7 Sourdough Mistakes to Avoid by Reading Your Crumb

gluten talk in today's video i will show you seven mistakes that you can spot by looking at your bread's crown the first mistake i see quite often is that you slightly over fermented your dough nailing the fermentation of your sourdough bread is the hardest part you can ferment too little or too much now if your bread is a little flatter than usual you see many tiny pockets of air inside of your crow you don't have an ear that's a sign that you might have pushed the fermentation process just a little bit too far your sardo is a really fascinating symbiosis of different microorganisms you have yeast and you have bacteria yeast pretty much creates the fluffiness the bacteria creates the acidity and the bacteria also starts to break down the gluten that you have inside of your dough so over time you will have less and less gluten and the bacteria also consumes the ethanol the yeast is creating so the longer ferment the more of this gluten is broken down and your dough can no longer hold the structure as well the co2 that's created by the yeast just disperses out of your dough and that's why the dough is relatively flat and you see many tiny pockets of air your dough couldn't contain the gas during the baking process some of the water evaporated but that all evaporated out of your dough so simply try to shorten your fermentation period a little bit and or make your sourdough stutter a little bit more active i'm going to be saying this a couple of times in this video probably but the stiff solder stutter is definitely a game changer to boost the yeast activity of your sourdough a normal sourdough has a hydration of 100 so one part of flour one part of water and the stiff studder has one part of water and half a part of flour in this drier environment the yeast thrives more and this is a really good trick especially if your flour isn't so strong that means your flour doesn't have so much gluten the second mistake severely over fermented your dough is very very flat a flat pancake and i've been there when i started to make sourdough bread that's how most of my breads look like the bacteria has munched away almost all of the gluten no gas can be retained your dough just flattens out during the baking process and you might have noticed this already when you try to flip your dough out of your benetin your dough just floats away it's a very sad moment for many of us bakers regardless though the bread that you're making is probably super delicious think of it as a very mature cheese almost all of the raw flour has been converted by your magical microorganisms i started to use rice flour when i started to bake what you will also notice is that during the shaping process your dough suddenly becomes insanely sticky if everything was good before and now your dough is a really sticky mess then yes you have run into over fermentation issues when i started to bake i would resort to rice flour rice flour is really good at making everything non-sticky even an over fermented dough but normally your dough should never stick to the benetin if you ferment it just right so i try to avoid rice flour now because i feel it masks the issue of course if you're sort of the person that looks for a creative pattern when scoring your dough there's no way around rice flour rice flour is a great trick to fix this issue you have to shorten your fermentation time and or you have to make your sourdough stutter more active you have to activate the yeast part of your starter a little bit more again a stiff starter could be a game changer here or just make sure that you give yourself a regular feedings i also see this happen quite a lot when your sourdough stutter is very new the more you feed your sourdough stutter the better your sourdough stutter is going to become at fermenting flour quick side note if you would like to see a written version of everything that i'm talking about in this video i'm sharing a link in the description to my completely free sourdough red book it's free because i believe information like this is essential to everyone around the world it's not fully completed yet but at the time of making this video the chapter about debugging your crumb structure is already finished so we talked about over fermentation but there's also the other site under fermentation you will notice several very very large pockets of air inside of your dough this is also known as the fool's crumb and you can reproduce this if you're for instance making a pita bread without a leavening agent in your oven it's just going to pop and increase a lot in size and that's because the water starts to evaporate but it's trapped by the gluten matrix the dough expands and creates those super pockets of air if your dough were fully fermented you would have many much smaller cavities inside of your chrome the pockets would be distributed way more evenly so in this case all you want to do is you want to push your fermentation even further try to add 30 minutes try to add an hour two hours when tasting the dough you should also notice that there is not a tang there should be almost no acidity if that's the case yep you definitely under ferment it if your dough is just generally flat but you do have a nice distribution of pockets of air everywhere there are no two big holes that's a sign that you simply didn't create enough those strengths creating those strength is done by kneading your dough this is what aligns the gluten strands you can do this by hand or you can do this in the stand mixer actually just by waiting your gluten matrix is also going to develop but the more you need the stronger this matrix is going to become this creates a very elastic dough that holds together and that's the reason why the dough is not going to stay flat in the oven but it's going to spring upwards this is a quite common problem because you find a recipe on