500g King Arthur Bread Flour
100g Starter
350g Water – 100°F
15g Table Salt
Process for picture #1
Add water, starter, salt, flour.
Mix into shaggy dough.
Wait 30 minutes, do 4 folds in 4 different directions.
Proof in oven with light on for 1 hour max.
Oven at 425, lid on for 20 min, then lid off for 25.
Process for picture #2
Add water, starter, salt, flour.
Mix into shaggy dough.
Wait 30 minutes, do 4 folds in 4 different directions.
Proof in refrigerator for 16 hours.
Preheat 475 with Dutch oven.
20 min lid on
25 lid off.
I quite like the flavor and texture of the loaf with cold proofing. Wanted to do a side by side comparison. What do you guys think???
by PhilMeUp1
11 Comments
4 folds in 4 different directions every 30 minutes for 2 hours ***** both types
How did you figure out when the final proof was ready? I’m thinking of skipping cold proof too but I don’t know how to check if it’s ready to go into the oven.
Looks so good!! Well done
How do you keep the bottom crust of the loaf from getting too hard? Mine always comes out too dark and stiff on the bottom with almost identical oven time as listed here.
How’s the bread
Typically the aromas are more developed when cold proofing. So the books say. Seems you did extra well there! What is your sourdough ratio? 1:1:1 or 1:3:3 ( sourdough:refresh flour:water) ?
The one that was cold retarded is probably going to be more fermented. It takes hours for dough to get down to ambient fridge temp, cooling roughly 10f per hour.
Did you pre-heat the Dutch oven to 475 as well in the second process?
What were you trying to achieve? A one day loaf? Normally that would involve higher % of starter and warm temperatures to make bulk go faster.
To me 2nd loaf looks better as it has more time to ferment but IMO both are underfermented. Bet it still tasted good though.
Loaf 1 is underproofed.
I just did this on the weekend, I looked up advice and they said mostly it’s just the sourdough flavour which is affected. I messed up my timings and had to restart my levain so I was 8 hours off and disk t have time for overnight cold proof. Total bulk ferment was about , 6-7 hours in the end inc. autolyse.