What happened to my lovely dough? Help!
Hello,
I have been baking sourdough for a while with varying degrees of success but 90% of it is good stuff.
Today I made a 70% hydration plain white sourdough.
The strengthening stage went well.
The stretching and folding went well. I did four sets then left the batch until my aliquot jar had roughly gone up by 75%.
When I turned the batch out to split into two I noticed that the skin broke on the second loaf. It seemed strange as the dough had real integrity before that. I re-tightened and left to relax.
When I came back to shape, I lifted the dough to stretch it and it completely collapsed. The first one I was a little more gentle with and managed to shape it without it collapsing but to be honest neither feels like it has a lit of strength. I have no idea why this has happened.
One thought. When I do a batch for two loaves, I always feel that when I cut the batch in half to make two loaves, I am cutting through the surface tension that I have spent time developing through the stretch and folds and then the ferment. It felt like that today. Is this something I should be thinking about more? How do you divide dough that has spent time fermenting after stretching and folding? Is the integrity of the tension lost if you cut straight through it?
Other than that I have no idea why this dough acted like it did today. As I said. it felt tight and acted well throughout the stages. I have done my best to get them into shape in the bannetons and will bake in the morning but I'm not holding out much hope for oven spring or good structure.
Any thoughts and ideas are gratefully received. Thank you.
An added question to the above...
Is it possible to over-stretch the dough?
I did four or five good stretch and folds and the last one was only about two hours before the aliquot jar told me it was time to pre-shape. Should I have left it alone much earlier? The dough was nice and strong, maybe it didn't need more stretching so late. Again, all thoughts gratefully received.
No, dividing the dough should not cause problems. Unless you tear the dough while stretching, more stretching would give you a more elastic loaf, not what you describe.
Your description sounds like the protein got attacked. As it degrades the dough would get softer, tear more easily when pulled on, probably get stickier, start to lose its strength. It's not obvious why. Flour, starter, fermenting temperature, additives to the dough, these would be obvious places to look at.
Without more information, I don't know to what more can be said.
TomP
Thank you for this reply,
no the stretching went great.
I'm puzzled as to why how the protein could have got attacked so quickly from the stretching to the pre-shape but, judging by your list, that seems to be what happened.
I don't know why either. Very puzzling. Maybe if we could get into enough details we could make some progress.
Some change in the flour characteristics would seem the most likely, even if the brand is the same. But if you are using a well known national brand, that would be less likely. If the flour were privately labeled, a change might be more likely.
Now that I think about it, a change in the water could conceivably cause something like this, too.
Thank you for your reply.
A puzzle indeed as I used the same flour I always use and the same filtered water too. Same bowl, same mixer, same everything. Just shows how the smallest thing can give the biggest result.
Keeping me on my toes!!!
It's your starter - it will go after a while - my guess is too far. Enjoy!
Thank you for the reply.
That's interesting. I hadn't even considered that.
But the starter bubbled up nicely overnight and after 2nd feed it doubled in size which is when I added it to my autolysed dough. Do you think there could be a loss of integrity in the starter even if it acts in the positive way it did today/last night?
Overnight, you say? How long after refreshment did you use it? What's the composition of the starter, the refreshment ratio, and the temperature of your workspace? If the starter got too mature for some reason, it could have become unusually acidic. Perhaps your flour doesn't do well in a more acidic environment.
Is there any chance you forgot to put the salt in? I forgot once or twice so I know it can happen. That would make fermentation go faster and the dough be softer.
Cheers for the reply,
I activate the starter overnight - 50g 100% starter, 150g Allison's strong bread flower, 150g room temp filtered water.
In the morning I refresh with another 150g flour and 150g water.
4 hours later the starter has doubled and I add 200g of that starter to 900g flour and 600g water.
This makes a dough with 70% hydration. Room temp was about 20 degrees.
It's the same process I use whenever I make bread but I have never had such a result with the dough when I came to shape. The explanation that chimes best here is that the starter has 'gone'. I hadn't fed it for a couple of weeks before use and I wonder if it has become too acidy (although I don't quite understand the science). But, as always, I returned the starter I didn't use to the pot and that usually refreshes it enough for my next bake. Also the starter behaved normally when I activated it. It doubled in size as normal in the normal time and seemed good and lively.
I didn't forget to put salt in. All was completely normal and the dough behaved well in the stretch and fold stages. I used an aliquot jar to tell me when fermentation was complete. I pre-shaped before the dough in the jar had doubled. About 75% I'd say. It simply collapsed at pre-shape.
It's simple - the flour is different - the temp is different - the starter is different - my guess is the last. Enjoy!
and i'm sure you'll find the answer. I just wish to chime in to say if this happens, and there's little to no strength in the dough, then dump it into a loaf pan and bake soon after. No point in carefully shaping a weak dough and to continue with an overnight final proof in the fridge.
I agree with what everyone is saying here. More info is needed... Starter? Flour? Temp? Timing? How long did you autolyse for? etc.
