S U N D A Y S O U R D O U G H

Been a while since I baked, been a while since I wrote anything. I went into a bit of a tailspin after the inauguration and did a bit of science policy writing, before sinking deep into a labwork rabbit hole, which is where I've been since late March. Overnights doing chemistry; a few intensive mass spec days; no time for baking.

But now we're back!

I had a few weeks of pretty crappy bakes, tbh. I pulled my starter out of the fridge sometime mid-April; it had languished there, shoved behind yogurt cartons, for at least a month and a half without any attention. I got home from three nights at the lab on a Wednesday; fed it Thursday and Friday; and made a levain Friday evening. The bread that came out was...let's just say it was lackluster. It was slack, floppy, impossible to shape, impossible to score, and generally unattractive. But as always, it tasted good, so I was ready to get back to trying.

I topped off lil starter buddy and put him back in the fridge until the following Thursday, when I basically did the same thing. Let me also note that I was hydrating the crap out of my dough--I think I was up at ~85%, by accident one of the times and intentionally the next, because my instinctive response to failure is to try harder with the same variables in play, assuming that it's some error on my part that's causing the problem. I thought the problem here was shaping technique, so I watched a ton of YouTube videos and came back at my sloppy dough with new strategies in hand. Turns out you can't shape your way past dough that has no structure--or at least, I can't.

It was clearly time for some calm, measured, science-y variable isolation. Several factors could contribute to floppy, weak dough: a) overhydration, e.g. introducing more water than the flour can absorb, b) underdevelopment of gluten during bulk, most likely caused by poor turns/not enough turns (or not autolysing the flour for long enough), or c) overfermenting the whole mess.

A) seemed pretty likely, but I didn't really want to admit it. I've baked 85% hydration breads before and they came out fine! But the doughs from these last few bakes looked slack even a turn or two into the bulk, and my flour was at least a few months old. Swallow your pride here, Ale, and pull back on hydration until further notice.

B) didn't seem right. If anything, I've been turning too aggressively, trying to fix the weakness in the dough via manual manipulation rather than chemistry. I've been turning ~16-20 times, 3-4 times during bulk, and while the dough smooths out nicely, it never feels like it's getting strong. I hadn't felt it seize up and resist a turn at any point. Also, I'd been autolysing for at least an hour.

C) ....maybe there was something here. I've been following the Tartine/Perfect Loaf timings pretty closely, bulk fermenting for about 4 hours, shaping and resting for 30-40 minutes, and then proofing for another ~4 hours on the counter or overnight in the fridge (my fridge proofs always looked pretty tight, though, so I've generally pulled them out and put them on the counter while the oven preheats, adding an extra 1-2 hours of counter time. Our kitchen is generally around 68F).

At the end of bulk, the dough surface is always shiny and quite bubbly, and has risen ~25% above the initial volume. At the end of my final proof, the dough looks jiggly and soft, and pillows up roughly ~30% beyond it's initially-shaped volume.

I read, and I thought, and I looked at a LOT of pictures of other people's dough on the internet, and I decided that a) and c) were both probably major contributors to my failures. Maybe my starter is a lot more active than I think it is, because it's running through the dough way faster than it should, given the temperature of our kitchen and the times involved.

SO: in this weekend's bakes, I acted like a bad scientist and changed two and a half variables at once. I pulled the hydration back to just over 76%, and I decided to finish the bulk fermentation in the fridge to both firm up the dough for shaping and to slow down the starter's activity. Then, I decided to overnight proof in the fridge and to forgo the counter finish. I think I've been pretty consistently overproofing, waiting for that jiggly, bubbly look (which I assumed was right because it was what my dough looked like after the allotted times in basically every recipe I've ever seen). I wish I had pictures, but I don't. Sorry.

I'll work on nailing things down a bit more over the coming weeks. Here's the final recipe, very lightly adapted from The Perfect Loaf's Beginner's Sourdough:

LEVAIN:
start @ 9AM

• 40g starter
• 80g Tartine flour mix (half whole wheat, half white AP flour)
• 80g water (I'm not precious about the temp here)