Misadventures making enriched sourdough

You know, I’m like, a bread guy. I like to eat bread.

I’ve been trying to get better at making bread, and that entails making a lot of bread. This means I often end up with more bread than I know what to do with (I suppose it could be worse - I could be into pastry!). Of late, I’ve been focusing on sourdough and rustic, country-style loaves - lean bread. I find myself eating said lean bread at least two times a day, and things are getting a bit stale (pardon the pun!). I wanted some enriched ✨ sourdough bread. That’s when I came across My enriched foodbod master recipe sourdough….

I don’t know why, but I decided I’d do a cold-fermented enriched sourdough (things I’d done before, but never all at once - foreshadowing).

Ingredients

• 500g bread flour (100%)
• 50g starter (10%)
• 50g honey (10%)
• 50g butter (10%)
• 50g egg assuming one medium egg (10%)
• 300g milk (60%)
• 5g salt (1%)

Method

• Start mix around 0515
• Finished slap and fold at 0545
• Oiled hands, rounded into a rough ball - dough was pretty smooth for a hand-kneaded dough
• Wrapped bowl in cling wrap
• Cold ferment for 19+ hours

The next day, I woke up and decided I wanted to take a look at it - nothing. Wanting to speed up the process, I decided to let it ferment at room temp for as long as I could, before I went about the rest of my day.

Curious about my dough’s lack of progress, I decided to do some research (I wish I’d stop doing this after the fact).

That’s when I read this quote from an article by Chain Baker on cold fermentation:

This may just be my opinion, but I think that cold bulk fermentation of naturally leavened bread makes no sense. Sourdough takes long to rise anyway and placing it in the fridge for bulk fermentation would extend this step to several days. Perhaps there are good uses for this method in naturally leavened bread, but I cannot think of one.

Reading this paragraph would have saved me from myself. Oh well.

More reading suggested that most sourdough bakers like to opt for a “cold proof” rather than a “cold ferment”. I mean, I suppose this all of this makes sense in retrospect:

• A dough with a low percentage of sourdough is going to take ages to bulk ferment - in my case, 10% starter takes me about 8 hours to bulk ferment, on the counter. Which means that a cold bulk ferment will take much, much longer
• A normal dough can proof in as little as half the time it takes to bulk ferment

So, when baking sourdough, people like to cold proof instead, for several reasons:

1. Because yeast activity slows down, it’s a lot harder for a dough to overproof. It’s more convenient and accommodates different schedules
2. We also get the benefits of cold fermentation - time develops flavour
3. Supposedly, it’s much easier to work with cold dough, because it’s stiffer, which helps with scoring
4. Better oven spring?

Here’s a discussion on Reddit - What’s up with cold proofing?

Anyway, my bread got poofy after about 10+ hours at room temperature. Onward.

Method (cont.)

• Took dough out to BF at 0200
• Dough looked ready at 1200+
• Degas, round into balls. Filled sandwich tin. Started proofing at 1300
• Preheat oven to 175c at 1430
• Baked for 25 minutes covered, 10 minutes uncovered

Final Thoughts

Here’s the final result:

Considering how many things went wrong, I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. It’s a bread with a blistered, flaky crust, and a fluffy crumb. You can’t really taste any sourness, but there’s definitely a little “something extra” that really comes through, especially with the crust.

Closing thoughts:

• Slap and fold for this recipe is fine. Takes about half an hour
• I won’t try to cold ferment sourdough again. Ferment at room temp for 10+ hours (maybe shorter, if dough starts out warm)
• Proof for two hours or so. Even though the dough rose most of the way (80% of pan) after two hours, it still didn’t fill up the pan (it usually does with other doughs of the same weight). I didn’t get those nice, full corners. Will need to use more dough than usual
• Bake at 175c for 25 minutes covered, 10 minutes uncovered. I might try something different the next time
• Unrelated: I’m incredibly pissed off with my baking pan.