How long can you go?
Hello everyone!
I've been baking sourdough for a little while following the same basic formula with a 30 minute autolyse (90% white bread flour, 10% rye flour, 68% hydration) after which I then mix in the starter (about 15%) and salt, but I've been playing around with bulk fermentation and final proof times as I'm still trying to find that 'sweet spot' between under and over fermenting/proofing as we come out of winter and the temperatures start getting warmer.
For this week's bake, life happened, things didn't go as planned and I ended up sticking my dough in the fridge after an 8 hour day time room temp BF and leaving it there for another +/- 16 hours before finally getting around to baking it. This is a lot longer than I've ever let dough go before and I was worried that it would be overproofed but it ended up being one of my nicest loaves - deliciously browned crust, slightly tangy and the best ear I've been able to get so far. And that got me thinking - how long can you push the autolyse, bulk fermentation or final proof (or a combination of all three) without your dough overproofing? Or what is the upper limit for % pre-fermented flour (still not completely sure about this term so maybe this is the wrong way to ask this question) and still being able to get a good loaf out of it? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
I don't distinguish between autolyse and ferment, but I can say I have left dough in the fridge for 4 days without issue - I'll make a big batch of dough for pizza and pull of what I need, something came up and I got delayed, the last pizza was 4 days later. I use a very high gluten flour and I'll tell ya, I stretched that dough to paper thinness (I got out of hand stretching it, but it was so easy, and fun I couldn't stop).
I would recommend folks play around with this - if you really want to develope gluten (outside of mechanical manipulation - stretch and fold is not considered to be a good form of mechanical manipulation), give it time. I will note that the flour I use is 17% protein - pretty high. Lower protein would require shorter times and of course, starter/yeast would need to be adjusted. Enjoy!
That's much longer than I thought dough could handle before starting to break down! My flour is quite a bit weaker than yours though (about 12% protein at the highest) so it probably won't survive that long but I'm excited to do a bit of experimenting and see how far I can push it!
Also, what would you say is a better form of mechanical manipulation than stretch and folds? That's about the extent of my very basic method at the moment and I'm always keen to try something new!
And that's the trick - in a perfect world, fermentation and gluten formation are complete at the same time. Fortunately there's so much leeway in bread making it doesn't matter a whole lot if the ideal is actually realized. The bread won't be ideal, but the process will still work. Perfection is hitting that nail right on the head.
Gluten formation - you don't need to manipulate the dough to form gluten. All ya gotta do is mix flour with water and give it time - the rest happens on its own Kneading just forms it quicker. It's actually kinda hard to not get gluten to form as the proteins in the flour will get water wherever they can to form gluten (pull it from milk, eggs, oils - they just slow the process down). Mix up some flour and water and toss in the fridge, check every 24 hrs and see what happens.
Stretch and fold - machine mixing (considered a rather intense form of manipulation) can take 20 minutes or so. A few stretches and folds would equal like a second or 2 of those 20 minutes. What really forms the gluten is the 8-30 hrs (or however long) spent mixed with water (from first mixed to baked). Enjoy!
Thanks! That makes a lot of sense. I pulled my starter out of the fridge this morning and he's all fired up and ready to go to mix up a batch of dough later this afternoon. I'll do a couple of stretch and folds (it just makes me feel a bit better to see the dough starting to come together) and then let it just sit and do its thing. Let the experimenting begin!
Stretch and fold won't hurt anything, so if not doing it keeps you up at night, by all means do it. I usually do a quick knead after it doubles (or triples, depends on if I remember or not!) to degas and mix up the food, and again before the final proof.
And I forgot to mention another really good way to develope gluten in my last post - rising - all those expanding bubbles are stretching out the gluten giving it more chances to link and cross link. Consider it a natural form of kneading. Enjoy!
You asked about pre-fermented flour and I think you already know this, but, it is the total flour in your levain, divided by the total flour in the final dough. The total flour in the final dough includes the levain of course. So for my 900 g dough which has 494 g of flour and my 100% hydration levain which I’m using 115 g of the pre-fermented flour is half of 115, so 57.5 g. 57.5/494 = 11.6%. So in my example my bread will have 11.6% pre-fermented flour.
Thank you for clarifying that!