Loaf 82 – More Failed Sourdough. Huh?

Posted on Nov 18, 2012 in loaves

I’m mad at bread, again. I’m not sure what’s going on with my sourdough lately, but my success rate has been very low.

This past weekend I made two batches of sourdough, which I’m only counting as one loaf here.

Saturday

The Saturday batch didn’t even get baked. My starter was about a week old, I fed it on Friday and also did a separate feeding to make the levain for this sourdough batch. I did the feeding at 1am and started mixing at 9:15am. I wanted to test out making epi rolls for Thanksgiving but also wanted a nice loaf to eat, so I mixed up 1800g of dough to make a boule and a couple of baguettes to practice epis with.

The Tartine recipe says to delay adding the salt for half an hour so that the yeast can get a head start before this toxic ingredient is added. I forgot to do that on this batch. After a three hour proofing rest I divided the dough, let it rest for 30 minutes and then shaped a boule and two baguettes. The second rising stage is usually three to four hours, but after four and a half hours the boule had barely risen and the baguettes had actually collapsed (without rising first). I dumped the whole batch.

My assumption was that either the salt killed the yeast or that my kitchen was too cold.

1st try: shaped, post-proofing. Flatter!

Sunday

I decided to try again, and fed a new levain at about 10pm Saturday night. I began the new loaves at 9am Sunday morning. The levain grew about 50% overnight, had appropriate bubbles in it, and floated in the water. Everything was pointing in the right direction. I mixed 1200g of dough, and this time let it proof in the oven with a preheated pizza stone, keeping the oven at about 75°, with stretch and folds every half hour (as usual).

I divided the dough, and rested it. So far so good – the dough had some nice bubbles in it and rose a nice amount during the rest.

I then shaped a boule and two smaller baguettes. Like the day before, this is where everything fell apart. The baguettes fell flat and the boule rose only a small amount over a 3 or 4 hour period.

I decided to bake the boule anyway using the dutch oven technique. Failure. The loaf only rose a tiny amount in the oven. The flavor was okay, but it was a dense ugly loaf otherwise. Into the compost pile it went.

No oven pop. Fail.

Now I’m grumpy. My starter is behaving properly with growth after feeding. My levains look, smell, taste and float properly. I’m following the same process as my successful sourdough loaves. Yet the result is stunningly bad. My thoughts on what the problem may be:

• This may not be a good dough for baguettes – I haven’t tried them with this recipe before. That would explain them falling (too much handling in the shaping step), but it doesn’t explain why the boules are failing, too.
• Saturday may have failed because of the salt being added too early, but that was fixed on Sunday with no improvement.
• Something may be wrong with my starter. Indications are that all is well with it, but I’ll have to investigate this more.
• I have no idea what’s going on.