Thank you for this,
I stuck them in the bannetons and refrigerated anyway and am in the process of baking now so let's see how they turn out. I don't hold out too much hope! I'll use a Dutch oven just to help as much as possible but let's see.I added some more info in the post above if that helps. Yes, the same routine I do every couple of weeks and have done for a long time and no difference which is making me thing, as someone has suggested above, that maybe my starter is shot in some way.
I'll update with results, thank you.
Hello all,
thank you so much for your helpful replies.
As expected the loaves came out a bit of a mess, lacking any form or structure (pics below)
'Bad bread2' at least had a little surface tension. That was the loaf that I was more careful in shaping as the first one disintegrated in my hands. But anyway, two of my less successfull efforts of the last few years it's fair to say!
The explanation I like best is that my starter is somehow out of whack. It rings true because looking back at my dates, the last time I used it was three weeks ago and it's sat in my fridge without being fed ever since. Naughty!
However, I'd love your thoughts on this because the truth is, when I activated it, the starter behaved fine. It doubled in size overnight and then when I fed it again before adding to the dough it doubled again. It was very active. But I don't know if that means it was good. Someone mentioned acid. I wonder if the starter, although active, contained too much acid and that's what broke down in the process. I offer this without any real scientific knowledge of the acid in a starter or whether that affects its activity.
I added the unused fresh starter back into the refrigerated jar as I always do as my way of feeding it. My question is, will this save the starter if it was indeed full of acid? Or is it gone for good however much feeding I do now? Basically should I just throw it away and start afresh or is it saved with regular feeding over the next couple of days. All thoughts are gratefully received as always. thank you
Your routine that you described in another reply above sounds impeccable in almost every way except possibly one: starter refresh and handling. Even that sounds *almost* right. Where I see a potential problem is in the low refreshment ratios, When combined with the long stay in the refrigerator, I think it could be the culprit. Here's how that would work.
A starter left alone that long, even in cold storage, will become very acidic (in bread-making terms), probably below a pH of let's say 3.8, maybe a few pH points lower.. When you refresh it, the pH will increase (less acidic dough), since the new ingredients dilute the acidity. Normally it might rise to maybe 4.8 or 5 (don't hold me to the exact values, please, these are for illustration purposes but are probably somewhat realistic). But you refreshed your starter with less than a 1:1:1 ratio, even. So you didn't get as much dilution. So the pH of the new dough started out lower than it should have.
During fermentation the pH drops steadily. The two times I've measured it over time, after a certain period it started dropping much more rapidly. For one of these two runs the starter had been left out overnight at room temperature, like yours. The pH started out much lower than in the other run. So it's very likely that your starter started out very acidic, the new dough therefore started out very acidic, and during fermentation the pH got so low that the protein started to degrade.
I can't be sure since I wasn't there to look at your starter and to see what its properties looked like as you mixed the refreshments and at the point of use. But it all seems to fit, based on what I've seen with my own starters. And it might be that your flour is a little more susceptible to an acidic environment than some others.
Remedies
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1. When the starter has been languishing in cold storage for a long time, refresh it several times before use, and make sure it seems to behave normally in terms of its activity and thickness as you do.
2. Refresh with at least 3 times as much flour and water as the weight of the old starter. That will reduce the starting acidity more that what you have been doing. (a some people would say a 1:2:2 ratio and that can work, but higher gives you more of a safety factor. I've been using as high as 1:5:5 lately. The higher ratio also lengthens the time for the refreshed starter to develop. So it will be more able to hold up better to an overnight development).
3. Don't return the unused starter to your starter pot and stick it back into cold storage. That's a recipe for getting more and more acidic starter over time. Instead, take some of the extra, refresh it, let it develop, and then refrigerate it. Discard the rest. Refresh with a higher ratio, at least 1:3:3. Don't go hog wild with a large refresh ratio, though. That could let new organisms a foothold to start growing. So no 1:20:20 or anything like that.
As an alternative, once you have refreshed the starter and let it develop for 4 hours or so, refrigerate it. You can use it straight from the fridge as is for several days before it would need refreshment again.
This is such a great answer I am so grateful, thank you.
Indeed I am so lazy and can leave my starter in the fridge without feeding it for a long time sometimes. It always seems to come back again with a refresh but your explanation makes so much sense. I just want to check a couple of things with you.
you say "But you refreshed your starter with less than a 1:1:1 ratio, even." What does that mean? When I take my cold, unfed starter from the fridge my normal routine is to pour 50g of it into a jar and mix with 150g water and 150g flour. So I'm thinking that's a ration or 1 part starter to 6 parts flour and water. Is that incorrect? Should I be adding more flour and water to my starter or less? It feels intuatively like it should be more rather than less but I'm just checking.
Further on down in your answer you seem to be confirming the above. And everything you're saying makes perfect sense.
