I did my first sourdough bake in a while this weekend. Results were absolutely delicious, but didn't look great, so I was hoping y'all smart people can offer some insight.
I used Claire Saffitz's recipe, with the addition of whole oats:
- 700 g King Arthur bread flour
- 200 g locally milled whole wheat flour
- 100 g Bob's Red Mill dark rye flour
- 110 g whole oats, soaked overnight and well drained
- 20 g kosher salt
- 220 g sourdough starter (notes below)
- 750g water, plus a bit more to dissolve the salt added after the autolyse.
Method:
- Earlier in the week, took starter out of fridge and did my normal feeding routine of 1:1:1 starter:bread flour:water. Did this 3 days in a row in the evenings, starter was very vigorous, easily doubling over night.
- Evening before baking mixed 20g starter, 100g bread flour, 100g water.
- Autolyse: mix water and flours, rest for 60 minutes.
- Mix in starter
- Add salt and a bit more water, mix
- Knead in drained oats
- Stretch-and-fold kneading until windowpane. Just a little over 15 minutes to get a good windowpane.
- Bulk ferment: 4 rounds of 1 hour ferment + stretch-and-fold from all 4 sides. Dough was doubled in volume and felt good.
- Divide and pre-shape, rest 20 minutes. Form into a ball for the round banneton and a long loaf for the other.
- Final ferment. About an hour and 15 minutes, until noticeably risen and a dent remained when poked. Into the fridge overnight.
- Next morning, preheat oven with stone to 500F. Take loaves out of fridge, slash.
- I don't have a Dutch oven to fit these, so I used Reinhart's hearth baking method: start at 500F, steam tray at bottom of oven. Load loaf onto pizza stone, add 2 cups of water to steam tray, spray walls of the oven 3 times at 30 second intervals, lower heat to 450F.
- Bake for 10 minutes, rotate, bake another 15-20.
As you can see from the photos below, there was almost no oven spring. The bread registered between 205F and 210F in the center, but the outsides did not blister or even brown well.
I do have an oven thermometer, which agrees with the built-in one, so that's one variable I can eliminate.
My baking stone is a fairly inexpensive one, but I can't imagine that being the source of the problem. I'm ordering a Fibrament stone soon, but mostly because I want more real estate.
As for the lack of oven spring, over proofing? If so, bulk or final proofing? She says proofing can take up to 7, 1-hour rounds of stretch and folds, and I stopped after the dough had roughly doubled in size after 4 rounds.
Any advice is definitely welcome!
Usually, when a dent remains after the poke test, the dough is fully proofed and verging on over-proofed. Then you put it in the refrigerator, where fermentation continued until the dough grew cold enough to bring the yeast to a stop.
So, no big surprise that oven spring was minimal.
Curiosity question: Step 2 mentions 100g of yeast. Should that say water, instead?
Paul
I've always thought the same thing, but both her video and website specifically say to do it this way. I have another baker friend who follows her instructions with excellent results. So I was trying to follow a known-good method to try narrowing down where my issues were. From her site:
I'm always trying to learn.
Yes, of course. I've fixed it, thank you.
1. Your crumb photo -- which shows some large air holes bunched just under the crust -- does suggest slight over proofing.
2. it's a 75% hydration bread without the soaked whole oats. I know you specify they're well-drained, but the oats undoubtedly add some additional hydration to the final mix. Which means the final shaping (before the cold overnight retard) might require a bit of attention to really get the gluten sheath going. I've followed a similar pain au levain recipe (around 80% hydration) many times, and have discovered that I need to sweat the shaping more than the recipe calls for if I want my loaves to spring and not spread.
3. 220 g of starter seems quite a bit to me, and I would expect the dough to develop fairly quickly. Plus, of course, fermentation times also depend on the temperature of the water you're using and the ambient temperature in your kitchen.
4. how much time did you leave the loaves on the counter before baking. To combat spread, I generally try to get cold slashed loaves into the oven as fast as I can.
Enjoy the eating!
Rob