Uneven Baking
If anyone has some advice on this, I'd appreciate it... I've been making sourdough for years now. I had good results for a long time, until this year. I can't figure out why there are pockets of apparently underbaked dough hidden inside my loaves. Some things that have changed:
I use more home milled rye and wheat flour than I was before. The wheat is sifted through a #50 sieve. These I mix in varying ratios with Bob's Red Mill Artisan Flour. I have tried without the home-milled flours, without improvement.
I rebuilt my starter, as it was very dormant after an extended break in the refrigerator. It's pretty active. I sometimes feed it with only white flour, sometimes I throw in some rye.
Hydration varies, but is generally 70-75%, I think. I don't measure, I just go by feel.
I've been adjusting the initial bake temperature from 480F to 520F. 520 is what I was using before. The temperature gets reduced to 370-380 after 5 or 6 minutes. I bake now for longer, and have reduced the temperature to avoid burning the outside.
The variations are just due to trying to experiment to see how to get the middle of the loaf to spring as well as the rest.
The bread tastes amazing, and the underbaked parts are not doughy or wet. Just dense and darker than the rest.
I hope someone knows what the magic technique is that gets the interior of the loaf to wake up. Thanks!
Images would be a great help.
Sounds like something went wrong with mixing/incorporation. Can you describe your formula including mixing technique? Are you combining two different doughs, or a biga with a soaker?
On a stone, in a pot, covered? How big are your loaves?
"Sounds like something went wrong with mixing/incorporation. Can you describe your formula including mixing technique? Are you combining two different doughs, or a biga with a soaker?"
- Same as what was working previously... The dough is roughly 70-75% hydration. The ingredients I measure by a standard, but I don't weigh any of it. It's all derived from what I learned when I was weighing everything very carefully trying to be consistent. After a while I found I could recognize the right hydration by look and feel. Salt became the only ingredient I couldn't really guess at, but if I stuck with a standard size I could be consistent with it. The recipe is just starter, salt, water, and flour. The starter is 100% hydration, approximately. It was fed with home-milled rye for a while, but now I'm just feeding with KA all purpose flour.
"How do you bake it? On a stone, in a pot, covered? How big are your loaves? "
- Also the same as what I was doing previously... the loaves are small boules, I bake every day, instead of throwing out starter I just make a small loaf out of it. I mix them in the same bowl each day, mix with a table knife, and store them until the next night at 52F. It's no-knead, although I do sometimes fold them. I take them out and shape them, and let them proof for a little over an hour. I bake on stones, without a dutch oven, but with some steam. 5 to 6 minutes at max temperature, then I bake at a lower temperature for 25 min.
- I'm thinking I may be over-fermenting. Maybe I need to bring the temperature down to 48 or 50.
- I have one about to bake, straight white flour this time, nothing home-milled. I'll try to put up a picture.
them hot or long enough. My boules are usually about 700-800 grams and they get baked at 450F for 25 minutes covered and then at 425F for another 22 minutes. Internal temp needs to be 205F or more.
So don’t drop your temperature so much and bake for longer. Use a thermometer to see if they are done.
Thump the bottom of your loaves. They should sound hollow.
I've often thumped them... they sound hollow-ish... not having anything to compare to, I've guessed they are hollow sounding enough.
I sort of agree though, I've often wondered if I should bake them longer. Even when the spring was good, I thought the insides were not quite baked all the way....
But I feel this problem I've been having is more to do with the vigor at the time I start baking. They spring maybe 60% of what they did, and there are pockets on the insides that don't spring at all.
While typing this, I'm finding the one I'm baking tonight is actually looking good. It sprung up much better, and I'm interested to see what the inside looks like. 2 differences this time: I added more steam after a few minutes and it's straight white flour (Bob's Red Mill Artisan).
Will spring better than loaves with whole grain in them.
"... the underbaked parts are not doughy or wet. Just dense and darker than the rest."
You're using some home milled wheat flour, and some commercial flour. if some internal parts are darker than others, that sounds like the flours were not sufficiently mixed. Or, maybe your starter was not fully distributed.
suggestions:
1. Stir all your different flours together while they are still dry, to ensure an even mix.
2. Dissolve the starter completely in the water before mixing with flour, to ensure even distribution.
Good luck. and welcome to TFL.
Maybe you're right. I didn't have this problem before, but I was also not mixing flours much and was using a softer more forgiving flour from the store. Those are good ideas I will try tonight!
I appreciate the tips that were offered here. I overcame this problem by cutting my fermentation times by about 15%. I think the new starter is a bit more active, maybe because I'm home all the time and more attentive. I've had a string of nice loaves by doing this. The dough I made tonight at 1045pm today will be kept at 60F until noon tomorrow. The previous schedule had it going until a bit after 2pm.