Loaf #7 - Butterfly Pea Flower Loaf = best yet, but now I have so many questions
Hello! I’m guilty of being a pandemic sourdough baker and very new to baking in general.
This is loaf #7 with butterfly pea flower swirled into the dough. I followed FullProofedBaking’s recipe and instructions. I believe my hydration was at 80% and incorporated 4 coil folds. The loaf was shaped and put into the fridge about 4.5 hours after mixing the levain with the autolyzed dough. I started cutting the bulk ferment time by 15 minute increments a few loaves ago because I thought I was overproofing my loaves.
Loaf #7 looks perfect to me and I believe that it wasn't underproofed nor overproofed (but please correct me if I'm wrong because I'm still not great at figuring out exactly what went wrong or right). Here's where all my questions begin though. I baked loaf #6 immediately prior to loaf #7, and both loaves were treated exactly the same. The only difference was that loaf #6 was made using locally stone-milled red wheat bread flour, while loaf #7 was made using some kind of bread flour from a local supplier.
Loaf #6 is on the left and loaf #7 is on the right. What happened?
Is the flour causing the difference or am I doing something wrong? Prior to baking loaf #7, I assumed that I had been overproofing all my loaves and that was the reason for no oven spring. But these two loaves were treated exactly the same for bulk fermentation and even registered the same temperature while bulk fermenting. Can anyone give any pointers for possibly fixing this? I have a huge bag of the stone-milled flour and don't want it going to waste. Thanks everyone!
First of all, great result with your bread flour loaf.
Don’t forget that whole grain dough will proof much more quickly than white flour so if you have two doughs proofing side by side the whole wheat will be done sooner than the white. Second, you may not get as good oven spring from the whole grain dough as the bran in the whole grain will interfere with the gluten and make it harder to get as good structure and oven spring.
The proofing of your loaf #7 looks great to me.
Benny
Thank you Benny! I’ll experiment with reducing the proofing time for the whole wheat loaves. Should I start with smaller increments of 15 minutes or larger ones of 30? My loaves were registering at 75 degrees Fahrenheit / 24 degrees Celsius during bulk ferment.
A little trick I've just started using myself is when you have mixed your levain into your dough, pull a ping pong ball sized chunk of it off and place it into a narrow glass container. You can then accurately judge the rise on your dough which I always have a difficult time doing in the container I bulk ferment in.
Benny
Ahh perfect. I’ll give that a try since I have a really hard time assessing whether the dough has increased in size. I’ve always had trouble with assessing volume. :P
You’re not the only one, my container is a square Pyrex casserole dish like Kristen of Full Proof Baking uses and it is impossible to judge rise in it but it is great for doing coil folds in.