This was a recipe with a little over 5 cups of flour and I split it into 2 separate loaves I think I expected them to be bigger does this look right?
@yeastbeast, did you mean to attach pictures? There are no images on this thread. You’re not alone. I’ve posted a thread and forgotten to include the pictures I wanted. Welcome to the “club”.
Leah
I did try and add the pic. The file is too large and have been trying for a while to
Thanks abe…everyone here is so nice!
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Our pleasure 
Let me see… 5 cups of flour is roughly 600g of flour. If you made it about 70% hydration (give or take) which is a nice amount for bread flour then you’d be adding around 420g of water. 2% salt will be 12g and some yeast or starter. So we’re looking at about 1032g ish of dough.
That will be two small loaves of about 530g each. They will be small. A nice decent size for one loaf will be anything from 850g - 950g ish.
So your recipe will be probably bigger than an average loaf but when divided in two will make very small loaves.
Let’s see if we can alter this a tad for one decent sized loaf.
Now bear in mind I work in grams and cups are not my thing but here goes…
540g flour = 4.5 cups bread flour
378g water = 1.6 cups water
10.8g salt = 2 tsp
Now I don’t know what you used for leavening but 1 tsp dried yeast is about right. I work in sourdough only so more knowledgeable when it comes to that. But as long as you leave it to bulk ferment for the correct amount of time by watching the dough and not the clock then it’ll be fine. If you work in sourdough then we’d need to pay attention to how much for the final loaf weight.
This quick off the cuff recipe gives you a nice bread flour loaf and a good hydration of 70% coming in at 928g which is a good sized single loaf.
As for raising more that’s down to timing, gluten formation, shaping and steaming the oven. A bread flour recipe should give you a good rise. Just under doubled for bread flour in the final proof is a good guide. You want some strength in the dough for a good oven spring so better slightly under than over for final proofing. You want a taut skin on the shaped loaf and the loaf should not crust over too quickly preventing oven spring and that’s where steam for the first 20 minutes helps. Scoring correctly can help with bloom but a bad scoring can compromise bloom.
Wow very informative…thankyou very much