the interwebs and there it says 80 hydration so it's a quite sticky dough for 100 grams of flour you're using 80 grams of water 80 the problem though is that many of the bakers you find on the interwebs are using very expensive high gluten flour the more gluten your flour has the more water your flour can absorb so it's never a good idea to follow a water suggestion from the internet you have to figure this out for your own flour i had to learn this the hard way i would see all those beautiful pictures of bread but my breads were always flat and that's because i live in the germany hi germans we're not known to have the best weather actually i'm looking outside the window right now and it's rainy typical hamburg weather in order for your wheat to produce a lot of gluten you need to have a lot of sun so the average flower that i find at the supermarket doesn't have such a high gluten content i have to use less water for the flower that i find here so the solution need more or reduce the water amount for your flour and please note there is no need to buy expensive flour whatsoever if you have a relatively low gluten flour please try to go to stiff sourdough starter route as well the next point isn't so obvious if you ask me you bake your dough too hot what you notice is you notice several pockets of air towards the crust what happens during the bacon the water evaporates the co2 inside of your dough expands your dough starts to grow this is what's called oven spring now the crust becomes too hot the crust is no longer extensible it can't expand and then the inward of your dose crumb is going to push upwards and all the pockets of air are going to converge into single super pockets and this is typically towards the top part of your crust and i had to learn this the hard way if you bake at a too hot temperature this is likely going to happen to me the ideal temperature is around 230 degrees celsius the first part of the baking process the expansion period is where your dough increases in size the second stage where you remove the steam is where you build the crust color if you're a chaser of that ear on your sourdough and it simply won't open up then this might be the reason you are baking too hot and please i conducted many experiments if your oven shows 230 don't rely on this every oven is unique the best thing you can do is measure the temperature in your oven once quite fascinating isn't it how many things you can just understand by looking at your bread scrub the next point goes into the same direction you use too little steam for the baking process you will notice these large pockets close to your crust the same thing as with a bake too hot you want to keep your red crust at a lower temperature during the first stage of the bake and by steaming it this is exactly what you are achieving if you go too high the maya reaction starts to build a thick crust your dough can no longer expand this is where steam comes into play and this is also how dutch ovens work water evaporates from your dough stays inside of your dutch oven and circulates that creates you all that steam you need especially in a regular home oven i see this happening quite often you're baking too close to the top rack the temperature is too high simply spritzing your dough just a little bit during the baking process isn't enough if you don't have a dutch oven no worries i recommend that you just place an inverted tray on top of your dough the water is going to start to evaporate and then it's going to circle right there if you cannot turn off the fan in your oven the only option you have is to use a dutch oven if your crumb contains a piece of very very gummy dough chances are you under-baked during the baking process all the starches and all the protein start to denaturate the water starts to evaporate if you don't bake for long enough some parts of the dough don't fully go through this conversion process and you will see those large pieces of gummy chunks the best thing you can do to know that your bread though is done baking is to use a thermometer stick that thermometer into your dough the moment the core temperature is at around 92 degrees celsius you know that your bread is done afterwards remove all the sources of steam and then simply finish building a crust the second stage of the baking process can take as long as you like depending on how dark you like the crust now with all this knowledge you are probably a chrome master i asked all of you to submit a couple of pictures and some of you selected the option i have no idea half me please so i'm going to be showing a couple of pictures now and please share in the comment section what you think might be wrong with these particular breads i'm super curious to hear your thoughts if you want to start baking amazing sourdough bread consider buying a little bit of bread pit my sourdough stutter rat pit has been featured in all of my videos and i'm taking it with me wherever i'm traveling too it's the most diverse sourdough stutter out there it's super powerful and strong it's going to create you amazing bread plus you'll also be supporting this random german weirdo if you're interested please check out the description i'm sharing a link right there i'm super curious to hear what's your most common mistake that you do while baking sourdough bread please share it in the comment section thank you so much for watching and i hope you learned something new also big thanks to all the monthly supporters this channel wouldn't be possible without you thank you so much [Music] hahaha

Channel: The Bread Code

Views: 55,865

Keywords: sourdough, sourdough bread, sourdough mistakes, bread mistakes, sourdough crumb, overfermentation, underfermentation, flat sourdough, sourdough sticky, sourdough pancake, sourdough baking, sourdough tips, over fermentation

Id: sFQZIKb_iIA

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2022