What now?

drpete

Okay, so I need help again. I had trouble a few months back and techpoh fixed it for me with some excellent advice and now I'm in trouble again.

The problem is that my dough no longer rises and I often have these doughy, uncooked bits that stay that way no matter how long I cook it (I was going to post a photo but for some reason I can’t). Now, I live in Brisbane and in summer everything was fine, but now, I can't get any love from it. Obviously you'll need to know what I do so here it is:

I mix 1/4 cup starter,
1 cup of bread flour (13 percent)
and one cup of warm water.

I then put this in an oven that I have warmed slightly by turning it on for a couple of minutes and then turning it off. I let that sit for a few hours (at least 5 or 6),

then I stir in the final 2.5 cups of flour, .5 cup of warm water, teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoon sugar and squirt of olive oil. I knead this keeping it fairly moist (just moist enough to work as advised here previously) for about a minute or so then put back in the slightly warmed oven for about an hour (removing every fifteen minutes or so to stretch and fold).

Then I leave it for four or five more hours before punching it down and shaping it into its final loaf. Then I let this prove for about another hour or two and then pop it into the fridge to retard overnight.

I bake it in the morning in an oven preheated to 200 straight from the fridge for 40 or 45 minutes. It rises, but nowhere near what it did in summer and it sometimes gets these weird spots on it where it seems to brown much more than the rest of the loaf. It's also doughy and heavy and has a tight grain rather than the nice, irregular open grain that it used to have.

I'm not an expert but I have made a lot of sucessful loaves this way over the last eight months or so and this is now really bugging me. I feed my starter once a week and let it warm up a bit in the oven when I prove my dough before refrigerating again. It is colder than usual here but I don't know if that explains everything.

Any thoughts?

Note inserted by TP: I took the liberty to make the good doc's 'prescription handwriting' easier to read by breaking it into paragraphs as suggested by Firebeard. Hope it helps.
Category: 
up
228 users have voted.

Replies

Fire Beard's picture
Fire Beard 2008 August 19
What temperature do you have in Brisbane at the moment?

Is your problem just on the final rise?

It is a good idea to break your posts up into paragraphs and leave a space between them as it makes it easier to read on the screen.

It would be good if you could post some pictures so people can see what is happening.

Joe



TeckPoh's picture
TeckPoh 2008 August 20

Since the temperature is colder now, you shouldn't stick to the same modus operandi. Before you decide to:

1. stick the dough into the fridge to retard overnight, or,
2. shape the dough for proving,

make sure the dough is ready, i.e. make a cut and see if the dough has developed into a webby network.

Or,

You could take the bread out of the fridge,
let it come to room temp...could take 2 hrs,
do a stretch n fold or two,
then shape,
and prove further till finger press test shows the indentation slowly coming up.

Your flour...has it been sitting too long unused? Any clumps in it?

We simply must help bring back the joy of baking bread for you!

TP

drpete 2008 August 20
Temperature here is around 5-20c. My flour is fresh and i always keep it in the freezer. No lumps. It is only really at the end where it seems to fall down. Every stage of the process looks the same as it always has, it's just when it gets baked, it doesn't behave the way it always has. When I leave it to prove after the final shaping it flattens right out and doesn't really rise again in the oven much. It has always done this but it normally always rises right up in the end to look (and taste) like a normal loaf.
Will post photos as soon as the website lets me. I don't know why I can't but I'll keep trying.
Thanks
Peter
Maedi's picture
Maedi 2008 August 20
Hey Peter, send me your photos via email if you'd like and I'll put them up for you (maedi at sourdough.com). Also see a tutorial on how to upload images. What's not working exactly?

Maedi
davo 2008 August 20
I'm new to making sourdough, but those times seem well short. My first mix of starter and flour/water I leave for 10-12 hours, and really not much happens for the first few hours, at around 18-20 deg.

The second mix of bread dough I bulk ferment about 3-4 hours before shaping. Then if I fridge retard, I leave out of fridge for about 2-3 hours  before baking.
drpete 2008 August 20
I suspect that you're right about the proving times in this colder weather. In summer, I have made bread using this recipe lots of times and until recently it has always worked perfectly. I used to proove for twelve hours but was strongly advised here to cut those times and that was what fixed my problem when I first started. I might give it another go now though.
Thanks
Peter
Fire Beard's picture
Fire Beard 2008 August 20
I don't know the answer, but here are my thoughts. You need to experiment and see what happens.

