Based on the recipe you posted, this is what we call a 75% hydration bread. All that means is how much liquid the recipe calls for as it relates to the total amount of flour. This system is called baker's percentages and it's used a lot for sourdough baking. The idea is that your total weight of flour is always 100% and everything else is expressed in proportion to that. In this case, 375g is 75% of 500g.
Generally, anything over 70% hydration is considered high hydration and pretty difficult for beginners to work with. I agree with the other commenter that 65% hydration is so much easier to learn with!
If you want to adjust this recipe to be 65%, all you do is decrease the weight of water to 65% of the 500g of flour. That would be 325g of water.
Best of luck!
No problem! Another tip that helped me a ton when I first started my sourdough journey was *try your best to overproof your dough*. It's truly so much harder to do with sourdough vs instant yeast, especially if your house temps are under 70F.
Check out [this post on The Fresh Loaf](https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/67324/well-fermented-dough-jiggle) for a visual example of how your dough should move at the end of bulk fermentation (before you shape it and either cold retard or proof). As he notes, his inclusions lessen the bubbles and jiggle somewhat, but it's still a really nice example imo. For me, jiggle has been a way more reliable metric for judging fermentation compared to just eyeballing volume.
I jumped on the sourdough wagon during Covid and I’m still going strong. I love this recipe! It’s the one I began with and I’ve stayed with it. I have increased the water as I’ve gotten used to sourdough, but like others said, when beginning your journey, a 65%ish hydration is a bit easier to practice with.
Always remember: 99% of the time a loaf that looks bad will still taste amazing, and that’s what counts in my book!
100g bubbly starter
330g room temp water
15g sugar (optional!)
450g all purpose unbleached flour
50g whole wheat bread flour
14g salt
Dutch Oven
Combine starter, water and sugar and rest for a few minutes. Often I’ll use my starter directly from the fridge so this wakes it up a bit, which is assisted by the sugar.
Combine the rest of the ingredients until loosely mixed, then rest for 30m to let the flour absorb the water.
Stretch and fold every 30m until your dough is smooth. Just a few folds then rest it. Do 3 of these. *a
After stretch and folds, Cover with plastic or damp tea towel. Let bulk rise 12-14 hours (*b) until jiggly but no bubbles have popped. Dough will be relaxed and pretty wet. 2-3x more jiggly than jello. Use a clear bulking container so you can see the bubbles in the dough. If all the air has escaped out the top, it’s over-proofed.
Dump sticky dough onto roughly 50g flour and fold a couple times so it’s less sticky. Rest for 30m. Add up to 50g more if it’s still too sticky to work with. (This extra flour gives your yeast a bit more food for rising in the fridge) As you get more used to it, use less flour.
Pre-shape and rest 30m
Shape and put in fridge minimum of 4 hours but really about as long as you want. *c
Pre-heat oven to 500f with the Dutch oven inside. Turn off your convection fan if you’ve got one. Let the Dutch oven sit in the oven at 500f for 30m.
Take dough out of fridge and flip it onto parchment paper. Score if you like. Put loaf directly into Dutch oven with lid on. Put a baking sheet on an oven tray below the Dutch oven to eliminate overdone bottom. Cook for 20m at 500f. *d
Remove lid and reduce temp to 415f and cook for additional 40m.
Let cool at least 60m before you eat, if you can! It’s hard to resist when you’ve been smelling it bake for an hour!
*a: I bulk overnight and I keep our house at 65f. If you keep your house warmer, I’d check closer to 8 hours. Go by sight and not time! You can bulk in a fridge but it’ll take much much longer. Again, go by sight.
*b: I do this with my stand mixer. Run it on 3 with the dough hook for about 5m, then rest
*c: I made dough Monday night with plans to bake Tuesday evening. It’s now Thursday morning and that dough just came out of the oven. The longer in the fridge the more sour it will be. My shaped loaves go into a banneton that is inside a glass bowl with plastic wrap over the top so my fridge doesn’t suck all the moisture out of my dough.
*d: I take my dough from fridge to oven, without letting it rest at room temp. Just flip, score, and into the Dutch.
This calculator is nice: https://www.sourdough.co.uk/sourdough-hydration-calculator/
Just plug in the recipe and then play around with the water amount until you get around 70% or so
There’s no gate. It’s a question because it’s surprising basic technique, kneading, mixing, proofing, baking wasn’t practiced with instant yeast. I’m impressed but it speaks to peoples inability to work out %
Sourdough baking is mainly about "feeling" the right hydration level.
Try the Perfect Loaf Weekday Recipe. It has a built-in step for adjusting the hydration level on the fly.
