The illusive high hydration oven spring
Hello all,
I'm a newcomer to the world of bread and sourdough. I spent a couple of weeks playing with normal yeasted loaves to get a feel for it down while my starter was maturing, and all that went perfectly well. Got good results with a number of loaves.
My initial sourdough experiments were a bit ambitious, but I reined in that and went with a lowish hydration (65%) white loaf that was my first success - felt like a dough, bulked well, shaped well, sprang up lovely in the oven.
Now I'm trying to expand into higher hydration loaves but feel that every time I experiment with something over 75% and use a simple stretch and fold technique during bulk, my loaves end up not giving me any rise in the oven, but I'm also pretty sure the dough is strong enough and it's not over/under-proofed.
Case study from yesterday:
1. 10pm - Levain build night before: 50g starter 100g flour (50:50 white:rye), 100g H2O
2. 10am - Autolyse 325g white (shipton mills organic) with 260g H20 @ 34 C (my kitchen is ambient is about 20-21C)
3. 11:40am - Add 125g levain, leave 5 mins, add 6.5g salt (I think this gives me an 85% hydrated loaf?). Mix in bowl for a few minutes, perform about 30 stretch and folds, transfer to bulk container at approx 12pm.
4. Perform 8 sets of stretch and folds at 30 min intervals - I wouldn't do this many but loaf wasn't holding its shape until this point. I had also moved to near a radiator and ambient is now about 26C.
5. 620pm - dough had doubled, decent doming and bubbles forming - I realise this is a long bulk, but dough didn't seem right until this point Preshaped and bench rest
6. 7pm - shape and into banneton and proof at 25/26C
7. 10:50pm into oven (final proof 3hr50mins - dough rose a little but not tons, poke test seemed fine and previous problems with flat loaves told me I was overproofing, so didn't want to push it out)
8. 11:40pm - Out of oven, great crust, great even crumb, but no rise, score didn't open at all.
Is it dough strength? Is it shaping? Is it my proofing timings? I have tried retarding overnight to same effect but worse crumb/crust. this bread is 100% edible and really quite delicious, but looks sad. It's also driving me mad as every time the dough seems like it's in the right state right up until I take it out of oven...