HI to all at the Fresh Loaf from Durban South Africa. I am new to baking bread, and have a question that i hope can be answered.
I baked a country style loaf yesterday with a 250g preferment that i took from my sourdough starter that im currnetly training/feeding. ( i didn't want to through the starter portion away that i took out so i thought id use it as a preferment). I added 250g white stone ground bread flour, water , 10g salt and 4g instant yeast. The recipe was at 70% hydration.
This was my process :
autolyse for 30min,
kneaded the dough for 10mins
turn and folded 3 times every 30mins
rest for 20 mins in the basket
bake for 35 mins at 220 C
The bread rose alot, i was surprised how much, it looked like a giant long pillow. The crust looked good but it turned out to be very hard and the crumb, although it had a decent looking crumb, that was also very chewy. I cut it for toast the next day and it was almost too hard to eat.
What could have made the crust go so hard ? Is it better to bake at a lower temp for longer ? I want a crunch crust and soft chewy crumb.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
thanks
Warren
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My first thought is you have too much preferment going in. Try keeping it to about 20% of flour weight, mixing more thoroughly, and allow to proof for an hour or so.
Murph
HI Murph. Ill try it out with your recommended 20% preferment and hopefully it works out.
Cheers.
Please note that you're not that far off. I was corrected in another post that prefermented flour is calculated from total FLOUR in the recipe.
If you have a 100% hydration starter, then 125g of it is flour (and is prefermented). You then added that to 250g dry flour. This means that 33% of your total FLOUR is prefermented.
Still a little high but not too far off... then you added more yeast on top of that. That'll give you a fast rise. The yeast will act faster than the starter.
I think a more thorough mix, maybe skip the yeast, and allow more time for the dough to ferment in bulk and proof after shaping will help.
Murph
HI Murph
Right, i understand what you saying about the total amount of hydration and flour. I didn't think of the correct amount of preferment to be used. Thanks for clearing up the total flour ratio. The starter is only a few days old, so ill cut the yeast by half and see how that goes instead of taking it out altogether.
cheers