Need Help - first loaf

arcticfox

Hi all

 

I'm new to the forum and new to baking.  Its not really my strongest point but I decided I would try to make a sourdough!

 

I followed the Baker Bros recipe and created a culture on 1st Sept using white bread flour and warm water.  Amazingly it worked and so yesterday I decided to try and bake a loaf!

Culture been out on the kitchen side, stirred daily and covered with a towel, been bubbling nicely but kept having some liquid form on top which I stirred back in.

as recipe, took 300ml culture, 500gm white strong bread flour and warm water with pinch salt.

 

Mixed together kneaded until not sticky then left for 2 hours in the airing cupboard. then had to fold into loaf shape and put in loaf tin for 12 hours.  It was very sticky when I took it out of the cupboard and took a while to get it into the loaf tin.

Took it out the cupboard again this morning, still very sticky to get out of the tin, put on pre-heated tray (fan oven at 220) and baked for 30mins. 

 

It looked fab when it came out - a bit of a dodgy shape but looked like a loaf!  Had risen to twice the size in the oven, but once cooled and cut into it wasn't baked properly.  the inside was still very doughy.

It had lots of airholes though :) the crust was nice but it wasn't really edible,

 

advice and help very gratefully received.

 

C

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farinam's picture
farinam 2012 September 16

Hello ArcticFox,

Firstly, I recommend that you read SourDom's beginners blogs on this site.  He gives some good beginners basic recipes and all sorts of advice and descriptions of methods.  I would also recommend that you weigh all components for your recipes - not absolutely essential once you get the feel but it helps immensely when you are just getting started to have a reproducible dough consist.

Now, you don't say how warm it is in your airing cupboard but one possibility is that it was quite warm and that your loaf has over-proved in the time that it was there.  That could go some way to explaining the stickiness - certainly a total of fourteen hours seems a lot even for quite cool room temperatures and way too long for a probably warm airing cupboard.

In the past, I have used the time that it takes my loaf starter to reach the peak of its rise as a guide for how long to take from mixing the dough to having it ready for the oven - for dough development and proving at the same sort of temperature as the starter rise from feeding.  Generally, I would work on about half of that time for bulk fermentation and half for proving after shaping the loaf.

For a loaf made from 500g of flour, I would expect to bake for 40minutes to 45 minutes, so some more baking time might be in order.

Hope this helps and let us know how you go.

Farinam

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