Thanks for the link. It had good information.
I keep a running record of what I do with my sourdough from the first day I began making my starter back in June. The document currently had over 8k words. Every bake is not worth the words, but every time I try something new it is duly noted.
That focaccia looks tasty. I have notebooks, no idea the word count lol.
Agree with what you say. I think beginning bakers may find it useful to know how active their starters are and how long dough needs to roof. It is a crutch I used when I started and found it difficult (i.e., impossible) to recognize when the dough had sufficiently proofed by sight and feel. It is more about making the process repeatable than any one way being right or wrong. Confession of a chronic over-proofer.
How far i’ve come from thinking refreshed starter caught at its peak makes the best bread. Sometimes it does one good to throw away the rule book, and recipes for that matter, and just have some fun. Nice to not be constrained by convention. So with some ends of packets and un-refreshed starter I came up with something along these lines…
Everything is a guesstimate with making a few mental notes on the way while pouring flour in the bowl then working out the dough hydration, after going by feel, by working out the difference of the flour and bowl plus add-ins.
Bulk ferment was 16 hours getting in some folds along the way. The dough developed very well. Sticky but manageable. At the end of the bulk ferment it had risen by about 2.5x. Final proof was 1.5 hours and baked in a pullman.
Really delicious. Texture for more than 50% wholegrain with kamut and rye to-boot is excellent. Flavour is delicious. With the kamut bringing out some tang but the durum balancing it out. Rye giving a lot of depth of flavour and bread flour lending some lightness. Best of both worlds. Sunflower seeds and sesame seeds are very delicious with the toasting drawing out the oil adding to the texture as well.
I think kamut has the most marvelous impact on texture!
Being that signs of peak fermentation were still noted prior to shaping with the micro unfed loaf, I am wondering if the very long fermentolyse weakens gluten in some way, leading to the decreased oven spring noted. As such, what would you think about performing 1 or 2 coil folds late in bulk/fermentolyse, say with 2 hr left in a 12 hr bulk? Do you think that would improve oven spring and overall airiness of the crumb?
I agree it makes sense to stretching and folding farther into the process if the fermentation stage is so long as with using tiny amounts of starter/levain. I believe @homebreadbaker does later stretching and folding.
That said, some weakness of the dough may come from enzymatic breakdown of the gluten, which probably wouldn’t be improved with stretching and folding. This recent article by guest blogger @mcw.mark looks at ways of testing wheats for strength and “longevity.” (I’m using that term here just to mean enzymatic breakdown.)
As Melissa noted, my “regular” weekly whole grain sourdough bread is essentially a “micro unfed dough” and I do frequently do late coil folds as you suggest. I have felt (with my hands) that they help some to maintain strength in the dough, but these long, long fermentolyse’s do really seem to be a tightrope act.
I’ve lately been experimenting with all kinds of different techniques to boost oven spring and the last few weeks have been doing my breads “no knead” after the initial mix; no stretch and folds, no late coil folds. Just taking the dough out of the mixer, and plopping it into a rising bowl and doing one very short round of folds to basically smooth it out and round it in the bowl. Then I don’t touch it again until I turn it out to shape it something like 12 - 16 hours later. And I’ve been getting pretty good results that way coupled with tight shaping and a 500F initial covered baking temperature.
Thanks for your replies. I’ve been trying lots of strategies over the last couple of years. I think I’m most satisfied with this type of very long fermentolyse with unfed starter. It just makes sense to me and fits my schedule. I’ve tried both machine kneading or a series of stretch and folds. Both have given me an acceptably open crumb, but I want more vertical rise to my loaves.
For reference, I am doing 100% bread flour (KAF or Breadtopia High Protein), 80% hydration, and bake in Challenger pan at 500F, then 450F.
Now that you are experimenting with only the machine kneading, do you think that late stretch and folds add anything? Also, at which point do you end your machine kneading? Do you wait for a windowpane?
Thanks.
My recent few no-knead loaves have about convinced me to stop doing the later stretch and folds altogether.
I don’t actually do the window-pane test, but yeah, that’s the kind of consistency that I am aiming at when I take the dough out of the mixer.
I think that if you are using 100% refined white bread flour and you are getting an open crumb without much oven spring (“vertical rise”) that you may be over-proofing your dough.
I suggest experimenting with shortening your bulk proofing time. Hard to say how much since you didn’t relay those details but I measure all those timing things by feel and not by minutes / hours anyway. You could try to measure it by volume of dough expansion or, following @Benito, by pH.
I’ve written a couple articles here at Breadtopia that discuss some of the basics behind why I do what I do with fermentation. Maybe this is the most relevant one (also mentioned earlier in this thread) if you haven’t read it:
