I have been baking sourdough bread for about 8 months. My first few attempts did have oven spring, but also cracked a lot on the sides. I did then what my fiance used to do with his yeast bread: put it in the oven while heating up. Also, it was winter time and the fermentation took way longer.
Since then I read a lot and learned a lot. Now I put the 2 loaves into an oven preheated to 450 degrees F ( spray the oven with water) , bake it for 10 min, then reduce the heat to 380 degrees F, and bake for 30 min. longer. I am now producing very lovely tasting sourdoug bread. No cracks. But once I put it in the oven, it won't rise any further. I was advised on this forum to reduce the fermentation time and prooving time ( I think I used to let it more than double during bulk fermentation), so that now the dough will not go beyond doubling. It being a hot summer here in Toronto, at average temps of 25- 27 degrees C or more in the house, my last total bulk fermentation and prooving time was about 5 hours. Still no oven spring. It seems as though the dough actually shrinks a tiny bit and pulls away from the glass pans.
This is what I use:
200 g built-up starter 50 / 50
800 g flour ( 325 g Spelt, 325 g Kamut, 150 g Rye, all home milled )
500 g water
2 ½ tsp salt
1TBS honey
Some bread spices (Brotgewürz).
I autolyse the flour and water for 30 min, before adding the rest exept the salt which gets added 10 min after all the other things got mixed. Then I do 3 stretch and folds.
The bread is somewhat dense, it certainly does have many little holes, but none of the big ones that some people seem to strive for. I don't. I would just like to see ovenspring, thinking that this would result in less dense bread.
Should I do more stretch and folds? Should I retard the dough ? This will soon happen quite naturally as we are facing colder weather. Brrrr .
Your help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Replies
I have been making bread with dried yeast for a year and just completed my second ever sourdough. It has reasonable oven spring (see pic) so for what its worth I haved listed what works for me.
I used the recipe by shiao ping (search 'home bread') (thanks shiao) which use 1:2:3 weight multiples for starter(50/50), water & flour. This recipe uses a water to flour ratio of 71% (inc. starter) whilst your recipe is a little dryer -67%
After 30 minutes autolyse I worked the dough using a technique recommended in 'Dough' by Richard Bertinet. I find this aerates the dough really well.
Another 3.5 hours followed with 2-3 strech and folds in the bowl covering each time with cling film and then two hours in a linen lined wicker basket. Temperature throughout was about 22 C.
I heated the oven to 260 C on a fan setting then turned the fan off as I find circulation hardens the crust too quickly and reduces oven lift. I use a thick steel baking tray (inverted) as my oven platter mainly because it heats up more quickly than a stone.
Two minutes before loading the dough I poured 1/3 cup of boiling water into a steel baking tray on the floor of the oven.
I try and load the oven in under 5 seconds to keep the temperature high. After 10 minutes I reduced to 180 C and poured away the water remaining in the 'steamer'. I baked until I felt the weight of the bread was light enough- I do not trust tapping the base as I often find this leads to an soggy loaf. This was 47 minutes at 180 C for the 140g (starter),240g (water),420g (white flour) recipe.
I do not know if anything above will be of any help but good luck with your future attempts.
DO YOU SLASH THE LOAVES BEFORE PUTTING THEM IN THE OVEN --- THIS MIGHT HELP --
TONYK
Hello Dorisw,
This is a bit of a long shot, but maybe the glass pans are giving the dough a chance to form a 'dry' skin that is a well known killer of oven spring. That is one of the reasons for adding steam early in the baking, to keep the skin soft so that expansion can take place.
Of course, if the dough has dried out and formed the skin during proving, then you are dead in the water before you start. So that is the other possibility - are you protecting your dough from drying during proving?
There are many other factors that can have an effect like dough hydration, over-proving etc.
Hope this is of some use. Let us know how you go.
Farinam
hi, doris. i was a baker a hundred years ago and often make bread at home including soughdough. with the types of flour you are using, it is hard to give a set weight of water for your doughs. maybe try adding a bit more and experiment. dry doughs will limit oven spring and cause cracking. hope it helps.
