Sourdough Scheduling Problems

Scheduling Problems with letting dough rise overnight or all day in the frig

A Suggested Schedule:

• Thursday: Take starter out of fridge after work, let ferment for a few hours and refresh at night
• Friday: Refresh starter in morning before work. Feed again at night before bed
• Saturday: Build the levain early in morning. (Refresh starter and let ferment all day until night - to place in frig later for future starter). Mix dough in afternoon, bulk ferment in afternoon/ evening. Shape dough and place proofing baskets in fridge overnight. At night make sourdough pancake batter and refresh starter before placing it into the fridge
  • Make the dough. Leave on the counter to bulk rise [bulk ferment] at room temperature. In the summer, if your dough rises quickly and you’re not ready to bake, cover the whole bowl with lightly oiled wrap and chill until ready to use. Let rest in a warm spot to rise. The dough is ready when it no longer looks dense and has doubled in size. This can take anywhere from 3-12 hours depending on the temperature of your ingredients, the potency of your starter and surrounding environment. For example, in the summer rise times can take anywhere between 3-4 hours @ 85 F whereas in the winter, the dough will take about 10-12 hours @ 68 F.
    
    
  • Cut and shape the dough. Now the dough needs to rise again, but for a shorter period of time. Place the dough inside the bowl for a second shorter rise, about 30 minutes to 1 hour and cover with a very damp cloth. The dough is ready when it is slightly puffy but not double in size. Alternatively, shape the loaf in the evening and place it in the refrigerator overnight to bake in the morning.
• Sunday: Make pancakes in the morning. Preheat oven for 1 hour. Bake loaves in the late morning. Starter is in the fridge resting.

Another Suggested Schedule:

• Day One: Make levain before bed (9pm-ish)
• Day Two: Mix dough in morning (7am-ish), shape and cold-proof around noon (12pm-ish)
• Day Three: Bake loaves in morning (7am-ish, until about 10am-ish)

My Bread

• No-knead sourdough bread (May 2021)
• Starter collapsed overnight and took 4 hours to double the next day (so one of my problems is getting my starter ripe, without collapsing, at the time I want to make the Levain).
• Mixed the dough with all my starter (twice the amout in the recipe - I have since found out this is not a good idea as it reduces the ferment time when it is building structure an flavor) and did 3 folds in first hour. After a total of 3 1/2 hour bulk ferment, dough looked ready to do the last folds. The dough was jiggly and bubbly
• After doing the last folds, placed in bowl on parchment with cornmeal. Sprinkled with sesame seeds and placed in frig while I preheated the oven (sesame seeds stick better if wait to add when putting the bread in the oven. Brush the dough with water, sprinkle on the sesame seeds slash and bake.)
• Baked about 8:45 in the evening. Sprinkled water on the bread and put it in the oven for 20 minutes with the cover on and about 20 minutes with the cover off, turning the Dutch oven after 10 minutes to get even browning

Problems:

Some critical success factors here are having a consistent starter if you are a sourdough baker, weighing your ingredients, tracking and controlling your temperatures, and monitoring your rise times. Tracking all that stuff will help you repeat a triumph and avoid repeating a disaster.

The main tools you have to control the rise time of your dough are the amount of riser, the temperature of the dough and the rising area, the density of the dough and altering the bread making process. Another tool of the trade is common sense. If a bread usually rises in an hour, it's not a good candidate for a long term rise, you're just fighting the process. If a bread usually takes 4 or more hours, then the formula is already doing a lot of the work for you. 

Next there is the proofing area temperature. You can reduce or elevate the rising temperature for any rise of the dough. When retarding in bulk for 12-18 hours the dough will benefit from being down around 45-48 degrees. It can be divided and pre-shaped (if applicable) right out of the retarder. The dough should probably be rested a little longer than normal after pre-shaping as it's going to take a while for the dough to come up to temp, but it can be shaped and final proofed just the same as a regular dough. Three to four hours may elapse between removing from the retarder through divide and shape and proof and until out of the oven. Yeast can start at 1.2 percent for this method.

