Although parchment is non-stick, on occasion it add a very, very small amount of canola oil and wipe it around the parchment paper to avoid this issue. Especially if I am afraid that the parchment paper may have a fold in it because of the shape of the dutch oven being used and trying to lower a very wet batter.
I would vote for baking it now, enjoying the taste (which is almost always wonderful not matter what you do), and chalk this up as a lesson learned.
Thank you, it is in the oven & I will report. I do wish the store would restock I need those gloves, dough hook & a safer baking dish (cloche etc). Dangerous lifting out my cast iron pot with a not so safe lid. We are definitely enjoying the taste & have not bought our normal whole wheat unsliced tolerable good bread!
I’m with @SingKevin. I don’t think I’d try adding more flour after that long bulk proofing. Depending on how wet is “VERY WET” (which I don’t know how to say in words though it would be obvious at a glance), I’d bake it in a bread pan if it’s like pancake batter wet and in a clay baker if it’s not spreading all over the place wet.
Not pancake batter, but sticks to my fingers when checking spring. I was dithering as Cloud locked me out of the site as I was looking for an answer. Just so appreciate the information & sharing here. Thank you.
Thanks for posting this. I am still a bit mystified. Why do people like Chad Robertson and Debra Wing really recommend having a “strong starter” and feeding it daily, maybe even twice a day? Is it simply to shorten the fermentation time, or does it affect flavor and structure as well? My understanding is their goal is to minimize sourness and maximize crumb/spring.
My goal is to get more sourness but maintain a nice crumb/spring. I’m OK with a longer fermentation time and of course the idea of not having to feed a starter daily appeals to me. However I’ve been having trouble getting a nice crumb/spring with the method you describe here. Maybe it’s something I’m doing wrong with fermentation or oven temperature. But regarding the innoculation, here is my understanding:
Once you innoculate the flour and mix it all together, it’s a race between yeast and acid. If the acid gets ahead of the yeast, the yeast will not peak as strong because the dough is too acidic. So my understanding of what Chad Robertson etc. are trying to do with the daily feedings is to give the yeast a huge head start vs. if you do a 20% innoculation with a very acidic starter, you won’t get a good rise.
Now the part I’m confused about is this low innoculation strategy – in that case it seems like basically the yeast and bacteria get a roughly even start since it’s such a small amount of starter? And in that case are you getting an “ideal” fermentation where the yeast peaks before the acid has a chance to ruin it?
In other words - besides fermentation time, is there really no tradeoff between the high vs. low innoculation methods and you can make tweaks w/ the flour, and during fermentation, shaping, etc. to get whatever loaf you want, whether that’s a sour open crumb or non-sour open crumb or whatnot?
Hi Misha, those are good questions.
I’m afraid I probably don’t have good answers, but I’ll give it my best shot.
I can’t speak for Chad Robertson or Debra Wing or any of the rest of the majority of people who do prefer to use a well-fed starter in the vicinity of its peak. That way of making sourdough bread totally works. For my part, if I want really not-sour bread, I’ll make up a one-time levain and feed it once or twice to make it very active and use a lot (by comparison with my usual practice) of it so the dough rises very fast. I will also not retard that dough, so the whole loaf is a few hours from mixing to baking and it all happens at room temperature (until the oven).
I think this is a bit of an over-simplification. There are so many things going on in a fermenting dough. Along with a lot of other things that affect the ultimate loaf, the acid buildup is both affecting microbes (both yeast and bacteria) reproduction and metabolism directly, and it also has a deleterious effect on gluten formation.
Without doing a lot of empirical measurements and observations that I’ve never done, I can’t say anything meaningful about what is happening over time in the method I use, but I have a theory that basically goes like this:
I am using a tiny amount of starter in a relatively huge amount of dough. At the inoculation percentage that I am talking about, the acidity level of my starter is meaningless, as is the relative population of different microbes in the starter. Because the giant playground of food they just got mixed into so dwarfs the microbial environment of the starter, it’s like a giant reset button and they start going nuts in a clear, unconstrained field filled with food at a neutral pH. That’s how I think of it anyway.
So then over the hours they are spreading rapidly through the dough it’s a long time before their activity starts to affect the dough’s properties - mainly acidity level. Basically we just created a brand new, giant levain. And for me, the bulk fermentation period is letting that large levain ripen.
Because I use such a small amount of starter the initial part of that bulk proof is a lot longer than in more conventional sourdough bread recipes. I think that’s because it takes a while for the microbes to physically saturate the whole dough and get to the point where their competition for food and their waste products are starting to actually reshape their environment (i.e. change the dough’s properties). But once you get to a certain point of microbial spread, from that point onward the timing from the baker’s point of view is more or less the same as with a more conventional recipe / method.
I don’t know this is true for sure, but I hypothesize that the length of the bulk fermentation (and then the long, cold final proof) is responsible for developing flavor that I really like. My bread is not super sour at all. You can taste a little acidity but it’s really not like what people think of as a “San Francisco” sourdough bread. It does have a really rich and complex flavor that I like a lot.
Over time, I’ve found that for my preferences, using the whole grains that I like, once the dough’s volume is at ~150% - ~200% of where it started when I mixed it up, it’s ripe enough for shaping and then a long retarded final proof in the fridge over night.
Then I bake it up the next morning and I get something like this recent loaf:
…which I’m happy with.