Hi all, thanks for your remarks. ( Sorry for not replying sooner, for some odd reason I get all other links from the sourdough forum sent straight to my inbox- except these answers to my own question???).
RE: hydration, I have experimented with this a lot; when following the original recipe ( it uses store bought flour, I don't) of 720 - 750 g flour, my dough's consistency was all right when mixing it, but after an hour or so it became so soggy wet that it was impossible to lift it or do any stretch and folds. I then had to litterally pour it into the pan - resulting in tasty bread, no oven spring. I started to gradually reduce the % of water content, so that now it is rather stiff when mixing it, but very soon becomes beautifully workable, I can actually stretch it without it falling through my fingers! It will still still not hold its own shape properly, this is why I am using the glas pans. But have not tried metal pans as yet, will do so next time.
I am not good with slashing, found the dough sticking to the knife and getting pulled along with it; so I am inserting fork holes, the way I do with apple pies. I insert the fork holes before I do the final proofing. I found that when I did it after the final proofing, the dough seemed to collaps around the fork holes. In fact, my dough is sooo sensitive after the final proofing, if I move it too rapidly from counter to oven, it collapses. I don't dare proofing in a wicker basket for the same reason. I am proofing it now in the glass pans where it stays for baking.
I always cover the dough with cling wrap paper so it won't dry out and recently I also started rubbing a little olive oil or butter on the surface of the loaf before final proofing. But, in the beginning I used to place a dish of water in the bottom of the oven to produce steam, ( and in the beginning I did have oven spring!), and now I am just spraying several times with a water spray bottle. This may be the problem, or one of the problems! will go back to steaming with a bowl of water, see what difference this makes.
I know one of my challenges is using fresh home milled flour. It is a bit coarser than store bought flour and demands different hydration and soaks up water much slower. But still, this should not prevent me from getting oven spring, right? In the "old" days my father was a miller, he had a flower mill and was milling flour for all sourrounding farmers. That's the flour my mother baked with, usually pure Austrian rye sourdough bread made in one of those free standing brick ovens, just delicious! 12 - 18 loaves at a time. Granted, they had a commercial stone mill, and mine is a mickey mouse one on comparison, but still, having this ancestry, I just have to rise to the occasion...
O.K.,yesterday I tried to follow some suggestions.
I mixed the flour with the water and let it be absorbed before adding the sourdough.
I made sure my dough was not overprooved. After abt 5 hours of bulk fermentation ( it had doubled, as far as I could estimate in a typical bowl that is narrower at the bottom and widens as bowls do...). I divided it and placed one loaf into a glass pan, the other into a metal pan, oiled the tops, put fork holes at the top, covered with plastic. I let them proof for 1:45 h until they had almost doubled.
I put a dish of water at the bottom of the oven for steam, then removed it after abt 12 minutes. Surprisingly, the loaf in the glass pan rose a little more than the one in the metal pan. The one in the metal pan just barely rose. This morning my better half could wait no longer, he cut a couple of slices from the loaf that had been in the glass pan. He said it tastes great. But the holes are small, as in my previous loaves. Perhaps this is all I can expect from home milled whole meal flour? After all, pumpernickel bread is quite dense, and ours is not nearly as dense....
Should I have left the steaming water in the oven for the hole baking cycle? I was worried that it would make a soft crust.
Hello Dorisw,
Sorry to hear you still have problems.
Wholemeal flour does have some problems due to the bran etc affecting the continuity of the gluten and reducing the strength of the dough. If your home milled flour is significantly coarser than commercial flour then I imagine that the problem could be even worse.
Although it might go against the grain, I wonder whether you should try a batch with some commercial white bread flour and see how that goes. Possibly make a few loaves to get your technique right.
Then progressively increase the proportion of you home-milled flour and see at what level it becomes a problem.
Another option to consider might be to buy a suitable sieve and take out the coarsest of the kibble from your flour and see if that makes a difference. You could also put the kibble back through the mill until it all passes the sieve.
Hope this helps.
Farinam
I used that same recipe from shiaoping over and over until i finally started to get consistent results.
