Aliquot jar

Baking Techniques
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Have a burning question for those that use “the jar.” Melissa adds dough to the jar and just watches how high it proofs up, which is what I have done in the past. Pretty simple.

BUT…

I have viewed on the Fresh loaf and other sites where lets say 30g of dough is pressed into the container and then a measured amt of water goes in and compared against levels on a graduated aliquot jar. All kinds of calculation to figure out how much the dough has risen (fermented.)

What am I missing here? Even if you are doing gluten building techniques in the main batch of dough and not in the jar is not fermentation just fermentation? The latter procedure seems to be from what is used in a pharmacy.

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Dennis I use the aliquot jar quite a bit and I’ve posted about how I use it. I started a thread about it HERE.

When I’m trying to fine tune a formula I will use tape on the aliquot jar and mark off what would be 40-100% rise in 10% increments. Doing this during bulk and until the end of bench proofing in a banneton allows me to adjust how much a fermentation a dough has had when I know if the resulting bread was a bit over or under fermented. That is the reason I’ve usually marked off these 10% increments. I now also measure pH as another data point that helps with fermentation as well.

I don’t think you’re missing anything, the assumption is that if you keep the aliquot jar dough at the same temperature as the main dough then the degree of fermentation, which you can confirm by pH measurements) will be the same. The rise won’t be the same though since the main dough is receiving folds while the dough in the aliquot jar isn’t. The aliquot jar will always overestimate the degree of rise in the main dough. Not sure if this helps answer your question or not.
Benny

1 Like
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Thanks for the comments, frankly all the gyrations people were doing did not make a lick of sense to me.

What I have been doing worked but then sometimes you wonder when others write such different procedures.

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This is the dough I’m working with today. The aliquot jar on the right has marking for rise, the aliquot jar on the left is the one I test for pH. I keep the jars in the container the dough is in until the dough has reached the temperature of the proofing box which I usually keep between 80-82ºF. Once the dough has reached that temperature I leave the aliquot jar in the proofing box instead of in the main dough’s container.