Requesting further diagnosis...
Hello again!
First of all I would like to thank the community for the input on my last post here - lots of very helpful information for me to go away and experiment with. I wanted to revisit as I've made significant progress since that bake but I still find the loaf lacking.
I can now get decent rise / oven spring, a decent ear, and pretty good colour and flavour. But the crumb is still very far from where I want it to be. Large, inconsistent holes with dense crumb everywhere else (but at least no fool's crumb now). Is this still a bulk fermentation problem? I feel like I'm better at spotting when it's significantly increased in size, but maybe I'm still ending this stage too early. I'm using Maurizio's "Beginner's Sourdough Bread" recipe & method.
Thank you all, again!
Dan
to me...I have not seen your previous post but the loaf needs more fermentation I think.
Could be the starter or bulk...hard to tell without knowing your process...
Kat
Hi Dan, it looks under fermented to me. Your bulk fermentation needs to go longer. I baked with Maurizio’s beginner sourdough a lot in the past year repeating it many many times when I first started out until I could get a decent result, it is a good tasting sourdough and I’ve made many variations on it with add ins. Can I share a recent trick that I have been using to fine tune my sourdough baking? I am now using an aliquot jar to gauge bulk fermentation. A small piece of dough, about 30 g, removed from the dough after the first set of stretch and folds and placed into a small jar with straight sides. This dough will ferment at the same rate as the larger dough mass assuming you keep it in the same conditions as the larger dough. You will mark the starting point and can very accurately measure the volume rise of the large dough by the dough in the aliquot jar.
I’ve always had a very hard time measuring rise because I bulk ferment in a Pyrex 8” x 8” square dish and make one loaf at a time. So when the dough starts out it isn’t even touching the sides of the dish. I’ve started using the aliquot jar in the past 3-4 bakes and now I can really measure the rise so if the end result of the crumb is a bit too tight I can next time let bulk go further with confidence by using the aliquot jar and get a more fully fermented loaf. Or vice versa of course if over fermented I can dial back on the fermentation next time.
the crumb bubbles are caotic in many directions and that particularl large bubble looks folded into the dough while shaping. That bubble might have been even larger as the crumb indicates everything flowed at one point into the middle, flattening many bubbles. A big bubble like that will also throw off your proofing time when judging by volume.