It's interesting you say "Don't return the unused starter to your starter pot and stick it back into cold storage. That's a recipe for getting more and more acidic starter over time. Instead, take some of the extra, refresh it, let it develop, and then refrigerate it. Discard the rest." I now understand I may be adding acid to acid but I just want to check. What's the difference between adding the refreshed starter back to the refrigerated jar and simply making the refreshed starter my new refrigerated starter? I like the idea of simply replacing the refregerated starter with the refreshed one each time but sometimes I end up using all the refreshed starter eg when I'm making focaccia. Are you saying that what I return to the fridge should always simply be the leftover batch of new refreshed starter?
The other thing I have done on this advice is to take my refrigerated starter, throw 3/4ths of it away and refresh with 3x as much flour and water, let it rest for a few hours, tip out 3/4ths and repeat. I'm on my second cycle now. I'm thinking of doing it three times. Intuitively I'm thinking this will balance out the acid to safe levels. Would you concur? After that,
I'm deffo gonna start feeding the starter once a week whether I am baking bread or not. Pure laziness on my part but I never had the dough disintegrate like that before for no apparent reason.
Thank you again for your thoughts, they are so useful and I appreciate you taking the time.
Here you take 1 part starter and mix it with 3 parts flour and 3 parts water. That's usually written (at least here on TFL) as 1:3:3 (starter:flour:water). So what you say isn't wrong but it's not how it's normally expressed. Since in bread-making we usually base everything on the weight of flour, known as baker's percentage, it makes sense. For example, if your bread recipe has 300g flour and you add 90g starter, that would be written as 30% starter.
When you refreshed the starter right out of the refrigerator you used 1:3:3, which would normally be fine but your starter was most likely extra acidic. The 1:3:3 would not have raised the pH enough to counteract the acidity. Next, you refreshed your 350g of refreshed starter with (if I'm remembering right) 150g flour and 150g water. That's 1:0.43:0.43. That's a *very* low refresh ratio. It wouldn't dilute the acidity much and would ferment very quickly because there wouldn't be much new flour for the yeast to eat.
So the starter could have gotten very active fairly quickly, but still have been much more acidic than we would like to see. After you used that starter to make new dough, everything would have gone along fine and the fermentation proceed well, but the acidity would have been dropping. That's normal: the LAB bacteria are also working their magic and producing more acid and flavor compounds. Since the pH started out relatively low, it would be much lower than usual by the end of bulk ferment. If you had been lucky, the flour could have withstood the acid conditions and made a good loaf of bread. But you weren't lucky and the flour wasn't quite up to it. The ending acidity was too great and it was able to attack the gluten.
At least, that's my scenario of what happened.
Your plan to do repeated refreshments at 1:3:3 is good, although I would have probably gone with 1:5:5. I have been in the exact same situation more than once with a starter sitting neglected in the fridge for weeks. It had gotten thin and had some dark liquid on top. Here's how I work the starter back into good shape:
I refreshed somewhere between 1:3:3 and 1:5:5. I say "somewhere" because I didn't measure the starter, I only eyeballed it. After that first refresh it might have risen well or it might have seemed feeble. Either way I would refresh again, at the same ratio. When the refreshed starter rose vigorously and remained thick and elastic in a normal period (generally around 4 hours for my starter) - I use both criteria - then I felt I could bake bread with it. Sometimes it would take yet another refreshment before I was happy with its condition. It depends on the starter and how neglected it was.
Well, think about it. The old starter was very acidic and probably had degraded protein. You go and add some refreshed starter back to it, and probably not at a very high ratio. So this new hybrid starter starts out unusually acidic and still thin from the degraded protein. It sits there in the refrigerator and gets more and more acidic.
Now say you took 10g of that newly refreshed starter and added 50g new flour and 50g new water. Let it ferment for say 3 hours until it's nice and active, but it doesn't have to be fully developed (because it will keep fermenting slowly in the big chill). Put that into the refrigerator. Now you have 110g of low-acidity, happy starter to work with for your next loaf. You can use it as is for the next several days; after that you should refresh it before use.
Sound good?
If you aren't using all white wheat flour, the details and appearance will change but the principle will remain the same.
All makes perfect sense.
Thank you very much indeed.
Enjoy!
Thank you for this Davey,
I'm glad you have confirmed that a high acid starter can still imitate a good starter because that's exactly what happened in this instance and it's good to know because I could have sworn it was nothing to do with the starter because it rose nicely. But from your response and others on here it is apparent not it's not all as it seems in that department sometimes.
I am in the process of refreshing my starter somewhat as you have described and I feel this will eradicate the problem I had with my last batch.
I will come on and report when I do a couple of new loaves this weekend.
Thank you for taking the time to reply,
I confirm nothing - it just seems like it. The finished product says it all in this business. Enjoy!
It's not just about doing the stretching and folding, but also making sure the dough doesn't get overworked. Four rounds of stretching and folding are usually enough, but if the dough starts to become slack and too soft, it's time to skip the next stretch and let it ferment in peace.