Avoid those who don’t like bread and children - Swiss Proverb
The crumb on this dough looked much better than the first two, but the seam was wonky, and I sadly (spoiler alert) will not begin to try and remedy this particular sin until loaf five, but please bear with me. By now I have a good idea of how the levain should look before I add it, tons of bubbled on top, really sloppy when you shake it. I mixed the dough, folded every 30 minutes four times, and let the bulk proof go until it looked right (roughly eight hours but I stopped counting), I have a west facing window that gets great sun and decided to leave the cambro (opaque) in the sun with a towel on top, whether this helped or not, I’m not sure, but I got a better bulk prove. Again I did the final proof in the fridge overnight, pulled the dough out of the cambro by hand, let it sit in a glass bowl to return to room temperature, at which point I again pulled it from the glass bowl by hand, I imagine I knocked a good bit of air out of the dough by all this abuse, gave it a fold, haphazardly scored it, and baked it. Again the oven was at 500 with the dutch oven and a baking steel inside for 30 minutes, I put the dough in the dutch oven again on top of the baking steel and baked for 20 minutes with the top on and 20 minutes wit the top off.
The bread tasted better, it felt more like sourdough and less like bread. I’m reading through Flour Water Salt Yeast and Forkish talks about baking his bread “brown” so I decided next time I want to increase the baking time to see what that does. Forkish also talks about his belief in the auto-lyse (pronounced auto lease, mixing the water and flour before adding the levain) so I will be employing that technique next time.
Dough
565 g bread flour
85 g whole wheat
420 g h2o
10 g salt
Levain
10 g starter
50 g bread flour
50 g h2o
What I did right:
I ran the bulk proof longer.
What I did wrong:
I still need to increase the bake time and the bulk proof. Both are rather important it seems.
What I learned:
Baking steel is quite helpful for bringing up and maintaining the heat of the oven.