After that last bake (with the apparent over-proving) I HAD to do another.
The first part of my hypothesis was a potentially weak starter due to sub-par flour. The second part was about the strength I built in shaping. What I didn’t include was the overall time in bulk fermenting nor the time on-counter resting.
There are a LOT of variables!!
My starter rose just fine after feeding (>2X). My time letting the levain rise (yet another variable) was shorter. Mostly this was due to when I started the whole process and I was wanting to get to bed by the time I needed to mix in the levain and then salt.
I bulk fermented for 24 hours as usual. The dough didn’t seem to have risen as much so I was a bit skeptical about how it might do in the final bake.
For some reason I decided to mess with my experiment by adding additional variables by lamination and adding inclusions.
Why not?!!
Shaped as best I could and got them into the bannetons.
Altered (yet again) another variable because I was impatient and just covered the bannetons with a towel and decided to bake them later in the evening since my oven had already been used for dinner.
Overall, they came out quite nicely. The Turmeric loaf has all the attributes I had been hoping for in terms of shape, bloom, ear development etc. The cheddar-jalapeño did well to and wasn’t off from what I expected given the moisture in the cheese and jalapeños.
So much for recreation of my conditions that might have led to my previous results. At least I proved them a bit less (overall) and tried better to shape and score.
At least I’ve two additional tasty loaves on which to chew on as I ponder what to do next…
Baked By Bear Sourdough 