September 4, 2021 - 2:34pm
Sweet sourdoughs
Hello!
I've recently been trying to bake sourdoughs enriched with sugar, and I'm having a heck of a time getting my doughs to rise.
I used 9% prefermented flour, and 16% prefermented flour on two recent bakes and in both cases I got a negligible increase in volume during proofing, and very little oven spring.
Does anyone have any general advice to share on making sweet sourdough breads? I know spiking my dough with commercial yeast is one way to deal with this, but I'm a bit of a purist and prefer to only use wild yeast in my baking.
Thanks!
Share
I had the same issues. Sweet and fatty breads with sourdough are difficult, you need a super active starter, and it seems not any recipe is even realistically possible with SD.
Here is the thread with some advice I got when I had this issue: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/68117/complete-fail-enriched-dough
I'd be curious to know how your recent bakes have been turning out. What percentage of sugar are you able to use with your starter? What temperature are you fermenting at? What percentage of prefermented flour has been working for you?
To be honest I gave up on any purely SD leavened highly enriched doughs. I simply don't have the patience to supercharge my starter for a week before baking something significantly enriched. I guess if you maintain your starter with daily or twice-daily feedings, it might be strong enough for a lot of things, but I keep it in the fridge between feedings and using it directly or with a levain works fine for regular lean bread, but not for significantly enriched dough.
Moreover, recently I've been mostly using CLAS (see my blog, or http://brotgost.blogspot.com/p/clas.html for an explanation), and it's used with commercial yeast anyway, so no issues with enrichment.
What's interesting about my failures is that my starter is pretty vigorous. I feed it twice daily, and it frequently triples in volume. My impression is that the wild yeast in my starter simply don't like the presence of sugar.
CLAS is intriguing. That Borodinsky bread in the blog you linked to is gorgeous!
Well, I think it is the question of amount of sugar and butter... You didn't actually say what your formula was. In the past I've made some enriched doughs successfully (although often they take a very long time to rise, and a couple of times I realized that my buns or whatever were somewhat underproofed and would benefit from longer fermentation). The recipe Iinked above where I had a complete fail was very highly enriched though, and although my starter was quite activate at that point, I had exactly zero rise in a whole day, and the dough started degrading... So it depends on the recipe, and sometimes you need to follow specific builds prior to mixing the final dough to get a good result. I'm no expert, but a lot of people have had difficulties baking enriched dough with just SD starter. Some people have more success and I wonder whether some starters are better at it than others.
CLAS is great! It's particularly well suited to simple wheat bread or enriched things, since it's just so quick and easy to ferment using CY, while getting very high quality results.
My most recent fail was my attempt at conchas using Daniel Hernandez's recipe over at A Knead to Bake. His formula calls for 20% sugar, 20% eggs, and 25% butter. I deviated from his formula by using a liquid starter and incorporating the butter by hand. He does a two stage ferment where the dough ferments on the counter for two hours followed by overnight in the fridge. Then the dough is shaped and left to proof in the oven for eight hours. He got a significant increase in volume where I had none.
The other factor here is that he lives in Texas and I live in Washington state, so the ambient temperature and humidity will be drastically different. Perhaps my conchas would have risen had I given them more time.
My next attempt will be a sourdough version of poor man's brioche from BBA. It will be about 24% butter and 6% sugar. I'll probably do about 12% prefermented flour. My ambient temperature has been about 22 degrees Celsius, so I'll probably use my dough proofer to ferment around 30 degrees Celsius. I'll update this post with the result.
Higher temperature will certainly be a huge help! And the brioche sounds like an easier recipe with lower level of enrichment, I'd expect that to work. Good luck!
But if your dough is not rising, dissolve some instant yeast in a spoonful of water and knead it into the dough. I've saved my dough once that way. If there is no rise during fermentation, there is no point trying to bake it and hoping for oven spring... Best case you'll be able to slice the result and bake a second time to get sweet crispbreads, but that's far from what you actually want :)
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/399448#comment-399448
I love the idea of pannetoche! Pannetone is clearly not an intermediate bread, yet it seems to have the most to teach us about sweet sourdough.
I'll try playing around with trying to train a starter to be yeast tolerant. How well do you think a starter like this would do in the fridge? I've tried maintaining two starters before, but it ends up being to much work for me. Feeding one starter twice daily is a pleasure. Feeding two or more starters twice daily is a chore.
reduce the sugar. Too many recipes have too much sugar. Long fermentations bring out the natural sweetness in the grain. Try using only a tablespoon sugar in the recipe. Something close to 3 or 4%.
I agree most recipes have too much sugar. This is especially true here in the US. I can halve the sugar in a lot of recipes and still find the result is too sweet.
My next experiment is going to be a brioche with about 5-6% sugar and about 20% butter. That should be a good test for my starter.
Have you tried a sweet stiff levain? Say 50-60% hydration and about 20% sugar.
Benny
I made a stiff levain this morning at 60% hydration with 10% sugar. I'll update this post with the result.