I have baked several loaves and all look good, Great rise and nice brown crust color. However the crumb
is slightly gummy and not really white. Internal temp 204 to 209. Cut when completely cool. Difficult to
shape loaf due to very soft dough. All ingredients properly measured.Could it be over hydrated? Should
I use more flour when shaping to hold the loaf to a ball like shape? Cheech (Frank)
Great question - I’d love to see answers to this. I thought I was the only one! The bread is fantastic, but very hard to slice because of what you are calling “gumminess” of the crumb. I still love it, but would be interested to see if there is some way to improve it in this regard.
This is the recipe you’re referring too? http://breadtopia.com/sourdough-no-knead-bread/
It calls for a mix of whole wheat and white flour, which adds brown (bran) color to the crumb. If you want more white crumb, then you probably need to use only white flour.
In terms of hydration:
16 oz of flour is about 450 grams
1.5 cups of water is about 360 grams
360/450 = .80 or 80% hydration
That can certainly be lowered, either by adding more flour by dropping the amount of water.
I have also read that some people leave the loaf in the oven after it’s done cooking, with the oven off and the door cracked open, to help dry it out.
Some people also don’t cut it until the next day.
Finally, maybe it is an underproofing issue? High hydration dough should yield big holes, which tend to be less gummy than a tight custardy crumb, but I have gotten the latter when I rush the process and don’t proof it long enough. Just throwing that out there as a possibility.
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I don’t know whether this will help or not but I ran into the same problem using sprouted rye flour. It turns out if the rye berries are permitted to sprout too long they develop an excess of malt. So I did some research on line and discovered that excessive malt does exactly what I observed, a gummy crumb. In addition I found that commercial bread flour (e.g. King Arthur, Hodgson Mills) that is enriched does contain diastatic barley malt to aid in yeast development so adding additional barley malt to bread flour will do the same. I hope this helps.
Tried baking today using all Purpose flour, Same results and problems, The most annoying problem is not being
able to shape the loaf due to the wetness of the dough.I start out with a heavily floured surface, still not able to
shape into a ball like shape and keep that shape to transfer to the proofing basket. It ends up a "jiggling blob"
that I drop into the basket. All ingredients carefully measured per original recipe. 3 cups of flour,1 1/2 cups cold
water, 1/4 tsp yeast and 1 1/2 tsp salt. Resting over night for 18 hours.Would you recommend that I keep adding
flour while shaping to get a ball like shape that I can handle?..Cheech–Frank
People around here are probably getting tired of my rants against bread recipes by now, so I won’t add another one. Just some links to previous posts in this forum all of which are trying to say that following a specific recipe for baking a loaf of bread will often not work too well because there are too many variables in bread baking that matter that a recipe can’t take into account. The only way to get consistently good results is to try different things and pay attention to how your changes affect your results until you start developing a feel for what works and what doesn’t in your own kitchen.
For your specific case, try doing everything exactly the same, except add an additional 1/2 - 3/4 cup of flour. See what happens. You might also want to try using a bread flour instead of an all purpose. That will also likely give your dough more integrity.