Try a longer final prove, possibly using a proving basket to avoid the flattening out you referred to after shaping.

If that doesn't work maybe try reducing the time before shaping.

You referred to "punching it down" before shaping the dough. It could be worth avoiding this. When I shape a basic loaf I try to handle it gently. Just removing it from the bowel and shaping knocks it back enough.


drpete 2008 August 21
I'm happy to try this but I'm not across the term "proving basket". What exactly does one of these look like and how can I bodge one up at home? I forgot to mention also, that always have a pan of boiling water in the oven when baking and I spray the bread with water before baking.
Peter
davo 2008 August 21
I also don't punch down at any stage.

For a proving basket, for me who has no "proper" banettons, I use an ordinary round mixing bowl lined with a tea-towell with a tight/flat weave (not fluffy/textured/spongy). This I dust with flour - fairly liberally, but not so's you cover the cloth completely. Then when I've shaped the boule, I lightly rub the smooth top surface (which will end up the top of the baked loaf) with a little more flour (holding the scrunchy bits at the bottom). This boule I turn upside down into the clothed bowl. Any wildly open seams that look at me once it's in the bowl I pinch together. Then I lightly dust the exposed surface of the dough, fold over the flaps of the tea towel, and whack it in the fridge, sometimes, but not always, in a placcy shopping bag.

I'm told a colander or cheap placcy open weave mock-cane basket works better - the latter not necessarily even needing cloth lining, but I've not tried that yet.

Anyway, the shaped loaves will rise a fair bit in the fridge, but still need a decent warming up over a couple of hours or so after taking out (anything up to 20 hours in the fridge). Once it's good to go, I just lightly re-flour the top surface (which will be the base of the loaf), turn it onto my "peel" (actually just a 6 mm thick plywood offcut I salvaged from the shed), remove the bolw and peel off the towel, slash it and slide it onto the hot stone in my pre-heated oven, which has a tray of already boiling/steaming water in the bottom. Works for me.

Oh, and I try and make sure the bowl is just the right size so that when I invert it and the loaf goes onto the peel, it's not "dropping" and losing air  - ie the risen dough is close to the rim of the bowl. If it's a couple of inches below the rim , when you invert it, it''ll flop and lose a bit of air....
davo 2008 August 21
Also, re brown spots in certain areas - my stove definitely has hotter and colder areas, so I rotate the loaf once it's firm (after about 25 -30 mins) to even it's cooking out...
Danubian's picture
Danubian 2008 August 21
[quote=drpete]Found the problem with the photos. Here is a shot that shows my problem.

[/quote]

Good advice from the others. Just a few questions and comments.

This looks like a 'water ring' due to excess moisture. Did you bake it on a stone because the bottom crust lacks development also. Have you seen this happen before?

On a different tack; does that patch have a sticky feel or an unpleasant odour? If you were to break the loaf through the middle of that spot does it have a 'stringy' texture in the break? Has that patch also darkened over the last couple of days?

Blisters could be due to inadequate mixing/poor distribution of sourdough and/or salt. But it could also be where large gas cells have formed close to the crust surface and the gas has heated more rapidly during baking than the surrounding dough, resulting in colour differentiation.


drpete 2008 August 21
Thanks for all the replies. I suspect that you are right about the gas bubbles near the surface causing the brown spots. That's kind of what I thought it would be. I don't bake onto stone. i actually do have a big slab of marble that I should probably cut in two so it will fit in my oven. I normally just do the final shaping on greaseproof paper on a metal pizza tray. Sometimes, it collapses and just about spreads out to cover the whole tray but then when baked, it rises to a normal loaf size and shape. Well, not any more but in sumer that's what it did. That patch does not feel sticky or have a weird smell.
drpete 2008 August 24
Success! I took a few bits of advise onboard and prooved for much longer, mixed the water and flour first before adding the starter, put in the salt later in the process, cut out the sugar and olive oil (although, without the sugar it actually taste much sweeter. I don't know how that works), I didn't punch down and reproove before baking, I used a makeshift prooving basket and I only fridged it for a couple of hours then let it warm back to room temperature before baking. I realize that by doing all that in one go doesn't help me narrow down the variable that was wrong, but the bread speaks for itself. It is by far both the sourest and the most delicious loaf I've made. I am very happy with the result.
Thanks again.
Fire Beard's picture
Fire Beard 2008 August 24
Congratulations it is looking good. Keep experimenting, one of the things I like about bread making is there is so much to learn.

