What am I doing wrong?

It is hard to tell without the recipe and technique used but it actually looks more like a shaping issue than anything else. That is why you get the row of large bubbles-almost a flying roof or attic. Did it rest in a banneton refrigerated overnight and then go directly into the oven from there?

Tell us more.

Hello:

I routinely leave dough in the fridge over night.  Sometimes, due to scheduling, I have to throw the dough in the fridge in the mid or early afternoon knowing I won't be able to do anything with it until the morning.

For your very first loaf of sour dough bread, this looks wonderful!  There are some on this site that can produce outstandingly beautiful loaves of bread.  I am not one of them.  My bread looks lovely, but nothing like the beauty that is on our front page (to the left).

Enjoy your bread! 

Hadster

As a very first loaf, I would say that it looks really good!  Well done on choosing the most straight-forward recipe to start with:  the 1-2-3 style is really a great place to start, and gives you a nice point to start making changes from.

From your picture, it looks to me like you are using a gas oven.  If that is correct, then using just the pan of water for steaming is not going to be enough, since gas ovens are designed to vent continuously, so your steam is leaving as fast as it is being made.  Trying to bake uncovered with steam will require knowing how to block off the vents, playing with turning the oven off and on again, and a lot of other details (check out all that kendalm has done in his posts about baking baguettes in his gas oven).

A dutch oven is a great option, but you could also use any heavy baking surface (pizza stone, pizza steel, or even a regular baking sheet) with a heavy cover (stainless steel bowl, roasting pan, big pot --- held down with another heavy flat pan if needed).  Personally, I use an old enamel steel roaster (https://www.amazon.ca/Granite-Ware-18-Inch-Covered-Roaster/dp/B000050AVC/ref=lp_2224092011_1_7/147-9254019-6339448?s=kitchen-substore&ie=UTF8&qid=1502...), but there are a lot of other choices too (la cloche or other clay bakers, cast iron combo cookers, using the upturned steam trays from commercial restaurant steam tables).

Now, mixing in the salt right at the beginning is perfectly fine - and is often recommended if you are using high percentage of pre-fermented flour or are baking in high temps and want to slow fermentation down a bit.  You'll be able to change that or not in future bakes, depending on whether you want fermentation to get started more quickly or not.

If your starter is strong enough (just how old is it, what is it made up of, and how quickly does it double?), then your 4 hours of room temperature fermentation (from the time the starter hits the flour, until you shaped it) should be fairly close for fermentation at about 24 deg C room temperature and using part whole wheat flour.  If your refrigerator is cold enough (holds at no more than 3 deg C), then the 18 hours would be generally be fine for a refrigerated proof, but it might be too much if the fridge is warmer or too full and the dough didn't cool quickly enough. 

I suspect that the main issues might be:

- your starter is a bit young, so the levain might not have been strong enough for the timing

- the boule wasn't strongly shaped before being put in to the bowl and refrigerated to proof (it's tricky getting a good shape, especially with a wetter dough)

- the surface of the dough dried out too much in the fridge, since it was only covered with a towel (next time, try a piece of plastic wrap or even a plate - something that won't allow air to pass).  This would make it impossible for the surface of the dough to stretch and split in the oven.

If the dough looks and feels really "flat" when you pull it out of the fridge, then I'd suggest that you take it out from the bowl and give it another pre-shape, then a rest (covered with plastic or a damp towel) for 20 or 30 minutes, and then a final shape and put it back in to your proofing bowl and let it proof again at room temperature.  You'll be able to feel any big bubbles in the dough when you re-shape it, and that gives you a chance to pop them and for all of the gases to redistribute more evenly.

You also mentioned that it felt like a really wet dough even though it is at 71% total hydration.  I'm guessing that you are not using North American flours (which can take more water), so your best bet is to start the autolyse or dough mix at closer to 62% or 63% hydration (if you're using a 100% hydration starter / levain, you'd only be adding another 510-520g of water to the rest of the flour).  As you are mixing and kneading in the starter and the salt, you can go by how your dough feels to see how much more water that you might want to add.  I usually keep a measured amount of water nearby, and add it in little bits as I'm kneading until the dough feels "right" --- then I can note exactly how much I added.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you are running a very high percentage of whole meal flour (if your starter / levain is using whole meal, then your dough will be at 57% whole meal), which means that hydration and handling and rise and timing will be quite different than a mostly plain flour dough. 

