Hi have been trying to make sour dough for a while now. Have an established starter but my dough is very slack, does not hold its shape at all. Anyone have any ideas?
I don't know about your processes, but I find that if I put my dough (in a banneton) in the fridge overnight after I have left it to prove for about 6 hours beforehand that it is easier to slash and get into the oven. Also, I can't bake without first putting the dough out onto baking paper before it goes in the oven. Works for me, and my doughs are quite 'wet'.
Hi, Z :) A couple of questions before answering yours:
1. What kind of a sourdough are you having trouble with? White bread? Whole-wheat? Rye (which tends to be really sticky anyway)? Or something else, like spelt?
2. Is the recipe you're using some kind of "no-knead" thing or not?
3. And if you're kneading, is it by machine or by hand?
Ive got a very similar problem. I've been progressively making my doughs (rye, french white, khorasan, rye/white, swiss dark) wetter and wetter to try and get the big aeration inside. The end is result is good aeration (though not french baguette leve) but when it comes out of the Banneton its so soft that it just spreads out into a bit of a pancake.
I knead by machine. Use only sourdough starter. Typical recipie would be 100g dark rye, 300g French type 55, 300g H2O, 300g of starter. I use a Banneton for proving. Have tried rising it in the fridge overnight and the cold dough spreads out slightly less but still spreads.
I'm also at a loss to figure out how to get the really big air bubbles to form (even using type 55 + long kneading). Used to think it was that I was only using starter and not bakers yeast but having seen pictures of peoples bread on here I'm now not so sure.
I knead by machine. Use only sourdough starter. Typical recipie would be 100g dark rye, 300g French type 55, 300g H2O, 300g of starter. I use a Banneton for proving. Have tried rising it in the fridge overnight and the cold dough spreads out slightly less but still spreads.
[/quote]
I'm no expert but its seems your hydration may be a fraction too high perhaps?
According to your recipe you have
100g rye
300g French flour
Total dry ingredients of 400g
If we say your starter is 100% hydration then this adds another 150 g of flour and 150g of water.
In the end you have
400+150g of flour from starter =550g total flour
+
150g of water from the starter + 300g added = 450g total water
450/550 = 81.8% hydration
Someone more knowledgeable than me will know if this is the right way to calculate it though and whether 81.8% is normal or not.
As for the "pancaking:" one of the things I've noticed is that if I have a fairly loose or slack dough, turning out directly onto my "baking stone" (which 'cuz I am poor, means a preheated cast iron skillet) prevents some of that action and gives me a better bread all the way around.
I knead by hand -- not necessarily because I'm a purist, but because though my arms aren't broken, my stand mixer is. (Its a fairly large Viking and the motor burned out on it -- have to get that replaced -- bugger.) Besides that, I'm not baking for a restaurant or bakery; at the moment it's strictly at home and just a couple of loaves as we need them. My latest work has been using a 100% rye sourdough starter, which is a new experience for me as we've always used a regular white flour sourdough.
I've experienced a lot of "pancaking" with the rye sourdough lately and the way I've gotten around the problem is to proof in a straight-sided bowl (I don't have a banneton, so improvisation is the name of the game) and then turn out directly onto my "stone" as above.
FWIW, here's part of my experimentation: I just finished building my rye starter last week and because I hate waste, I couldn't bear to just reserve my little 1/2 cup of it or so and dispose of the rest so I made it up. I baked off a couple of loaves (no sense in baking off what one doesn't need at the moment) and froze the rest of the dough for baking off later. Halfway through making up all the dough, I ran out of our usual unbleached white flour (for this recipe, Daniel Leader's Zitnychleba, it's 80/20 white/rye) and as I reached for the flour, realized my hubby had picked up self-rising flour by mistake instead of our usual unbleached white. Yikes. So I crossed my fingers and continued on, using the self-rising stuff in hopes it didn't completely ruin what I was doing.