The disasters are just as important as the successes in learning. Observing how the dough changes and how it feels when it is young or when to old and over proved is the only way to really learn.

If you have time join the fun of the monthly 'Bake off's'.

Joe
TeckPoh's picture
TeckPoh 2008 August 25
Join our bake-offs, new theme every month (or so) but it's not limited to one month...a bake-off thread never ends. Made my week to see your breads back in great form.

TP
SourDom 2008 August 26
DrPete, (not sure what sort of doctor you are)

your new loaf looks great - so whatever you are now doing - keep doing it!

My thoughts, on hearing your description, and then on seeing the photo, is that your dough had bits of starter that were not well matured and mixed in to the rest of the dough. Then, when baked, you end up with cooked 'glue' in patches.

Starter is like glue - flour and water - but the yeasts do some fairly magic things to it with time. A starter like yours that is 1:1 flour:water (or 100%) will start off being quite solid and sticky, but end up like a thick batter after 12-24 hours (depending on the temperature).
If the starter hasn't fully matured though, there will still be  more solid lumps within the starter.

Then, when you add the starter to the flour/water/salt for the dough, you need to make sure that it is all mixed in well. You describe kneading for about a minute, then leaving it. Now, while I am a big fan of short kneads, the important thing is not the length of time that you knead - rather the length of time that you leave the dough in between short kneads. So, for example, you can do as Dan Lepard suggests, and knead the dough for only 10 seconds (really!), but you need to repeat it at least 3 times at 10 minute intervals. (So the whole process takes half an hour). In between each knead the gluten strands disengage and stretch our, and the dough becomes more stretchy - but you do need to repeat those kneads.

So I think, that the reason that you have abolished those yucky sticky patches is that
1. your starter is now being left for longer - and more mature
2. you have prolonged the 'kneading'/mixing phase by adding in an autolyse (where you add the salt later)

well done - keep up the good work

cheers
Dom
davo 2008 August 26

One thing I've changed in my mixing up - in order to try and get the mixing to be easier and more certain that I've got starter and then sourdough/sponge mixed well with the new flour coming in as sourdough/sponge and then bread dough is:

Each time I'm adding flour/water, I add all the water and whisk it till it's pretty mixed up (not perfectly smooth, but pretty mixed). Only takes a minute.

Then I add the flour. Now, so long as the mix is wet, I'm confident that I've got starter quite well distributed, rather than having some lumps of water/new flour anywhere, with nary a bug in them.
drpete 2008 August 26
I have done the stretch and fold at ten minute intervals for a while now and I have always found that it works well. I used to knead for a minute then let it rest for ten or fifteen then stretch and fold and I'd repeat this for an hour so it would get done four times or so. Now I do it basically the same way but I only knead the fist time for ten seconds or so (as sugested) rather than a minute. It seems to be working so I'll keep doing it till it stops.
Pete
ps. I'm a doctorof Political Economics/Development Studies
SourDom 2008 August 26
Pete,

I think it is worthwhile distinguishing between 3 different processes: mixing, dough-relaxing (for want of a better term), and folding.
The traditional way of baking bread involves a long initial knead, either by hand or in a mixer - this mixes, and also gives the dough/gluten time to relax. Then the process of folding is a way of elongating and stretching the air bubbles as they are formed, to improve the texture of the bread. It usually is done at intervals of 30-60 minutes, as you want to give the yeast a chance to produce more gas - so that you have something to work with.

As mentioned, with short initial kneads it is important to make sure that the dough is mixed sufficiently - particularly with a stiffer (more solid) starter. As Dave suggests, ensuring that the starter is well incorporated into water before adding the flour is one way to do this.

cheers
DrDom
(doctor of, well, medicine)

Post Reply

Already a member? Login