First, the 1:2:3 ratios were not calculated for your flour. So I agree with farinam to try some store-bought white just as an experiment...but don't change anything else! It will be like a control experiment.
The 1:2:3 recipe from shiaoping gave me what, at first, was a nightmare of sloppy, wet gunk. In my unskilled hands, I was unable to make anything appetizing. Then I took some advice and increased the proposrtion of flour....for a firmer dough...as i honed my dough handling skills. As my dough handling improved, my final loaves improved.
The 1:2:3 dough can be so wet that it makes slashing difficult...I also experienced exactly what you mentioned-dragging instead of slicing. Now, I refrigerate the wet dough while it is in the proofing basket. When I turn it out onto the peel, it holds its shape better, and is actually slashable.
I now make beautiful bread using that 1:2:3 formula. But it is really delicate work. You need to do the stretching and folding at intervals. You need to treat the dough tenderly when shaping. My dough actually jiggles a bit like jello before it hits the oven. And there have been a few disasters as well! But try it using all white commercial flour, with maybe a little extra flour till you get the hang of it. Then, progress closer to your ideal ratio, and add in your home-milled flour to substitute for the white a little at a time.
Good luck! Don't quit!
[quote=dorisw]
This is what I use:
200 g built-up starter 50 / 50
800 g flour ( 325 g Spelt, 325 g Kamut, 150 g Rye, all home milled )
500 g water
2 ½ tsp salt
1TBS honey
Some bread spices (Brotgewürz).
I autolyse the flour and water for 30 min, before adding the rest exept the salt which gets added 10 min after all the other things got mixed. Then I do 3 stretch and folds.
The bread is somewhat dense, it certainly does have many little holes, but none of the big ones that some people seem to strive for. I don't. I would just like to see ovenspring, thinking that this would result in less dense bread.
Should I do more stretch and folds? Should I retard the dough ? This will soon happen quite naturally as we are facing colder weather. Brrrr .
Your help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
[/quote]
To me Doris it sounds like you over-working those flours, autolyse, mixing and THEN mixing the salt after, this means by the time you do 3 stretch and folds your flours have had enough in fact too much hence no more power to rise in the oven.
Spelt can vary in it's gluten quality, certainly here in UK, English spelt hasn't been very good last few years, rye you can not treat it like normal wheat flour, then you have kamut, I've used it a few times and feels it has "shorter" gluten strands. All of these flours are flours I would feel in my hands on working with them like they don't like a lot of "working" out.
By the time you do the 3rd mixng with the salt, you don't need to do 3 extra folds...and especially when dealing with "weaker" gluten flours the less is best.
If you think about a commercial bakery they do the mixing in the mixer at the beginning to their desire state in the dough then leave for bulk prove, shape & final prove.
As well as folding the time in-between the folds contributes to the exhaustion of your dough (if that makes sense) by mixing 3 times plus 3 folds you're knocking a lot out of it - plus with using flours that you're using.
Hope this makes sense to you. In your situation I would mix it all, rest, fold, rest, shape, very short rest.
Hmmm, interesting observation, thanks for pointing this out for me!
I get it that you recommend only one fold. With " mix it all" are you also saying to forget about the autolyse? To mix in the salt right away with the flour and everything else, or did I misunderstand?
Thanks again!
Doris - think you should autolyse if you want to. Personally don't see the point of it you're not adding any ingredients that calls for the need of it like high fat/eggs or potato/cinnamon which can cause problems.
As far as autolyse goes for "improved" flavour I just don't get it at all, having done it many times and never noticing improvement I myself don't do it for that reason.
If you still want to do autolyse then do but add the salt at the same time as when you add the rest of ingredients.
You're doing 3 mixes and 3 folds at the moment and exhausting your dough...especially for the flours you're using. I wouldn't even work my doughs as much as that for normal wheat ones.
My advice is if you want a nice rise in the oven cut back drastically on your mixing or folding the dough. And make less time on final prove. Letting hours on final prove means you'll have less of oven-spring because dough will be at the peak of its rise...and there's only so much rise any dough can do, in or out of the oven.
hope that helps.
azelia