Todays bread came out very similar to last weeks. I’m playing with a new technique. Generally, you would add a certain percentage of sourdough to a mix to get it to rise at the rate that you are looking for. For example, most of our sourdough breads are roughly 6-9 hours from the mixer to the oven. I’ve always felt like the best bread was made with the lowest percentage of sourdough starter you can get away with to achieve the timing goals to fit production. Sourdough can be thought of like yeast. The more you add, the faster the process.

I’m pushing my theory to the limit with this bread. Where most of our breads have right around 20% sourdough starter in the final dough, this one has 2%. Pretty much nothing. In a 35 kilo batch, this weeks bread had 235 grams of levain to raise the bread! I mixed it at 6:45pm Wed. night, and loaded it into the oven at 12:00PM Thurs. This is so cool, but it presents some challenges. Fermentation develops bread, but not quite enough. I’ve also decided to make this project even more difficult by not developing the dough at all in the mixing bowl. It gets just enough mixing for incorporation of flour, water, salt and levain. About 90 seconds on first speed, then the slop is pulled out of the bowl. Two of my mixers were watching me last night shaking their heads. I’m pretty sure they didn’t believe this would resemble anything like bread;-)

When I walked into the bakery this morning, I found the same thing as last week, even though I made some tweaks. The dough was perfectly fermented, but was not strong enough! The aroma coming off this bread 11 hrs. after mixing is insane! It needed a “fold”. I gave it the fold and gave it another 1/2 hr. Folding a dough reinvigorates it, and gets it going even more. 30 min. later, I had the strength I was looking for, but now it had fermented more than I’d like!

The bread came out pretty good, but it doesn’t quite have the open hole structure I’d like to see, thanks to the over-fermentation in bulk. Next week, I’ll mix the dough 5degrees cooler, and see if I can hit the fermentation window I’m looking for. The cooler temperature should slow the fermentation just enough to get me where I want to be the next day.