February 25, 2019 - 2:29pm
Length of final rise in refrigerator
My last SD loaves didn’t have all that much spring. I’m guessing the final rise was too long. The recipe called for a 16 hour fridge overnight and I went 17. Seems like I had a better result when I went shorter. This was a 75% hydration dough done in a preheated combo cooker. I’m a new baker with only a dozen loaves so far. One was left out for 20 minutes and the other was baked right from the fridge. Couldn’t see much difference. I’m trying to eliminate one error at a time. Anybody have an outside time on overnight rises?
Edit-just cut into it. Also way denser than any thing I've baked. Few holes. Crust is tough.
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I don't have insight, but a suggestion: maybe try a considerably shorter time once, to confirm that that's where your difference came from.
Overproofing is certainly one possibility. This has happened to me on more than one occasion and others here have also reported this happening. I have found that fermenting at 76 F (Hamelman method for most recipes) allows me up to a 30 hour cold final rise without overproofing. But using Tartine temp (e.g., 82 F), overproofing is much more likely.
To diagnose it, did your loaves have a dented effect, spreading outward, as opposed to upward? It would be very helpful to see whatever photos you took.
of flour or so and I keep my fridge at 38F. I divide my dough into 3 boules and keep them to proof in the fridge 9 to 10 hours. As soon as I hit over 10 hours, I lose oven spring. So check your fridge temperature and give 10 hours a try and see if you get improvement.
Danni, I know you've mentioned this problem before, but logically you would think that the critical factor would be getting the loaves down to 38F as quickly as possible. This could be influenced by number of loaves, weight, shape, banneton material, dough temperature, other items in fridge, cooling rate of fridge, etc.
Once they were at 38F, then you would imagine that they would be safe for a extra few hours over your normal time. I'm surprised this isn't the case.
Lance
that I keep forgetting to account for is that I put 12 loaves in the fridge and just not one or two. It takes longer for my loaves to get to 38F if they ever do because of the increased mass. I just know if I go to 12 hours or more, the oven spring is not the same.
Twelve loaves' worth of warm dough going into one ordinary fridge all at once...
It sounds to me as if your mixing capacity and your cooling capacity may currently not quite be in sync with each other. ?
But you also need to take into account that my dough is not warm. I usually finish off my bulk in the fridge (4 batches of dough) which means that the dough cools/rises in there for a few (2.5-4) hours. Then I take it out, divide, preshape and let sit at 70-73F for an hour in the counter. Then they get shaped and back into the fridge for proofing.
The explanation is just that ordinary fridges are not designed to take an entire load of warm food (and I just mean "warmer than the fridge's target temperature") all at once, and cool it all down effectively & efficiently. Fridge designers expect slow turnover, and expect that the vast majority of the fridge's contents are always already at the target temperature.
That doesn't mean "don't do that", it just means "don't expect it to cool that amount in a reasonable time frame".
I guess it helps that this particular fridge is an all fridge (full size fridge with no freezer compartment) with 5 shelves and I use the top two for bread. I probably should put the baskets on the two bottom shelves since it is cooler there but I finally got everything tweaked the way I like it so I really don’t want to mess things up.
I did bulk fermentation at four hours. Maybe too long on that one too. The dough seemed especially hard to handle this time although I did three stretch and folds during the first 1.5 hours. I had to flour my board or all would have been lost during the shaping even with my bench scraper. Maybe I overhandled. Starter was floating and at 100% hydration and everything including the levain was held at between 76 and 78. The loaf on the left is the one I left out 20 minutes before baking. It seems worse than the one on the right that went in right out of the fridge. I did the 20 minute thing because I saw that in Tartine. This was Maurizio’s beginner sourdough that I had better luck with first time around.
Thanks so much for your responses. I thought I was getting better at this but I got worse.
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