Discard Sourdough - Very Slack, No strength
Hi. I just made a sourdough discard bread that was very slack; in fact so slack I gave up shaping a boule and baked it in a pan. It's a 83% hydration dough, so I expected it to be slack, but I could never get it to develop any strength.
- Discard (100% hydration, 33% WW, 67% strong bread flour; half 24 hour old and half 48 hour old) 230 g
- Flour 300 g (Azure Standard Unifine 206 g / 69%; BRM Artisan 60 g / 20%; Spelt Sprouted 34 g/11%)
- Water (Brita filtered) 230 g
- Salt (Balien Mediterranean) 10 g (3.3%)
- Active Dry Yeast 4 g (1.3%)
- Cane sugar 8 g (3%)
I activated the yeast in 100F water for 10 min. Added discard, mixed, and let rest 15 min. Mixed flour, salt, and sugar to rough dough. Rubaud mixed for 6 minutes. Rested 30 min. Then four stretch & fold sessions 30 min apart. Final bulk at 75F. At the end, the dough was still very slack and no strength. Total bulk from adding starter about four hours. Dough was puffy, jiggly, nice rebound after touch, somewhat sticky.
I pulled it out to a rectangle and envelope-folded, then put into bread pan for final rise at 78F for one hour. It rose a bit above the pan edge.
Baked 50 minutes at 350. The interior was 200F. This baking temp was too low -- the crust stayed pale. I probably should have done an egg-wash on the crust).
It's a good sandwich bread with a nice, moist crumb, great flavor, and makes excellent toast.
QUESTIONS
Should I have expected more strength from this dough? Any ideas why I couldn't get it strong enough to shape a boule?
Should I have used longer initial Rubaud kneading? Or slap & folds?
Will a sourdough discard supplemented with yeast just not strengthen like regular sourdough?
I know spelt will lead to slack dough at high percentages, but this was only 11% of the flour.
I think it must be a fairly common experience, to try old thin starter and not have it work very well. Actually I think your loaf came out decently in the circumstances.
Here is how I think about it. Maybe it will be helpful.
When you use a starter that is in good condition and not overaged, you can expect the water to add to the rest of the water and the flour to add to the rest of the flour, so far as hydration and handling properties are concerned. You are using a large inoculation of starter so there were a lot of added water and flour.
But when the starter is degraded, its water still adds to the overall liquid but its flour does not add to the overall gluten. It's almost as if it's not there. So the resultant dough will act like it has much higher hydration than you expected. I have a not-very-scientific notion that maybe 1/3 or less of the starter's flour might be able to contribute to the dough's structure instead of the zero I mentioned above, but the general phenomenon will still apply.
Also, it possible, though I don't know for sure how important this is, that the factors that caused the starter to thin out (proteolysis from enzymes and excessive acid, I expect) might also affect the dough.
When I have used too-old white flour starter discard for things like pitas, pancakes, etc, I have found that the cooked breads have an unpleasant taste. Much more sour than usual, yes, but something beyond that I haven't liked.
You didn't actually say that your starter was thin or slack when you used it, and if it wasn't I suppose the above wouldn't apply.
TomP
Thanks, Tom. My spent starter was young: half was brand new discard (fed 24 hours earlier) and half was a day old (last fed 48 hours earlier). I keep the spent starter in the fridge, so fermentation is slowed down to about zero. It wasn't thin and runny. It looks like the discard you get at feeding.
But your point about not being able to fully count the spent flour as fresh flour when calculating hydration is a good one. Has anybody come up with a factor to apply to discard flour to calculate a more accurate hydration?
I save my spent starter in a half-gallon milk carton and toss it when it gets full. I've got two starters going (one with one-third Rye and two-thirds strong bread flour and the other with one-third Whole Wheat and two-thirds strong bread flour). One (WW) is at room temp; the other (Rye) is at a lower temp.
I typically feed every 24 hours: 12-20 g starter + 20 g Rye/WW + 40 g strong flour + 60 g water (filtered or bottled). So I'm adding over 250 g/day of discard which is a lot. I'm working on reducing the starter temps so I can greatly reduce discard waste.
I moved one starter to the garage which hovers around 50 F this time of year. That got me to about a 48 hour refresh interval.
I just bought a Brod & Taylor "Sourdough Home," set it to 45 F and moved the garage starter to it. It looks like that might get me a 72 hour refresh interval. Experimenting with that now.
I just bought a Brod & Taylor "Sourdough Home," set it to 45 F and moved the garage starter to it. It looks like that might get me a 72 hour refresh interval.
I store my refreshed 100% hydration, 100% all-purpose flour starter in my refrigerator, and I can usually get 3 days before it needs refreshing.
Tom, you asked "You didn't actually say that your starter was thin or slack when you used it"
My starter discard wasn't slack at all. It was about the consistency of normal 100% hydration starter. My starter was about half fresh (fresh discard right out of the starter jar, last fed 24 hours earlier and half 24 hours older. So the starter had not digested all the flour and gone runny. I've seen that many times, but it wasn't the case here.
I would think that your discard had a higher acid level than a normal starter. Even if the discard hadn't started to get thin, the high acidity might have effected the dough. In addition, the discard would have been less active than a normal starter, and so would take longer to get to the same rising activity. During that time there would have been more chance for the dough to get affected compared with a similar dough using fresher starter.
Of course, I'm just flailing around here but I think it's plausible, at any rate.
That's probably about par for the course. You use old starter which is a complete crapshoot when it comes to its effect on gluten and ability to raise the dough. You have 80+% hydration with relatively weak flour. You fermentation time may be too long.