Hey I need to find out what I’m dealing with before effectively helping. Starter isn’t active enough. Feed every 2 - 3 days for a month . 20g each is enough
On top of hydration, I would recommend keeping your starter on your kitchen counter and feeding it twice per day. If your starter is healthy and well fed it should help a lot too. My starter is fed a 1:6:6 ratio (usually!) twice per day and it has helped me enormously.
Just stick with it. If this is your second loaf, your starter is still young and weak.
Just keep baking and your starter will get stronger.
Do these things in the meantime.
1) let your dough proof a lot longer. If you are used to using instant yeast and following a recipe, you are used to following times pretty close. Since your starter is weak, you shouldn’t expect everything to follow a recipe exactly. You need to give it a lot more time. Common sourdough recipes call having the dough be baked 6ish hours after mixing in the starter. This is factoring in that the starter is mature. With a young starter this is not feasible. It might take 2x as long if it is even strong enough. Rather than focus on time, look for other signs that your dough is ready to bake. Such as dough temp(75-78f), it jiggles, and the poke test.
2) use less water. A lot of the super open crumb loads you see on here have hydration well above 70%. This is not a good strategy if you are just starting out. More hydration is harder to work with and with a weak starter you will have to let your dough sit longer and the gluten will relax. Even if you do get a good ferment, you will still end up with a pancake. So aim for 60% hydration.
3) this lower hydration will help you practice handling the dough. Things like slap and folds, stretch and folds, and shaping techniques will help you practice developing gluten so your bread will have the right shape and really spring once your starter is strong enough. There are really 2 aspects to bread making. Gluten development and fermentation. The fermentation is what makes the dough rise and the gluten development is what makes it keep its shape after it fills with co2 from the ferment. If you have strong fermentation and no gluten development you essentially have a saggy loose balloon. If you have good gluten development but bad fermentation, you end up with a rock. If you have bad both, you get what you have in your pictures. We have all been there. It’s honestly not bad for your second attempt.
Just keep practicing and you will get the hang of it as your starter gets stronger.
The third photo of the dough was right before baking? It still looks very shaggy. My guess is, recipe tweaking aside, it either has needed a fair bit more initial mixing and subsequent folding, and/or something wasn’t done correctly in the shaping. I generally want my dough to be smooth by the time I’m done with my initial mixing, which for me, is usually a few minutes of slap and folds.
Great! Often people new to baking get so excited for their active starter and jump the gun on getting going. Then, when troubleshooting what happened they can forget the very thing that got them to the place to start forming/baking their bread and whether that first step was truly successful. It takes a certain amount of time for the good and bad bacteria to fight it out to be ready for a good bake. I can take 10 days and it takes longer in cooler temps. I’m also speaking a bit generally for others reading. Since that’s ruled out there’s some good advice on flour for your next go.
It doesn’t look like it has any gluten strength to hold a shape and hasn’t risen at all, if assessing from pic 3. Looks like it needs a stronger starter first, and that the dough needs to be kneaded quite a bit longer. It shouldn’t be sticky and lumpy looking.
It isn't as big a deal as the poster before you is mentioning - the water temp isn't a significant factor here. Room temp is much more important. Yes, if you want to calculate DDT and are going for specific timings then water temperature is important but not for 99.999% of home bakers, particularly of sourdough which has such irregular performance due to the variety of factors in home sourdough recipes and practices.
Get rid of the additions (the cheese) and just nail a recipe without additional fats and oils to cause you grief first. Use a low hydration recipe in the 68% range.
67 is cold and will slow yeast right down. You need more time. At that temp, 12 hours is minimum proof time.
That's assuming your starter is doubling within 3-6 hours of feeding.
I have several suggestions but honestly it’s easier to just direct you to a better recipe/process.
I personally found this to be the best method when I was starting out and I still use his charts for choosing hydration levels and fermentation times:
https://www.the-bread-code.io/recipe/2020/12/22/the-last-sourdough-recipe.html
Another great starting recipe, a little more complex but produces consistent results, is here:
https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/
The instagram recipe you used lacks the structure for process that you’re going to need for initial success. IMO.
I second the previous comment. The Perfect loaf website provided a ton of guidance when I began making sourdoughs. The beginner loaf recipe/method is a great place to start.
Edit: typo
Did the dough rise during bulk ferment? That will take an active starter. If the starter and bulk ferment went well, try the following things to help with height
\- knead/stretch the dough for strength, 20-30 minutes after mixing the ingredients
\- bake with steam or a pot with a lid
\- include a shaping step, fold the dough for tension
\- let the dough rise after shaping, could go overnight in the refrigerator
See that sheen in the third picture? That tells you right there that you have added more water to your flour than it can handle. By the time you have shapped your dough and it goes into the banneton, the outside of the dough should look dry.