As it turns out, well, the dough made with the self-rising flour is very, very slack so I have to thaw and proof it in a bowl. It actually turned out pretty well, but requires some adjustment on my part. Next loaf I will take pictures and show you guys how it turned out.......but this latest one I, um, ate before I got pix :( (Oops) Taste turned out well, crust was awesome, and crumb was perfect, so go figure. I am not entirely sure that rye dough works well for freezing but would really love to hear from some of you all about your experiences with it!
I am just an amateur, but I had the same problem when I first began. After fiddling with recipes and formulas and proportions, I finally discovered that my problem was shaping technique. The dough wasn't holding shape because I wasn't allowing the outer membrane of the dough to "hold" the inner, wetter part of the bread. In my final shapings, I was not wrapping tightly enough or sealing the seams strongly enough. Now that I am more attentive to these two things, I see three results.
1. The dough in the banneton (seam side up) used to spread to fill the banneton so that the seam side was almost flat before turning it out. Now, the seam side rises in a "rounded" fashion because my shaping was tight and the seams were well sealed to hold the outer skin of the dough against the pressure of the rise.
2. It follows that the dough spreads very little when I turn it out onto the peel.
3. The oven spring really bursts through my slashes because the unslashed parts of the dough are so sturdy.
Hope that helps.
This is a picture of a recent loaf using a 67% hydration dough:
I bake every second day and initially I thought I had halved a recipe but then realized just halving everything did not work. I adjusted and it worked better than a too wet dough.
I get consistently good bread using this recipe:
500g strong organic white flour
200 g starter (my starter is 50/50 wholemeal organic flour and water fed daily and used when ripe)
280g water
10 g salt.
I mix the starter and water and add to flour and leave for 30 mins before adding salt.
Let it rise for at least three hours and then do two folds about an hour apart.
Shape into a tight ball and make as tense as possible then roll gently into shape and place in banneton for another 3 hour rise.
Bake 240c down to 180c 35-40 min. I decided to use a mixer for the first time recently and got the best aeration in the crumb. Not as much fun as kneeding though ;-)
Replies
I don't know about your processes, but I find that if I put my dough (in a banneton) in the fridge overnight after I have left it to prove for about 6 hours beforehand that it is easier to slash and get into the oven. Also, I can't bake without first putting the dough out onto baking paper before it goes in the oven. Works for me, and my doughs are quite 'wet'.
Hi, Z :) A couple of questions before answering yours:
1. What kind of a sourdough are you having trouble with? White bread? Whole-wheat? Rye (which tends to be really sticky anyway)? Or something else, like spelt?
2. Is the recipe you're using some kind of "no-knead" thing or not?
3. And if you're kneading, is it by machine or by hand?
-- Maim
Ive got a very similar problem. I've been progressively making my doughs (rye, french white, khorasan, rye/white, swiss dark) wetter and wetter to try and get the big aeration inside. The end is result is good aeration (though not french baguette leve) but when it comes out of the Banneton its so soft that it just spreads out into a bit of a pancake.
I knead by machine. Use only sourdough starter. Typical recipie would be 100g dark rye, 300g French type 55, 300g H2O, 300g of starter. I use a Banneton for proving. Have tried rising it in the fridge overnight and the cold dough spreads out slightly less but still spreads.
I'm also at a loss to figure out how to get the really big air bubbles to form (even using type 55 + long kneading). Used to think it was that I was only using starter and not bakers yeast but having seen pictures of peoples bread on here I'm now not so sure.
[quote=donkey]
I knead by machine. Use only sourdough starter. Typical recipie would be 100g dark rye, 300g French type 55, 300g H2O, 300g of starter. I use a Banneton for proving. Have tried rising it in the fridge overnight and the cold dough spreads out slightly less but still spreads.
[/quote]
I'm no expert but its seems your hydration may be a fraction too high perhaps?
According to your recipe you have
100g rye
300g French flour
Total dry ingredients of 400g
If we say your starter is 100% hydration then this adds another 150 g of flour and 150g of water.
