Hello all, I'm having a returner's conundrum.
I've been baking for years, but I took a bit of a "break" and just bought The Perfect Loaf book. I say "break" because I never stopped baking, I just took some time off from artisanal sourdough. I have been following the book word for word for months now just to sort of go zen mode on learning like a beginner again, but I'm running into some issues regarding timing. Maurizio is my favorite baker and I like being able to get so much knowledge from a single source, it's much easier on my mind than scouring the internet for various sources all over, often with conflicting information. Maurizio's recipes simply work, and he is successful. I will use the Everyday Sandwich Loaf from the book as my example.
I feed my starter twice a day at 8:30AM/PM, I scaled it back half as I figure this out, so 10g starter, 15g freshly milled rye, 35g Central Milling Artisan Baker's Craft, this results in a 12 hour cycle to roughly double or triple. At the same time, morning or night, I build my levains, which then sit for the listed time, usually 12 hours overnight.
My levains are remarkably bubbly, bouncy, and smell fantastic. I mix, knead, adjust water temperatures and check final dough temperature and record everything in my notebook. This is where it gets bizarre. My bulk fermentations or proofs are always 3-4x as long as listed in the book. Here's the Everyday Loaf example... If I follow the recipe, bulk ferment as listed, preshape, shape, coat, then stick the loaf into Pullman pans for proofing, the listed proof time is 1.5 hours to reach the top of the pan before baking, but mine takes 4+ hours! I get excellent spring and an excellent loaf (at least for this recipe).
Everything I can conceive of has been identically curated to match his environment except for Florida's humidity, which as of late, has me reserving 5% water. I check ambient temp, flour temp, levain temp, adjust water based on that, check final dough temp, always working at an ambient 75F-80F. I do almost always use freshly milled flour instead of store bought whole wheat, but this should make the fermentation even faster as my experience has been! My experience has been to not autolyse it and to not treat it any different than normal flour, perhaps an extra stretch and fold, but that's it, it never causes me issues anymore like it did when I first started.
I cannot for the life of me understand what the problem is... some loaves work, others don't, the levains and starter seem to result in wildly different results recipe to recipe.
Besides eating away my time and confidence, as I was very close to finalizing a cottage bakery operation due to my love for fresh flour and baking, it occasionally results in failures. Tonight's failure was a fougasse after finishing my sourdough pizza... Sigh. Any ideas? I truly do not understand why my bulk fermentation or proofing times differ so much from what's listed in these recipes and always push toward very long, they are never, ever too fast.
Despite the vastly different timings are you getting a good loaf at the end of the day? You're already doing the golden rule in baking which is... "watch the dough and not the clock".
Adjust for ..... whatever. Enjoy!
i bake from the recipes on the perfect loaf a lot. my ambient temps are way lower than his, so i usually ignore or adjust his fermentation times by a lot. it is interesting to me that your temps are the same as his and you’re still finding the fermentation times too short.
i don’t know what else increased humidity could do (other than require decreased hydration as you already do), but the one other variable that could be relevant is altitude: he is in NM at ~5000ft, while you are at sea level in FL.
sorry that i don’t see how exactly to adjust for that (when i moved from sea level to 5000ft, i mostly found i needed to increase hydration and sometimes degas my dough more often), but i thought i’d point it out.
hope this helps,
c
You are right, I overlooked his altitude. Does air pressure at sea level cause goods to rise more slowly? Does altitude really appear as though it will make bulk fermentation or proofing take 3-4x as long in a given recipe?
It appears sea level affects hydration as well then, beyond the humidity, which I’ve had to adjust for when comparing the stiffness of my doughs to those in video.
Right now I’m at about 50/50 great and meh loaves, so no, unfortunately I am not always getting the loaves I want and this is having an affect on my baking progress.
If I were to adjust my levain for goods rising too slowly in bulk fermentation, is an easy way to begin, double the amount of starter in my levain?
At this point I’m almost craving an out of control loaf!
i don’t think the altitude difference could account for 3x-4x differences in bulk times, that seems like a lot. my understanding is that high altitude dough rises to a larger volume faster than at sea level, but yeast/bacteria don’t reproduce faster, hence the need to degass (the old “punch down”) to give the yeast better access to food during bulk. there may be others on this forum that know more about altitude’s effects.
have all the loaves you’ve not been happy with shown signs of underproofing? if so, then increasing the starter/levain, or increasing all fermentation times are both good options. you would need to increase the amount of starter in the levain and increase the amount of levain in the dough (and/or the fermentation times). and you would probably need to systematically tweak each recipe to find what works best, which could take a while.
do you have other recipes that have always/still gone well? if not, troubleshooting your starter to make sure it is in good shape might be something to consider.
-c
Anybody have further commentary on this? I cannot seem to master my starter, I think.
Right now I'm at 10g:50g:50g...
10g starter, 15g freshly milled rye, 35g Central Milling All Purpose, 50g 75 degree F water
However, this results in levains that do not ferment my dough as per the given recipe quickly enough. What am I to do? Should I further increase the inoculation, or should I decrease it further? I have been trying 5g inoculation, 6g, but I cannot make heads or tails of whether my start is underripe or overripe, and I think my starter is the key to fixing these bulk fermentation issues. Tonight I am going to try 12-14g inoculation.
All I can do is test at this point.
sorry that you’re still experiencing this problem. a few things that come to mind:
- have you tried mixing your levain in a jar or other straight-sided container so that you can see whether it is before/at/after peak when you use it?
- you mentioned getting your starter feeding ratio figured out so that it doubles or triples in 12 hours. do you know how long it takes to rise to its highest point and just start to fall down? the highest point might be higher than tripling. if you’re feeding it before it is fully maxed out/peaked, you could be slowly weakening the starter.
- you could try letting your starter peak, and then instead of feeding just stir it really well, back down to its initial volume and then let it peak again. i learned this from marianna (and maybe others) on this forum and i think it helps strengthen the starter by increasing the amount/concentration of yeast (they continue to multiply after the stir down, because you’ve put them into contact with more food).
hope that helps!
-c