Troubleshooting Bread Volume?
Hi all,
I've been trying to troubleshoot some issues with bread volume that I have been experiencing. I have been mostly making the Ken Forkish Overnight White and White Poolish breads. I've been baking at least once a week for maybe 8 months using these recipes fairly exclusively. I find that my bread volume is fairly inconsistent at the end of the bake. Sometimes I achieve breads that have a wonderful seam or set of seams that give the appearance that the bread had a wonderful and powerful final oven spring. Recently, however, I've found that I routinely produce bread that just barely has any cracks along the surface.
SHAREitI always use bannetons for proofing, and when I take the boule out of the banneton to transfer the dough to the dutch oven I find that it holds its shape very poorly. It rapidly relaxes from the shape of the banneton into a much more relaxed shape. My suspicion is that this should be a good indicator that I'm doing something wrong.
I have a few thoughts about what could be awry here. First, my thought is that I may be doing a poor job shaping the loaves prior to proofing them. Perhaps I'm over-shaping the dough? Or under-shaping the dough? Second, I wonder if I'm possibly over-proofing the dougAppvnh. I'm very attentive to the dough at this stage of the bake and I almost never experience a failed poke-test (where the dough doesn't spring back at all).
So with that, does anybody have any ideas or suggestions? I love to bake bread, so I'm just looking for ideas to help hone my experimentation as I improve my technique and eye to detail.
Dough that won’t stand up sounds like an over-proof to me. Have occasionally seen when I held dough too long (6 days!) In fridge or when I went out on an errand and let my bulk go for 5-6 hours.
Because I generally make a 3-4 loaf (~3 kg) batch of dough, I’ve lately been bulk fermenting to only a 25-30% volume increase before moving to fridge. Since the dough mass takes quite a while to chill, I generally see another 50%+ volume increase in first 12 hours. Not exactly analogous to your situation but the limp dough sure sounds overdone.
Do you bulk for some specified time? Maybe experiment with shortening that by 10-25% at a time until you get a better result? BF ambient temps may have significant impacts, so you may need additional adjustments On any given day...
with every mistake you must surely be learning....
Phil