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?
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Replies
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
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
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
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.
Thanks
Peter
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.
Peter
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....
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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.
Thanks again.
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
TP
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
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.
Pete
ps. I'm a doctorof Political Economics/Development Studies
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)