All in all, I'd say that you are doing great!  I'm looking forward to seeing your next bake!

Hi - and congrats on giving sourdough a go. Not always easy I know. My thoughts are that your dough is over-proofed, and your little beasties were worn out when the dough hit the oven. I can see that the loaf didn't spring too much from looking at the score marks as a result.

As to the inconsistency of the crumb - I think you can overcome this with technique.I suggest letting the dough warm a bit out of the fridge (doesn't need to be room temp - a bit cooler can also be easier to work with) then do a final shaping of the loaf. Be gentle and don't knead as this will deflate too much - I normally just fold each of the four corners in then use a cupping technique to rotate the dough while tucking underneath/stretching the skin to be nice and firm. This retains some of the volume of your dough but also "redistributes" some food for the yeast to eat and thereby raise the dough more uniformly. It should also result in them having some zest to spring your loaf as it hits the oven.

Good luck on the next one. (I would personally drop the whole wheat % too, but it's a matter of personal preference).

Cheers,

Lincoln 

for a first attempt. Its a learning experience because you need to discover what is unique to your environment that makes your loaves do what they are doing. It seems that you could use a lot of steam in your oven because the crust is thick and there is not a lot of rise. I suggest trying SylviaH's method of creating steam with towels.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20162/oven-steaming-my-new-favorite-way

More steam means more rise because the crust will not set until its dry. Do be careful, the steam can burn you when you open the door, if you have glass in your oven door then make sure yo don't drop any water on it (or else it will crack), be extra careful loading and unloading the pan of water, etc.

You can bake a dough straight from the fridge but doing that has nor worked for me, I find that I always have to let the dough get up to room temperature before I put it into the oven and then I get excellent rise from it.

Your hydration level looks to be ok, I'm going to guess that there wasn't enough steam and that the dough was too cold to give you good rise. If you get good rise but still have that gap going across the center of the loaf then I would suspect that the kneading/folding needed a bit more work.

You are off to a good start, just keep baking and have fun!

lie in the final proofing?   I suspect it needed a shorter final proof with more folding closer to the baking time.  

I see the bottom of the loaf is pale.  Might want to get more heat directly under the baking loaf for more upward rise.  

I read about sifting whole wheat flour in Michael Pollan's book "Cooked".

The bran was still undermining the gluten, either by puncturing the gas bubbles or by weighing them down, giving me a too-tight crumb. I hit on a slightly wacky idea: I would remove the bran from the inside of the bread and put it on the outside, where it could do no damage to the gluten. So, before mixing my flour and water, I sifted the chunkiest bran out of the flour, maybe 10 percent of the total volume. In effect, I was making white (or whitish) flour circa 1850, pre-roller mill […] It still had the germ, but only those particles of bran small enough to slip through an ordinary sieve. However, I reserved the sifted bran in a bowl, and after shaping the loaves, I rolled them in the stuff, making sure that every last shard of bran was taken up by the wet skin of dough.
 
It worked: The trick allowed me to bake an airy and delicious loaf with a toasty, particulate crust-all the while preserving my claim to a “100 percent whole-grain” bread.

– Michael Pollen, Part III: Air, the education of an amateur baker, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

I have used this method to make 100% whole wheat bread, using Pollan’s sifting method. It did work beautifully (although maybe I didn’t get quite as much loft as I’d hoped for). But it was still WAY more loft than the doorstops of yesteryear.

(For more detail, please read more here: blog from OUR kitchen | Sifting: the key to lofty whole wheat bread (Bookmarked).)

That is some lovely looking bread, and our crumb is opening up nicely.

Do you like the texture and taste?

Its an obsession, but a tasty one!