In the end you have
400+150g of flour from starter =550g total flour
+
150g of water from the starter + 300g added = 450g total water
450/550 = 81.8% hydration
Someone more knowledgeable than me will know if this is the right way to calculate it though and whether 81.8% is normal or not.
Hi, guys :)
As for the "pancaking:" one of the things I've noticed is that if I have a fairly loose or slack dough, turning out directly onto my "baking stone" (which 'cuz I am poor, means a preheated cast iron skillet) prevents some of that action and gives me a better bread all the way around.
I knead by hand -- not necessarily because I'm a purist, but because though my arms aren't broken, my stand mixer is. (Its a fairly large Viking and the motor burned out on it -- have to get that replaced -- bugger.) Besides that, I'm not baking for a restaurant or bakery; at the moment it's strictly at home and just a couple of loaves as we need them. My latest work has been using a 100% rye sourdough starter, which is a new experience for me as we've always used a regular white flour sourdough.
I've experienced a lot of "pancaking" with the rye sourdough lately and the way I've gotten around the problem is to proof in a straight-sided bowl (I don't have a banneton, so improvisation is the name of the game) and then turn out directly onto my "stone" as above.
FWIW, here's part of my experimentation: I just finished building my rye starter last week and because I hate waste, I couldn't bear to just reserve my little 1/2 cup of it or so and dispose of the rest so I made it up. I baked off a couple of loaves (no sense in baking off what one doesn't need at the moment) and froze the rest of the dough for baking off later. Halfway through making up all the dough, I ran out of our usual unbleached white flour (for this recipe, Daniel Leader's Zitnychleba, it's 80/20 white/rye) and as I reached for the flour, realized my hubby had picked up self-rising flour by mistake instead of our usual unbleached white. Yikes. So I crossed my fingers and continued on, using the self-rising stuff in hopes it didn't completely ruin what I was doing.
As it turns out, well, the dough made with the self-rising flour is very, very slack so I have to thaw and proof it in a bowl. It actually turned out pretty well, but requires some adjustment on my part. Next loaf I will take pictures and show you guys how it turned out.......but this latest one I, um, ate before I got pix :( (Oops) Taste turned out well, crust was awesome, and crumb was perfect, so go figure. I am not entirely sure that rye dough works well for freezing but would really love to hear from some of you all about your experiences with it!
I am just an amateur, but I had the same problem when I first began. After fiddling with recipes and formulas and proportions, I finally discovered that my problem was shaping technique. The dough wasn't holding shape because I wasn't allowing the outer membrane of the dough to "hold" the inner, wetter part of the bread. In my final shapings, I was not wrapping tightly enough or sealing the seams strongly enough. Now that I am more attentive to these two things, I see three results.
1. The dough in the banneton (seam side up) used to spread to fill the banneton so that the seam side was almost flat before turning it out. Now, the seam side rises in a "rounded" fashion because my shaping was tight and the seams were well sealed to hold the outer skin of the dough against the pressure of the rise.
2. It follows that the dough spreads very little when I turn it out onto the peel.
3. The oven spring really bursts through my slashes because the unslashed parts of the dough are so sturdy.
Hope that helps.
This is a picture of a recent loaf using a 67% hydration dough:
Thanks - I'll give it a go reducing the H2O content progressively and see where I get to. Will also try the preheated tray.
Hi Z,
I bake every second day and initially I thought I had halved a recipe but then realized just halving everything did not work. I adjusted and it worked better than a too wet dough.
I get consistently good bread using this recipe:
500g strong organic white flour
200 g starter (my starter is 50/50 wholemeal organic flour and water fed daily and used when ripe)
280g water
10 g salt.
I mix the starter and water and add to flour and leave for 30 mins before adding salt.
Let it rise for at least three hours and then do two folds about an hour apart.
Shape into a tight ball and make as tense as possible then roll gently into shape and place in banneton for another 3 hour rise.
Bake 240c down to 180c 35-40 min. I decided to use a mixer for the first time recently and got the best aeration in the crumb. Not as much fun as kneeding though ;-)