Next, there is temperature. While dough really likes to be about 78F/25C, lowering the temperature will extend the rise time and raising it will shorten the rise time. However, if you raise the temperature much above 95F/35C, you risk off tastes in the bread. Above 110F/43C or so and you risk killing the riser. If your oven has a bread proofing setting, resist the urge to use it; the temperature is likely to be too hot for the long, slow fermentation sourdough requires.

Next, the more liquid a dough is, the faster it will rise, all things being equal. Of course, if you are trying to make a specific style of bread, the amount of water in the dough can be a very important part of getting the bread "right". Still, for many breads you can change the hydration by 5 to 10% and still make a good bread, even if it isn't quite right.

After bulk ferment overnight:

• If the dough collapsed, next time you need to:
  • use less riser
  • make the dough a bit thicker (less water or more flour)
  • cool the dough by using cooler water
  • and/or cool the rising area.
• If the dough wasn't fully risen, next time you need to:
  • use more riser
  • make the dough a bit thinner (more water or less flour)
  • warm the dough by using warmer water to mix it and warm water to do stretch and folds
  • and/or warm the rising area

After shaping the loaves and refrigerating (for instance, while at work):

• If your loaves haven't risen enough:
  • put them in a warmer location to help them rise a little more quickly
  • and take steps to help them rise more quickly next time
• If your loaves have collapsed:
  • you may not be able to salvage them Your best bet is to knead the dough, re-loaf the dough and let rise again. Many bakers suggest either discarding it or dividing it into small amount, freezing it, and adding it to future batches of bread as old dough.

Controling the Amount of Riser

You can control the amount of riser over a very wide range. Less riser will lead to a slower rise, more riser will lead to a faster rise. However, if you use too much riser, your dough can over-rise and self-destruct. In general, the longer the rise the better the bread will taste. However, longer rises do tend to increase the "sour" in sourdough, which may not be desirable depending on the bread you are making and your taste. I'd suggest keeping the amount of starter between 10 and 40% as a baker's percentage. And, of course, I'd suggest using an active starter.

Avoiding Over-Fermentation

• One key characteristic of over-fermented dough is a loose, almost runny consistency. The best way to test this is with the finger dent test: gently poke your index finger into the dough in your proofing basket, about an inch deep. If the dough pops right back out and the dent disappears, it’s actually under-fermented. If it stays indented completely, it’s over-fermented. If it slowly tries to return to normal but stays slightly dented, it’s perfect and ready for baking.
• Reduce the folding time. If you usually do four folds in two hours, try doing four folds in 90 minutes, or even 60. The dough will have the same number of folds and therefore strength, but the total time is reduced which is what will help with the over-fementation problem.
• Reduce the bulk rest time. If you usually leave your dough alone for two hours after your folds are completed, try reducing that total time to one hour. Like step one, this will reduce the risk of over-fermentation.
• Cold proof in the fridge. If you usually proof your bread at room temperature, you’ll absolutely want to start cold-proofing in the fridge. Don’t proof longer than 18 hours if you’re worried about over-fermentation.
• Finally, bake directly from the fridge. Some bakers let their dough come to room temperature before baking, but this encourages further fermentation and, in a hot kitchen, could be the tipping point between perfectly fermented and over-fermented. Once your oven and baking vessel are preheated, pull the dough from the fridge, score it, and slide it right into the oven.

