When I first started doing my sourdough breads, I went with half of Jim Lahey's recipe with 400g of flour (including portion levain). As such I went on a run of bricks at 200g of flour. Once I got decent at it shaping the damn things to avoid bricks (about fifteen loaves in) I started to increase the flour so that I am now doing a couple 400g loaves per bake (fwiw my process is more like the Forkish process now, but I like 400g for my loaf size).
However, I feel like I've kind of hit a rut where I'm not happy with the results (for some reason I've been on a run of breads with denser crumbs or overly sour flavors or both), so I want to go back to experimenting a bit more again. I was thinking about going back to loaves with 300g (or even 200g) flour so I can do three or four loaves so I can test more rations / processes per bake.
Since everything is a ratio, I don't think it would be a huge issue to go small until I stumble upon something I'm happy with, after which I can upsize it. But I thought I ask. Is there an actual qualitative difference when you scale down a loaf to that size?
One thing to note: It seems that all these Dutch Oven baking books recomment 4-5qt DO's to go with their 400g to 500g loaves. My Dutch Oven is 3qt. Would the smaller size of my DO have any affect on the oven spring?
Thanks!
"... not happy with the results (for some reason I've been on a run of breads with denser crumbs or overly sour flavors or both)"
That sounds to me that the starter needs some TLC to get back to raising the loaves with lots of yeast. That will hopefully get you out of the rut! Nothing like a good rise and a nice crumb to brighten your day.
Ahh yes, I can see where you're coming with that. I can say the starter is living quite happily. The cause for my bread not rising great comes from 2 parts: I'm getting pickier and I've been experimenting with different starter percentages to get a proper rise within certain time constraints. I work a normal M-F 9-5 office gig but with fuzzy hours on the edges depending on what shows up at the office any given day. Instead of letting the book recipes dictate my schedule I'm trying to tweak recipes to work with my daily schedule.
So what I'd like to do is to get the levain going in the morning with a fresh feeding, go to work, come home somewhere between 5:30-7:30 and then make the dough (autolyse, and then several folds) with the bake the morning after (or possibly the evening after). Of course I need to show up at the office the next morning so I need to start the bake around 6am. So I'm staring at a rise time somewhere between 9-10 hours with a 1 hour proof...or a rise of about 12 hours with a proof of about 10 hours. As summer starts in Las Vegas, I will have a consistent temperature of about 80 degrees in the house for the next 5 months, so then its just a matter of tweaking the starter percentages based on the projected rise times.
And that's why I'd like to run three or four loaves at a time until I lock down my instincts about how much starter to throw in a dough...and then go back up to larger loaves. But like I said, maybe there is something qualitatively different about doing a smaller loaf beyond just its size that I should be aware off...
I regularly bake in 3 quart cast iron pots. I can fit 8 of them in my oven at once. My loaves are 600 to 750 grams total dough weight (wet), so I don't think you'll have any problem with smaller ones.
Great, my standard full size recipe is somewhere between 700 and 750g so that's good to know its not the DO size being an issue.
8 loaves at a time is impressive, do you have an extra large oven? I can certainly fit 4, maybe 6 in my standard size oven. Though I guess the bigger question is...I know sourdough keeps for a week, but 8 loaves a pop!? You must have a lotta mouths to feed!
Haha, no, I bake for a subscription list, a little shop and a small community market. Eight is the max at once, whether it's the small cast iron pots or the Italian bread pans. Otherwise I can do six at a time free-form loaves on two slabs of granite in my oven. It's not a huge oven, but a good-sized electric wall oven (Whirlpool here in Canada).
wow impressive! Respect!
Do a search on David Snyder's San Joaquin Sourdough on this site. You can tailor his recipe to almost any work schedule. For Las Vegas temps during the summer you would just have to shorten the final shaping and proof time to account for the increase room temperature. The recipe has been used by a lot of us.
Cool, good to know! I looked it up. It looks fairly involved, but with a long weekend maybe I'll have time to play with it as long as my wife hasn't signed us up for a slew of playdates!