Visual bulk fermentation assist
I recently purchased Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast and it has re-ignited my passion for baking artisan bread. I really like Forkish's methodical approach since it mimics my approach to life in many areas. His concept of baking in a CI DO is unique to me but I have grown fond of it quickly partly because of the results it yields and the convenience.
I started with his Saturday White Bread formula and method and had outstanding results. I even experimented with using a 50/50 mix of AP and bread flour and that worked well too, following his recommended schedule and timing for bulk fermentation and proofing. However, one bake out of the 10+ I've done in the last two weeks yielded disastrous results - a dense, doughy crumb. I attributed this to not adjusting fermentation and proofing times even though I knew the house was cooler that day than on previous bake days. I am extremely methodical about logging every possible data point in the process so I can go back and review what may have gone wrong.
When I got beyond my frustration at this waste of time and resources, I had an epiphany, which was the result of a post someone made on TFL about time in baking. I don't recall who posted it but my understanding of it is, yeast and dough don't understand time, only temperature and time is merely a human construct to help us schedule things based on the inputs of the physical world around us. This made sense to me at a visceral level.
I resolved to start paying closer attention to the volumetric change in my doughs, instead of the elapsed time, henceforth and develop a good visual indicator of those changes. This made me remember another post on here. Someone suggested using a [drinking] glass during bulk fermentation in which a small ball of the dough would be placed to help better visualize the volumetric change in the larger dough ball that will ultimately become bread. Well, I went one better. I grabbed my 500 ml graduated cylinder and used it so that I could be more precise and then compare the volumetric change in the cylinder to the change in the larger dough and learn to better judge those changes.
Using that technique, on the Saturday White Bread again, it yielded the best results to date. After the second fold, I pinched off a tiny piece of dough and shoved it down into the graduated cylinder for my control. It worked great! Now I just have to repeat this enough times using the graduated cylinder to gain experience in visualizing volumetric changes. For those of you who are gifted at this without all the drama, I'm envious.