I'm new to the stretch and fold method of bread baking and have been working from the Forkish book. I recently took a sourdough bread making class at a local bakery and have tried to adapt their method to one of Forkish's recipes - Overnight Brown. The main difference from the Forkish procedure is that I did 4 folds, 30 minutes apart and shaped the loaves before putting them in the fridge overnight to ferment. Forkish doesn't form the balls until after the ferment. I guess I have two questions:
1. Can I put the shaped dough right in the oven from the fridge or does it need to rest at room temp for a while?
2. When I plopped the balls out of the bowls they were fermenting in, they were not very tight. Should I have tightened the balls before baking or would I have lost some of the rise by doing that? I'm not sure how much I can manipulate the dough after an overnight ferment.
I apologize if this question has been answered elsewhere.
but if you let it rest on the counter for a few hours after refrigeration, more of the complex sour flavers come out. I used to do the former b/c it seemed easier to score cold bread, but prefer the flavor after the bech rest.
if you havent used enough pressure in shaping to have a skin holding the ball together, it will affect your oven spring insofar as the bread will spread out more than up.