June 7, 2012 - 10:02pm
Retarding dough for multiple days
Hi all -
So lately I've added an extra day onto my overnight dough retardation so that my sourdough loaves can develop more sour flavor. Worked fine. I'm wondering If I can push the envelope even further and retard the formed loaves for more time possibly 3 or 4 days. I know the dough still rises a bit in the fridge, although very slowly, but over the course of 3 days this could become significant and collapse the loaf. Does anyone know if this should actually be of concern? Is there anything else I should be worried about when retarding dough for this long?
BH
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Hi BH...extended retardation should be fine..here is a sourdough with 20% pre-fermented flour..3 day in the fridge. The one on the left has a small dent because I accidentally smashed it loading the oven ;) Post some pics of your bread and let's see what happens!
Nice loaves! They look great! Did you form them before the extended retardation? How did the flavor come out?
You can retard sourdough (though not dough with commercial yeast) for several days to develop additional sourness, but how long is dependent in part on the temp of your refrigerator. The colder, the longer. But at a certain point, you are going to get a degraded dough in which too much of the starch in the dough has been converted to sugar and consumed by the wild yeast. And that will yield you a poorly risen loaf with a pale crust.
I think it's a matter of experimentation in your particular baking environment that will yield you the answer to your question.
Larry
See this post where I had a 7 day ferment that came out great for pizza, and at the bottom another reader mentions two weeks quoted from "Artisan Breads in Five Minutes..."
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/26626/7-day-ferment-pizza-dough-tartine-baguette-mistake