The Day’s Bake June 3rd 2024

Today I was looking at a couple of different tests. But before I get into that it’s fair to say that like many folks my Sourdough took more of a backing singer role when I was working fully in the tech world post COVID. Still great, healthy, and nutritious, bread. And a hobby that is good for your mental health too. I say that because making Sourdough has that amazing blend of complexity and simplicity. Simple, in that only 3 or 4 ingredients are involved, complex in that bacterias and yeasts are involved, and that spells complexity. In nature we are often attracted to repeating patterns, I think for the same reason in that the pattern itself may be complex but the repetition is simple, or vice versa. I think we find intrigue in the complexity and comfort in the simplicity. Therefore Sourdough is a very fulfilling hobby.

So on with the test. I was looking to prove two things:
A: That a 6 hour bulk fermentation is preferable to a 3 hour one, based on an ambient kitchen temp of 22.5c

B. That an overnight refrigerated (retarded) proofing stage is not overly impacted by my typical fridge temp of 3c.

So in my normal fashion I setup three identical bowls, scales, water, starter, and flours. Armed with a sharpie and a timer and planned out my day which looked like this:
1. 8am feed starter

2. 2pm initial mix and autolyse(actually fermentolyse)

3. Bulk Ferment and folding till 6pm for loaf A (4 hour bulk).Then shape and basket

4. 9pm bake loaf A

5. 9pm shape loaf B and C (6 hour bulk ferment) then refrigerate at 3c

6. 14 hours proofing in fridge and bake loaf B

7. 18 hours proofing in fridge and bake loaf C

The idea here, my need, is that with lessons restarting I now need optimal bread at specific times so that students in the lesson can see bread both prior to shaping and during a full bake, alongside their own “accelerated” class bread. In order to do this we need full control over our bulk fermentation and retardation times.

Loaf A - 4 hour Bulk and 2.5 hour Proof at 22c

Loaf A turned out almost as expected. A good oven spring, a small ear (more about that later), nice open crumb. light lactic flavours, and good crust. I have 4 dutch ovens currently, the typical one I use is a small Le Crueset, then I have a larger (wider and deeper) Ikea, and then a huge (two round loaves, or two baguettes) Cabela’s. The small dutch oven is only 10cm deep which is fine for non optimal loaves that I generally cook for family bread, but an optimal loaf will go higher than this. And you can see from the image that the ear is compressed. The width/height ratio here is 18/11 or 1.6, and that probably could have been higher with the deeper dutch oven. So test A was successful, but a reminder to use the taller oven.

Loaf B - 6 hour bulk and 8 hours Retarded Proof at 3c. (this was also a white starter and 100% white flour loaf but all else was the same as Loaf A)

Loaf B was a bit of a tangental test, mainly because I had a white starter at the same age and I did not have enough wholewheat starter to run 3 tests, so I used the white starter and 100% white flour for Loaf B. So this goes against my testing strategy which typically is to only change a single thing per test set. However all other things were the same and my main test is Loaf A against Loaf C. This loaf shows an excellent oven spring, width height is 21/12.5 or 1.7 which is similar to Loaf A however the loaf is 15% more volume than Loaf A. I used the deeper dutch oven so for sure this improved the height of the bread. The crumb has more gloss indicating good hydration, it’s better than Loaf A even though they had the same initial hydration because the wholewheat needs more water overall. Great loaf, but still could be better.

Loaf C - 6 hour bulk and 14 hours Retarded proof.

Loaf C turned out pretty much where I hoped. It had the best ear of all three loafs, and the best coloration of crust. Crumb glossiness was good, but probably would indicate that hydration could go higher. However it’s pretty wild inside so not really something that’s going to hold much jelly or peanut butter :) and there is the rub with imagery - bread is about flavour, smell, nutrition, and utility. It’s a brilliant protein-carb-hydration-salt platform for things like butter, and ham, and brie. What bread isn’t, is a thing that is all about aesthetic, so what may please the social media crowd may not be the most practical bread.

You may also notice that this loaf has a little less oven spring than Loaf B, but that could be the wholewheat accelerating the ferment, or the longer retarded proof. And that’s why you should only change a single parameter in your experiments.

So next stop is looking at hydration levels and length of proofing.