Benito's blog

You may know that I have recently started using a new pH meter, the Hanna bread and dough meter.  I have wanted for some time to use pH to help guide decisions during dough development including when to start cold retard.  My interest really peaked when I was trying to bake a decent 100% whole red fife sourdough loaf and ran into issues including gluten breakdown.  So I am now first trying to discover what the ideal pH is to shape ending bulk fermentation and when to start cold retard.

Sometimes things don’t work as planned, so it is good to have a plan B just in case.  Having a pullman pan lined with parchment or a focaccia tray ready is always a good idea if your dough doesn’t seem to be developing the way it should during bulk.  That is what happened today to this dough, it just seemed much wetter and looser than I recall when I made this recipe a year ago.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t measure incorrectly so I wonder if the flours have just absorbed quite a bit of the moisture from the air lately as it has been humid.

For this bake I followed the recipe that Melissa shared on Breadtopia.com a couple of years ago.  It has been on my list to bake for a long time after having made a yeasted version a long while ago.  A couple of challenges I had on this bake was using my niece’s starter which needs some work to boost and then baking in my in laws’ oven.  However, despite the very slow fermentation the end result is really good.  

For one loaf 9x4” Pullman pan 

Ingredients

Sweet Stiff Starter 

• 53g bread flour 

Trying to learn more about pH guided sourdough baking I decided to bake another 100% Semola Rimacinata bread.  Last time I felt that the dough didn’t hydrate as well as I remembered when I last baked this for the CB so I upped the hydration from 81 to 83%, I think I could have gone further given the high protein of this flour.

I really find that it is easy to get rusty when you don’t make baguettes regularly.  The dough knows when you are anxious and fearful when it comes to preshaping and shaping.  You must not feel fear.

This is an increase in hydration from the previous bake of this same recipe that was posted by Martin Philips of KA. I didn’t use IDY either time because my levain is so active I cannot imagine making it go even faster.

This is the third time I’ve bake this formula I first put together for the semolina CB.  I hadn’t baked it since that time and wanted to try it out again.  I finally received my new pH meter, the Hanna bread and dough model and used it for the first time for this bake.  I’ll know how it worked out when I finally slice this open, I will say I was surprised at how little a rise in the aliquot jar corresponded with the pH readings at which other well known bakers follow.  Now of course, pH will vary greatly based on the hydration and flour composition of the dough.

I saw a post that Maurizio made on his IG feed about basil pesto knots that he made, this was my inspiration for these sun dried pesto knots.  I used his recipe for the dough, although I had to decrease the hydration because his hydrations are always higher than I can do for my flours and conditions especially now that the high humidity is back in Toronto.  Also, as I have been doing lately, I am developing all my dough, even the enriched ones by hand rather than using the stand mixer in order to extend the life of my KA mixer.

So I still do not have my new pH meter but I’m calibrating my old cheap one now since I have the pH solution.  Based on my last bake I know that I have been way overproofing in recent weeks while trying to push fermentation and have allowed the pH to get too low resulting in proteolysis.  I measured rise by aliquot jar and any comments on rise refer to the aliquot jar not actual main dough rise.  So as not to damage the aliquot jar dough or the main dough, I create a second aliquot jar that I use to measure the pH from.  The dough started with a pH of around 5.74.

For this bake of my usual country sourdough I wanted to see how well the aliquot jar correlates with pH readings.  I have usually been shaping when the aliquot jar shows a 60% rise and now trying to push bulk wanted to cold retard when the rise is 110%.  This might be a bit overproofed but we’ll see.  From what I’ve seen shared from other bakers, they are shaping when pH reaches 4.4 and baking when pH is 4.1.