March 4, 2007 - 5:45am
Loaves busting out too much, please help!
My loaves keep busting out at the sides. I am;
1. Using organic stone-ground flours, sometimes white, sometimes white/brown mix (2.5kg total flour weight)
2. With a poolish ferment 7-8 hrs before (poolish = half tsp of yeast, 2 tsp of cane sugar, 300g flour, 600ml water)
3. I steam oven well at 250c for 7 mins then drop heat to 150 c for 20 mins, then 200 c for last 10 mins for brown.
4. I slash just before putting in oven. They spring well and get nice volume and a nice crust, but then just bust out at the sides.
What can I try other than;
1. Reducing the initial heat.
2. Reducing the 250c to 3 or 5 mins.
3. Glazing with egg white and/or water.
4. lengthening the proof time.
5. Kneading more/less
Any other pointers
Thanks
Hasan
Share
I just got this figured out over the weekend. I make two sourdough batards at a time, slashing just before baking. I always got the same blowouts on my loaves. I was being too timid in slashing.
This weekend, I made the inital cuts, then went back over them 2 or 3 times to deepen them. Ta-daaaaaaa, no blowouts!
My recipe is pretty different from yours, but I think what matters is giving the dough enough room to expand that it won't pop out the sides of your loaves. Worth a try.
Sue
Thanks for the advice, but it didn't help at all, the loaves continue to bust out at the sides. They look lovely on top but bad on the sides. Any other tricks???
Jalaladdin
I'm new at this but I just read that placing loaves too closely together during baking will cause this to happen.
I was making Nancy Silverton's basic white sourdough and I constantly had the problem of them blowing out on the sides. I was proofing them in a banneton. I decided to let them proof to the point that she said in the book (and what to me would be overproofing) which is that an indentation from the finger remains--and, voila! A beautiful loaf!