First time FWSY bread
Hey everyone,
Today I made my first Flour Water Salt Yeast bread. I haven't made a lot of bread in the past either.
I tried to make the overnight 40% whole wheat bread. There were some issues.
I had some problems at the start: I didn't have a lot of white flour, so instead I used 700 grams fine whole wheat flour and 300 grams of white flour. I kept the same amounts of the recipe: 800 grams of water, 3 grams of yeast and 22 grams of salt. Temperature after adding the water, salt and yeast was about 27 C. Maybe a little too warm.
As the recipe recommended: let it proof for about 5 hours after the first mix, until it's tripled in size. I folded the dough 3 times in total. I let it rise for another 2 hours after my last fold, but I feel like I overdid that bit, I think it was more than tripled.
After that I folded and shaped it and put the loaves in the fridge for about 12 hours. Dent test seemed like they were overproofed.
Baked it for 30 minutes covered in a Dutch oven, then 15 minutes uncovered, because they browned quite quickly. They both came out quite flat. The second one more than the other.
The taste was nice, but the loaves were extremely tough.
Does anyone know what I did wrong? Any help is much appreciated!
Hope the links work.
Greetings from Mirren
Welcome to TFL.
Actually, those loaves are kinda good! I would have no qualms about eating them myself, or serving them to others.
I have the FWSY book, so I looked it up. For even better loaves, you could have used the recipe/formula on page 85 for 75% whole wheat.
Your first rise (bulk ferment) went 2 hours too long (page 86, #3).
Page 88, for the 75% WW formula, says proofing should be only 1 to 1.5 hours, depending on room temp. Proofing/fermentation keeps on going in the refrigerator, and even more so with WW flour, which ferments faster than white flour.
So yes, both first and second rise went too long for that much whole wheat. I've done that quite a few times,
(also, the finger poke test usually does not work well on cold dough right out of the refrigerator.)
You were close, just a few pages off. And I bet it tastes great!
In the end, you really did a good job.
Hey idaveindy,
Thank you so much for your reply and your compliments! The taste was actually really nice, just very very tough to cut through and chew.
Do you mean I could've used the quantities of that recipe to make it into an overnight loaf?
I didn't really have the time to make a 1-day loaf, which is why I tried the overnight one. In the overnight one, you proof it in the fridge for 12-14 hours. I guess I didn't understand the rise after mixing; the 5 hour rise or triple in size. Could you maybe explain that to me?
I also have 1 Dutch oven, so what do I do with the second loaf? Baking takes almost an hour, which means the other loaves proofs extra for that long too. Is that bad?
I'm sorry for all the questions. I'm just very new to this.
Very excited to try it again some time!
As Forkish says, "time is an ingredient."
You basically used the flour-ingredients from the 75% recipe on page 85, but you used the time-ingredient (overnight) of the 40% recipe on page 93.
So... here's the explanation... (this may not be the whole story, but it has the gist.)
White flour ferments slower than WW flour. So the overnight fridge proof is good for the recipe with only 40% WW, and 60% white.
WW flour ferments faster than white flour. So 1.5 hours room temp proof is good for the recipe with 75% WW, 25% white.
Q: What else affects ferment time? A: the amount of yeast.
(Perhaps, maybe, reducing the yeast would have made the overnight proof work for the fast-fermenting 75% WW. But that would take experimenting to find out how much to reduce it by.)
--
If you study the page 85 recipe and the page 93 recipe, they are almost identical except this: more WW uses less proof time, less WW uses more proof time. (And.... WW keeps proofing in the fridge, more so than white flour.)
--
"I also have 1 Dutch oven, so what do I do with the second loaf?"
A) Leave it in the fridge. B) halve the recipe.
C) If you have a Pyrex covered-casserole dish, it might also work. That's what I used to use before I got a Lodge cast iron combo cooker. I've read that a glass (borosilicate or Pyrex) casserole dish should not be pre-heated because the cold dough could cause it to shatter due to thermal shock.
Hope this helps.
You're so helpful, thank you so much. I understand things a lot more now thanks to your explanation. It also makes a lot of sense now. I will keep these things in mind.
I don't have that kind of oven dish unfortunately, but I'll see what I'll do next time.
Anyway, thank you so much again for your great advice! Hope the next loaf (loaves) will be much better!