This is my 3rd attempt, and they seem to be getting progressively worse if that’s possible lol. Here’s what I did:
100g active starter, 350g warm filtered water, 500g king Arthur unbleached bread flour.
Mixed ingredients and lightly kneaded for a minute or two (should I have kneaded more or less? Some recipes don’t call for this?). Let sit an hour. 5 rounds of stretch and folds every 30 min (I got excited at this point — this was the stretchiest my dough had ever been and looking like all the videos I saw online!).
Bulk fermentation roughly 10 hours. I used a separate shot glass with a small amount of the dough to track the bread’s growth. It nearly doubled after about 6 hours but I wanted to get the FULL double so I waited a few more hours and it stayed at the same line. Note: My house is at roughly 75 degrees during the day. Another not: it was pretty sticky during shaping which I had not experienced before.
Threw it in the fridge to cold proof for about 12 hours. It was tiny and dense when I put it in the banneton and the exact same when I pulled it out. I knew at this point I would have another failure lol.
Baked in a preheated dutch oven at 450 for for an hour (pulled the lid off after 30 min). As you can see the loaf is TINY and DENSE, and so so heavy. It is the size of my hand and I have very tiny hands.
by LittleStellaluna
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I forgot to mention I used 11g salt 🙂 help greatly appreciated!!!
Mine is doing this exact same thing right now. I was surprised when I pulled it out of the fridge this morning to see it had stayed the same size so I’m expecting a small dense loaf too. Not sure what happened other than maybe my fermentation was off somehow? It’s my first “bad” loaf in a long time. I feel your frustration too.
Mine are too and I’m thinking it’s the humidity in my home naturally fluctuating with the summer season. For example I can’t use an ice cube any more because it creates a pocket of raw dough. I am curious to see if I will be able to use an ice cube again in 6 months or if something is off with my oven.
That is by no means a dense loaf
I wonder if it might be over proofed? 10 hrs is a pretty long time at that temperature, and extra stickiness and having the volume level off are pretty classic signs. When you scored the loaf, did it kind of collapse open? Or stay tight? That’s another signal I watch for. For comparison, I expect my loaves to be ready about 4-4.5hrs after adding salt when I’m proofing at that temperature.
Hi there, This is [Tina Martinez](https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/author/254692/tina-martinez/), I work as a recipe developer in the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen and just made many loaves of sourdough for an upcoming story. My first question (only because I didn’t see you mention this) is regarding your starter. Was it nice and bubbly and ready to go when you mixed with water and then flour?
First of all you do not want it to double in size. And it seems like you exceeded even that. The size you want has to do with the temperature you’re keeping it. If you let it double in size and then you shape it and put it in the fridge it will still be five or six hours before the temperature drops enough to more or less stop your fermentation. So if you’ve let it over double then you’ve definitely overproofed your bread. At 75 you don’t want it to get more than 50% larger.
Second thing is I don’t know how you’re feeding your starter or if you have a schedule. Some people feed it every day, I think that’s insane. But whatever blows your hair back. At any rate if you’re continually feeding a 111 ratio, in other words one part starter to one part water to one part flour, eventually you increase the amount of bacteria as opposed to the yeast. The bacteria is more active, more flexible, and the cell count exceeds the yeast many times over.
So essentially your starter will become so acidic that the gluten in your bread dough will be destroyed. It’s happened to me and I had to fix that very same problem. The way you do that is by taking a very small amount of starter and feeding it a lot of flour and maybe as much or less water. The flour will give the yeast something that it likes whereas the water gives the bacteria more activity. At any rate it doesn’t seem like that’s your issue, it seems like you’re overproofing your loaves. But that’s just a guess.
I have had to stop BF overnight and do it during the day for about 7 hours. I got the best loaf ever doing that this week.
Over proofed. It was probably over at the point when you checked at 6 hours and decided to go 10.
It looks like you don’t have great oven spring. This can be caused by a couple of things, such as overproofing (which, going by your BF time, could be a culprit here), but also baking conditions. So one thing you can do is, try preheating your oven (including Dutch oven) to 500F, then turning down to 450 when you put the bread in, then lowering to something like 435 after removing the lid. Also, adding an ice cube or two to your Dutch oven right before closing it and putting the bread in the oven can help. The ice cubes will evaporate and create steam, which will keep the crust softer for longer, so the bread has more time to expand.
Same thing happened to me.
1st and 2nd bakes were wonderful. 3rd was dense. 4th was a pancake.
3rd bake I had my dough in the oven (turned off, with the light on) and it got to 86 F, which I think caused it to over-proof.
4th bake I was waiting for it to grow and it never did so I let it sit on the counter for 12 hours, and it over-proofed.
Yesterday I tried a different recipe (Pain de Campagne from King Arthur) and this morning I baked my best loaf yet.
I think it’s because I didn’t have my starter/levain/dough going through so many proofing stages. It was just mix, fold 3 times within an hour, and then when it doubled I divided it, shaped it, and put it in the fridge.
As opposed to having a 12 hour levain stage, and then 2-3 hours of strech and fold, and then more hours of waiting for it to rise, and then resting after pre-shaping, and then more resting after shaping, etc…
All those steps might be perfect during the winter, but right now my kitchen is 78-83 F every day, so I think keeping the dough out for such a long time is ruining it, and it’s best to keep the process short and sweet right now.
Are you adjusting your fermentation times due to the humidity and heat?
You need to make seasonal adjustments to baking sourdough. During winter, bulk proofing takes me about 12+ hours. During summer, it takes about 2 to 3 hours. If there’s too much food in the fridge or the fridge gets opened too often when it’s hot, the cold proofing portion will be disrupted and the dough will take much longer to drop in temperature, thus continuing to bulk proof. This happened with my last bake because it was in the high 90s, and my dad kept standing in front of the fridge for 5 minutes at a time throughout the day. I ended up with an overproofed loaf.
In those instances, I can just bake as normal understanding that it’s going to be dense but still taste the same, or I can bake it like a sandwich loaf in a pan which I think is a better shape to bake in over proofed.
Watch this video, try this method, and report back.
https://youtu.be/iLizdCUZYzM?si=U1pXBDGKfgBjynfo
My BF has decreased by 2 hours over the summer. So you might have overproofed it.
I have a similar problem – I’ve gotten super lazy with how long I feel my starter before I make a loaf and I think that’s *my* problem, could be similar?
First two things that come to mind:
Could be your starter getting fed a little too early or a little too late which over multiple feeds is reducing the overall activity.
Could be weather changes, has the temperature been going down lately where you are?
It sounds like your yeast are struggling to get the double bulk for whatever reason, so a temporary solution is simple. Don’t wait for it to double and go early.
Think of it like a limit on how much work your yeast can do, if they are falling short, ask a bit less of them and you’ll get a better result in the end.
Or as ken forkish says “time is the fifth ingredient in sourdough”