Need help...After a power outage ( over 12 hours, all electric home ) I am faced with the following:
1. A bowl of dough that has been bulk fermenting 48 hours in fridge (less the outage) and looks like it has doubled in size, presenting very large bubbles on top.
2. A bowl of flour and water that has been in autolyse for 21 hours
3. 250 grams of starter that peaked 12 hours ago
I can probably go ahead with normal divide, shape and proof for #1 above and have pretty decent loaves... #2 is my issue since I'm 4 hours away from refreshed starter and I've never done an autolyse of that amount of time. Suggestions?
I'd say don't worry! It's all quite resilient stuff, try it, you might be surprised. What have you got to lose now?
Since you can't turn back time, your only practical choices are [bake] or [discard]. So bake, since you have nothing to lose. Even if the chance of success was tiny, it's still better than wasting your work, because the worst-case outcome is only some poor quality bread.
Concerning the autolysed dough... should I use the mature starter or wait 4 more hours and refresh first?
I decided to play along with the already fermented loaves... took them out and folded a couple of times since the dough was SO slack... tried to degas a bit to remove the giant bubbles. About 90 minutes later I placed into proofing baskets and I am currently heating the oven... Will post pics later.
I decided to refresh the mature starter and wait a few hours to inoculate. What the heck, autolyse was already WAY too long. I'll report on the dough later. Thanks for the "Go for it" comments... just what I needed :)
Really look forward to hearing how this works out - you never know, it might be the best bread you’ve ever made ;)
Whatever happens I’m sure it will taste great after all that maturation time....