Help, bread is flat.
Please help. I have been baking no knead sourdough breads in bread pans for years, but I am very new at baking freestanding loaves in a Dutch Oven. The bread in the picture is 80% strong wheat bread flour / 20% whole wheat, hydration around 80+%, 45 min autolyse, 5 min kneading, three stretch and folds, bulk fermentation ca. 5 hrs in ca. 78 degree temperature to about 50% volume increase, 400g total flour plus 80g whole wheat levain hydrated at 100% (my 10+ year old starter is whole rye at 50% hydration). This is probably my fourth or fifth take on this bread, I think it may be over fermented (dough is very, very wet in the preshaping/final shaping phase, to the point I can't really stretch a good "skin" tension, because it's creeping out from under my fingers), that's why I am progressively decreasing bulk ferment time/volume gain; while I am relatively happy with the crumb and flavor, I keep turning out progressively flatter loaves with less and less ear/grigne even though there is about a couple of inches of stretch at the score line, but no ear (used to be some with longer fermentation, but dough was still way too runny during shaping). My loaves are at least in part so flat due to the fact that they visibly spread out when I take them out of the banneton.
I am starting to think perhaps my starter is not suitable for this, I am thinking now of a white bread flour stiffer starter. Mabe more kneading and stretch and folding? But how much? during kneading and stretching and folding my bread resists pretty well and when I start bulk fermentation it's tight and springy.
Would anyone have any ideas? Please help!
80% is very high hydration; many would stuiggle to get a good freestanding shape and a tight skin at that hydration. maybe decrease to 75% or even lower and see if you see any improvement?
if the dough seems too wet, it might just be too wet 😉
hope this helps,
c
I'll try that. But I thought that 80% is pretty normal; it's not? I have read about 90% hydration breads and I believed that if you build up enough gluten strength, even a high hydration bread should keep its shape.
But I'll give lower hydration a try, there is pretty little risk of anything any worse happening than what is already happening ;) I am used to high hydration in pan-baked no-knead rye and whole grain breads, so perhaps I did overdo this a bit.
Thanks for your advice.
is normal for say ciabatta, but that's a relatively flat loaf. Higher temperatures make for a softer or gloppier dough, so if you can get down to maybe 72 - 74 deg F that might help a bit.
Shaping technique can make a difference in a loaf's ability to resist spreading. Another thing that can help is to use lots of flour while preshaping and shaping. For myself, if the dough seems too stretchy when I make a preform, I will stretch it out as I make the shape, and stretch it again while shaping the loaf. This will help it keep its shape better.
The number of stretch-and-fold sessions is less important than how the dough feels at the end of them. If it's still pretty stretchy then do a few more. If it's quite resistant to stretching then maybe that's enough.
It's also possible that your starter has developed some quality that tends to degrade the flour too much , but I'm guessing that's unlikely. However, you could try refreshing your starter several times in a row and using it while it's relatively young in development - see if that makes a difference.
Some flours are naturally more extensible than others. This could be either because of the variety of wheat or because of added dough conditioners. So it could be worth while trying a different brand or grade of flour.
You could retard in a refrigerator towards the end of the proofing period, and bake it from cold immediately after you unmold it (or "unmould" it as the case may be) from the banneton
As a comparison I expect that a sourdough loaf with 70 - 72% hydration, using mostly US all-purpose flour (something like say10.5 - 11.5% protein) ought to be able to proof free-standing without slumping excessively when proofed at about 72 - 75 deg F. The flour I often use that will give that result is (US) Gold Medal Unbleached All Purpose. King Arthur All Purpose flour behaves almost exactly the same for me.
Well, that's a lot of possibilities to think about! I would suggest starting with the simplest thing possible - use a lower hydration - and I suggest 70%. That should give you fairly reliable results without the dough being difficult to handle. If that works well, ease up to maybe 74% and see how that goes. After that, if you still want to get higher hydration, work your way up little by little.
Also, you can probably find some videos online that specifically deal with working with higher-hydration doughs.
Let us know how you get on!
Thanks a lot! That's a lot of stuff to think about, but I will try first, as per your suggestion, with lower hydration. The bread in the picture was cold proofed in a banneton and unmolded (as the case happens to be) cold, straight from the fridge. The bread flour I used was an organic 14% protein bread flour.
It will take me some time to digest all your pointers, but I will try to implement ASAP, thanks a lot!
14% protein, wow! I wouldn't add any vital wheat gluten to that. Though protein isn't always the same thing as gluten - I'm thinking of durum flour here, which is high in protein but not as much in its gluten characteristics.
tpassin, it's supposed to be regular wheat, not durum. Perhaps they are reporting a higher protein content than it really is, hard to tell, wouldn't surprise me all that much for a small specialty milling company selling their flour on the internet.
Other possibilities:
I will try baking a bigger batch.
My Dutch oven is 5.5 quarts; perhaps if everything else fails, I'll have to resort to getting a smaller one. This notwithstanding, I would still like to learn to bake breads that don't ooze out of their intended shape.
The dough is very wet at the final shaping phase.
So I'll assume it wasn't too hydrated in the bulk ferment stage.
If your dough started off not overly hydrated and then ended up too wet it certainly points to over fermentation.
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Any ideas anybody?
Can't see anything wrong with it.
Abe, to me it still appears a bit flatter than I would like (compared to many I have seen on this site and elsewhere), certainly too flat/wide in the middle to fit into my electric slicer and the alveoli are now smaller that in the bread i found way too runny/flat in the picture on the top of the page. And the ear is much smaller than on most breads pictured on the Internet.
But thanks, your opinion is certainly encouraging, I must be on the right track.
I'm starting to wonder if there's something different about the flour. I've read a few things recently about that - like flour that hasn't been aged long enough, or flour that has a different moisture content - causing problems for people. It might be worth while trying a different flour, just to see if that might be a factor.
Otherwise, and I think it's been mentioned here already, your starter may have somehow developed an ability to degrade the flour too quickly. That might be too much acidity, or an undesired organism having developed. If that's the case, refreshing the starter with more flour and water than usual, and using it at a younger stage after refresh, might help.
Worth trying, anyway.
Thanks, tpassin. I did have similar ideas and you have just helped confirm that perhaps I am going in the right direction. I have started refreshing my starter for a brand new batch, have already given it three feedings at a much lower hydration (starter:flour:water at 1:5:2.5) - following the advice I had found in the e-book of this German sourdough engineer Hendrik Kleinwächter at https://www.the-bread-code.io/) and I am hoping to test tomorrow or the day after. We'll see.
Your picture and description corroborate that your bread is overly proofed. I used to make bread like that all the time and it was delicious and soft, but did not look like bread on the Internet.
decrease bulk ferment time to only a 20% volume increase and you may see the results you desire. You will certainly get a different result than what is shown. 78 degrees is very warm for a 5 hour proof.