Gummy bread after many great loaves
Hi all,
my husband has been very successfully making the Multigrain Bread Extraodinaire from BBA for a while now. However, the last several loaves have not come out well. They are gummy and sticky. We follow the recipe as written but only use 113g of the 170g water listed (Reinhart suggests starting with 113g and adding more if needed). The dough feels a little sticky when coming together but nothing that would cause concern and when kneading is finished, it's tacky but not sticky.
At each stage the dough doubles so I don't think the loaves are under-proofed. We do live in Indonesia so I'm wondering if the humidity is currently higher than it has been and whether this is affecting the dough. After cooking today, we measured the internal temp of the bread and it registered as being 90C which is at the upper end of the recommended internal temp. The only thing that's changed is the brand of honey we use - could this affect the bread somehow?
I'm thinking that going forward we could try reducing the water by a little bit but not sure if there's something else we're missing?
TIA for any suggestions!!
Clara
Gummy means too much moisture in the baked loaf. This can be corrected by using less water in the recipe, or baking for longer time and/or higher temperature.
Yes, humidity plays a role. Changing weather and humidity can have a noticeable effect on bread baking.
Thanks - you'v confirmed what I thought it probably was. Will have to try reducing the water in the recipe and hope that that solves it!
So we tried again with the loaf and this time increased the amount of flour that was kneaded in to the dough plus reduced the water that went in. The result is marginally less gummy than previous loaves but nothing like the beautiful soft loaves my OH was making previously. I think we're going to give up trying to figure out what's wrong. I bake sourdough regularly and other types of breads and am really not sure what else we can try.
but there is a point where that is actually counter productive as the heat won’t travel to the centre of the bread as easily with less moisture. If you have made changes to your recipe maybe the answer is to go back to your original recipe that gave you results you were happier with.
We have done that though on a couple of the recent attempts though and still ended up with the same result.