Problems Scoring a Very Wet Dough

• So the key with wet dough is to proof in the fridge over night 12 hours or so depending on your fridge temp. You might want to adjust your fridge temp but you might ruin other food. usually fridge temp is way too low for any yeast activity. Cold dough stiffens and it becomes 100000 million times easier to score. Some people put oil on the blade. This is one of the advantages of refrigerating your shaped loaf overnight. Even after a 45-minute rest at room temperature the loaf will likely feel firm and less delicate than a loaf that's been allowed to rise at warmer temperatures.
• Video of a man scoring extremely wet dough, and he did it with scissors. He held the scissors over the dough and made a quick snip. The scores he was making didn't look big, but they looked right. I am going to try this next time.
• High hydration doughs require a more severe angle than lower hydration doughs, with the object being to create a "flap" of dough rather than split the dough by carving deep down into it.
• The 'gluten cloak' is a network of oriented gluten molecules near the surface of the loaf which provide structural stability. If a loaf is properly shaped, its surface gets stretched, which results in the gluten molecules aligning. So, even though a perfectly mixed dough behaves like a liquid in that it will conform to the shape of its container, it is not a perfect liquid because of the behavior of the gluten molecules. We can take advantage of this imperfection with proper shaping technique, which slows down the dough's propensity to yield to gravity.
• Whatever container you are proofing in could be coated in rice flour to promote development of something like a firm skin around the surface of your bread. Something that I think gets overlooked about coating your bread in flour is that you can gently and quickly scrape most of it off with a knife just before spraying your loaf with water and scoring it. With high hydration, a little overproofing and a good scoring can lead to a bread that expands outward instead of upward, so you gotta watch how long you let it sit.

How to Get a Crunchy Crust

• You could try is to spritz the dough with water right before putting it in the oven. This creates little water droplets on the surface that evaporate quickly, leaving behind beautiful blisters. You may find that it increases the crunchiness of your crust as well.

Tips for an Open Crumb (i.e., large holes in the finished loaf)

• Generally the higher the hydration (amount of liquid in the dough compared to flour), the more open the crumb – think ciabatta. However, sourdough's acidity tightens the dough's gluten, making it more difficult for large holes to form. Thus, kneading it less will keep the dough relatively relaxed, encouraging that sought-for open crumb.
• Another factor affecting the crumb is the protein content of the flour. In general, if you're looking for a more open crumb in your bread, unbleached all-purpose flour is a better choice than unbleached bread flour, since the higher protein content of the bread flour will tend to give you a stronger dough, which often leads to a tighter crumb structure.
• Finally, the way you shape and handle the bread also has a big effect on crumb, as does the final rising of the shaped loaf and the baking method you use.

Gluten Development & Oven Spring

• Shaping: Essential for good oven spring, shaping happens after the bench rest is completed. The baker uses firm but gentle hands to create surface tension on the dough, sometimes using a bench knife to assist the shaping process.
• Myth. You MUST knead bread for the gluten to develop. You can - but it’s not always necessary! If given enough time, bread dough will naturally form the gluten strands that provide structure to a loaf and trap yeast gases while it rises. By “enough time,” I mean between 12 and 24 hours. You don’t really want to go much longer than that. Instead, many bakers use what is called the “stretch and fold” method to redistribute the yeast and gluten at several points during the long rise. When bakers want to let the dough rise for a long time, they cut out most of the yeast, from the typical 2 teaspoons that come in a yeast packet, to one teaspoon or less. That way the yeast will take more time eating up the sugars and release gas more slowly.

Getting Better Flavored Bread

• Cold-proofing: Once the dough is shaped and in its proofing baskets, it goes immediately into the fridge for cold-proofing. The low temperature of the refrigerator slows fermentation, allowing for deeper flavor development without the risk of over-fermenting the dough. I recommend a cold-proof of 18-24 hours, but no longer.
• If you prefer a more mildly flavored loaf, let the dough rise in the brotform or bowl at room temperature, covered with plastic wrap so it doesn't dry out.
• One way to add more sour flavor to your bread is to be sure the dough has a small percentage of whole wheat flour or whole rye flour. Whole grain flours ferment more quickly and tends to intensify the sour flavor in sourdough bread recipes. If your favorite sourdough recipe doesn't already call for whole grains, try substituting 10-15% whole grain flour for a portion of the flour in the dough portion of the recipe.