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
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