Hi everyone!
Recently joined the home bakers army, thanks to COVID19 - started with baking machine, then moved to full hand made
I am following a recipe from Alan Wainer’s book, flour water salt and yeast
500 gr flour (11 to 12 grams of proteins, tried both white flour, whole grain and semolina - not sure is the right word in english)
360 gr water at ca 36°C - don’t have thermometer, about my hand’s temp (have tried also to reduce to 300 gr not particularly different result)
4-7 gr driead yeast
1 teaspoon salt
Hydrolysis, mix everything in a tub, fold a couple of times - bulk fermentation lasts 5-6 hours (both at 21° room temperature or in the oven with light on, ca 25-25°). Generally after that the dough is quite slack and wet, probably not more than doubled in size.
Then proofing for 40-70 mins, either in a small bowl or in a proofing basket. Cooking with some steam at 200-220 C
Issue: the look is great, crust is great, but bubbles are really small and the texture is not light but quite thick.
What am i doing wrong? When I tried to extend bulk fermentation, dough was weaker and lost most of its size when put on the oven rack/manipulated. See some pics below to get an idea
Welcome! Your bread looks delicious, but I also understand wanting different textures and trying to understand how to get a more open crumb.
Off the cuff, I’d say 5-6 hours (even at 21C/70F) is on the long side for 7 grams of yeast. Meaning maybe the dough has over-fermented, but the stretching and folding has masked the dough expansion.
Additionally, if you’re using some whole grain or semolina, your dough hydration may be on the low side. That tends to make a tighter crumb.
And since you describe the dough as slack at the end of the bulk fermentation (even though it may be dryish), I’m again thinking overfermentation.
You might look into creating an aliquot jar to track how much expansion your dough has achieved independent of stretching and folding:
Also, maybe give this recipe a go. It only uses 1/4 tsp of yeast (7g is 2 1/4 tsp, so that’s less than a gram). Even though it is no knead, you can do some stretching and folding.
The metric conversions for this recipe are:
440g flour
356g water
8-9g salt (1 1/2 tsp)
<1g yeast (1/4 tsp)
Ah! Interesting! I never thought about over fermentation but it might be the case!
I never thought about it because of the volume not doubling or tripling so I thought there was still room for further fermentation, but I will do some tests with shorter timings
Btw what about proofing? I do it because it seems to be the standard but not sure about the purpose… Should I want to remove 1h from the fermentation, should I cut bulk fermentation time or proofing time (the latter would be more practical as it cuts one step from the process)?
The dough has a finite amount of food resources to be allocated to the first or second rise. Where you choose to put the shaping step in that timeframe is somewhat up to you. The reason for shaping the dough after the first rise/bulk fermentation is to redistribute food a bit, further develop gluten through manipulating the dough, allow the gluten to realign after dividing the dough, and most importantly create a dough shape that has some tension and will hold together through baking. Even ciabatta has some shape and tension.
A well shaped dough can then withstand the expansion that happens during an additional period of rising, but if you shape and immediately bake, your crumb will probably be tighter for skipping that step.
You might enjoy this blog post that looks closer at some of these overarching concepts:
Here’s a blog post about shaping that also can’t help but go into fermentation principles too
