This week’s bread was a pretty standard setup, but it went sideways since I overproofed it, again. I’ve been on a bad run over overproofing my doughs, so this was yet another opportunity to try and rescue the final product.
I mixed the dough before breakfast with my standard 4-3-1-.1+~30% ratio
400g flour
300g water
100g starter (the usual 50/50 mix)
10g salt
60g rehydrated figs
60g chia seeds soaked in 90g water
So far so good, and the autolyse and the folds all went as planned. However we had some friends drop by the house and the kids ran around the house all afternoon. They didn’t stay for dinner, but the next thing you know its 5pm and the dough was already well overproofed.
I tried to rescue it by adding 200g flour and 100g water, but after an hour it was still really slack. So I kneaded in in another 100g flour, which helped a bit, but still was not feeling right. After another hour I kneaded in another 100g of flour and waited. At 9pm, I preheated the oven to 480f, dumped out the dough, preshaped, cut, reshaped, and then threw them into the dutch ovens and baked. I made one additional mistake, I forgot to lower my temperature to 420f when I took off the lids, which meant the loaves ended up pretty dark. I like the heavier toasted flavors of the crust, but it makes for hard cutting.
Even though the loaves did not have an impressive rise, but the crumb was still moist and avoided being completely rock hard dense, so it was not a total failure. In the future, when I try to rescue a loaf, I think I’ll just add flour without water. And I think I’m going to change my standard baking process to just keep it at an even 450f throughout, instead of starting at 480f and then lowering it to 420f midway like I’ve been doing for the past month.
When I first started baking, I made a slew of overproofed doughs and had no idea how to save them. After the successful salvage a couple weeks ago, when I didn’t only just add flour but also really kneaded the dough, it seems that I now have a way to save overproofed doughs. Ultimately I’d still prefer to avoid having to practice this fallback process too often.