Hi,
Thanks for reading,
I've been baking sourdough on an off for the last 18 months and since I started up most recently (about 4 week ago) I've been struggling to get a really good oven spring and the nice open crumb I am aiming for.
My starter is very active and usually doubles+ in size 6-12 hours depending on the temperature, and I've been feeding it daily (i.e. not putting it in the fridge)
Most recently I followed Fool Proof Baking's recipe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlJEjW-QSnQ
Which is:
Levain:
Starter 15g
Water 30g
Flour 30g
Dough:
Levain
Bread flour 255g (i'm using a stoneground white bakers flour with 13.6% protein)
Whole wheat 70g
Water 253g
Salt 7.5g
Hydration = 80%
Below are some pictures of the latest loaf, which has been the best, but is still a bit flat.
It tastes great but is a little on the denser side.
My guess is that I am not bulk rising/proofing it enough (I normally do a 12-15hr fridge proof) but I'm not 100% sure.
It's currently on the colder side here (Australia) so I've been bulking in the oven with the light on and the dough is maintaining a pretty consistent 24-26c (75-79f).
Any thoughts and help would be really appreciated.
Thanks!
Benny is the expert on these things, but in my experience, if it goes into the oven too early during final proof, you will get great spring but it will be dense. Based on the photo of the great ear, that would be my guess, though I am not familiar with that recipe, and I generally bake with 100% home milled whole wheat.
Not sure I can diagnose your issue exactly, but I did make this recipe a couple weeks ago for the community bake and had a fairly similar result. Haven't posted about it yet but plan to.
I think this recipe can be quite challenging if you're not making it consistently. It really requires strength and tension to hold a good shape, and if the fermentation is happening at a different rate than hers, it's not going to work quite right.
You need to be using fermentation gasses to build that tension and hold the loaf up, so if your folds are done while the dough isn't very active, you're really just developing gluten. I think that's the issue I had. My loaves (boules) were slightly flattened, clearly struggling to hold a shape. Not bad, but nothing special, despite the involved process.
I tried to follow her process very carefully, and the problem with that is you end up putting aside some of your usual bread-baking intuition and instinct. Even at the time, I suspected I needed more fermentation, but it was getting late. And I wanted to see if the magical open crumb would still appear.
It was a good experiment, but what I took from it was that there's no magic bullet for open crumb - what's important is being familiar with your process, doing it consistently, and making small tweaks based on good understanding. And active fermentation is key, which is easy to overlook sometimes.
Sorry for the long post, but I'd been meaning to write this up. Maybe it will be of some use :)
So I had another crack at this yesterday with better results.
I pushed the bulk by about an hour and once shaped left out for a 1-2hr RT proof.
Very happy with the result, have a nice ear and a good even crumb, not quite as open as the recipe but still pretty good.
Wow, what an improvement! Looks really good. Nice colour on the bake, too - I love when you can see the dark brown fading to caramel in the cross-section of a loaf.
This looks like one the loaves i baked several months ago! And the problem for me was ambient temperature, shaping and fermentation. If its cold in aussie then try pushing the bulk fermentation even longer but do keep an eye on the dough activity. Not too bad that u got almost a nice ear there!
Nice ear, great carmelization of the crust, pretty even crumb. I'd just chalk it up to something delicious to eat and continue on.
Yes, it was still delicious. I can always tell how good the loaf is by low long it lasts in the house... this one was gone in just over a day.
Thanks for the feedback and ideas everyone.
Sounds like under proofing is the most likely culprit (I'm still sometimes having trouble picking under vs over proofing).
I'm making another batch today and will report back how they bake up. I already pushed the ferment on the levain a little longer to wait until it had really peaked, and will probably push bulk a little longer too.