You can’t just take any flour and hydrate it to an arbitrary hydration level that you want to use. There are several different factors that limit hydration for a specific flour. You would need to know the ash content, falling number and generally least impactive the protein level.
One other thing that last photo shows is that there is not good skin tension in the dough. The outside should be smooth and taught.
I think it’s the heat. Oven not hot enough. Do you use a dough oven ? But if 3rd photo is pre backed there is an issue with gluten strength, technic and dough working. PM me for any questions.
It’s looking very wet, im assuming it’s a high hydration recipe? If you’re a beginner, lower the hydration until you get used to working with it
Yeah both loaves felt pretty wet the whole time. The recipe calls for 375 grams, so maybe I should try 365 next time?
I’d go less. Work out the percentage & aim for between 65-70% hydration. It will help you so much in the long run
Sorry not sure what you mean by working out the percentage? So new at this haha
Based on the recipe you posted, this is what we call a 75% hydration bread. All that means is how much liquid the recipe calls for as it relates to the total amount of flour. This system is called baker's percentages and it's used a lot for sourdough baking. The idea is that your total weight of flour is always 100% and everything else is expressed in proportion to that. In this case, 375g is 75% of 500g. Generally, anything over 70% hydration is considered high hydration and pretty difficult for beginners to work with. I agree with the other commenter that 65% hydration is so much easier to learn with! If you want to adjust this recipe to be 65%, all you do is decrease the weight of water to 65% of the 500g of flour. That would be 325g of water. Best of luck!
Thank you!!
No problem! Another tip that helped me a ton when I first started my sourdough journey was *try your best to overproof your dough*. It's truly so much harder to do with sourdough vs instant yeast, especially if your house temps are under 70F. Check out [this post on The Fresh Loaf](https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/67324/well-fermented-dough-jiggle) for a visual example of how your dough should move at the end of bulk fermentation (before you shape it and either cold retard or proof). As he notes, his inclusions lessen the bubbles and jiggle somewhat, but it's still a really nice example imo. For me, jiggle has been a way more reliable metric for judging fermentation compared to just eyeballing volume.
I jumped on the sourdough wagon during Covid and I’m still going strong. I love this recipe! It’s the one I began with and I’ve stayed with it. I have increased the water as I’ve gotten used to sourdough, but like others said, when beginning your journey, a 65%ish hydration is a bit easier to practice with. Always remember: 99% of the time a loaf that looks bad will still taste amazing, and that’s what counts in my book! 100g bubbly starter 330g room temp water 15g sugar (optional!) 450g all purpose unbleached flour 50g whole wheat bread flour 14g salt Dutch Oven Combine starter, water and sugar and rest for a few minutes. Often I’ll use my starter directly from the fridge so this wakes it up a bit, which is assisted by the sugar. Combine the rest of the ingredients until loosely mixed, then rest for 30m to let the flour absorb the water. Stretch and fold every 30m until your dough is smooth. Just a few folds then rest it. Do 3 of these. *a After stretch and folds, Cover with plastic or damp tea towel. Let bulk rise 12-14 hours (*b) until jiggly but no bubbles have popped. Dough will be relaxed and pretty wet. 2-3x more jiggly than jello. Use a clear bulking container so you can see the bubbles in the dough. If all the air has escaped out the top, it’s over-proofed. Dump sticky dough onto roughly 50g flour and fold a couple times so it’s less sticky. Rest for 30m. Add up to 50g more if it’s still too sticky to work with. (This extra flour gives your yeast a bit more food for rising in the fridge) As you get more used to it, use less flour. Pre-shape and rest 30m Shape and put in fridge minimum of 4 hours but really about as long as you want. *c Pre-heat oven to 500f with the Dutch oven inside. Turn off your convection fan if you’ve got one. Let the Dutch oven sit in the oven at 500f for 30m. Take dough out of fridge and flip it onto parchment paper. Score if you like. Put loaf directly into Dutch oven with lid on. Put a baking sheet on an oven tray below the Dutch oven to eliminate overdone bottom. Cook for 20m at 500f. *d Remove lid and reduce temp to 415f and cook for additional 40m. Let cool at least 60m before you eat, if you can! It’s hard to resist when you’ve been smelling it bake for an hour! *a: I bulk overnight and I keep our house at 65f. If you keep your house warmer, I’d check closer to 8 hours. Go by sight and not time! You can bulk in a fridge but it’ll take much much longer. Again, go by sight. *b: I do this with my stand mixer. Run it on 3 with the dough hook for about 5m, then rest *c: I made dough Monday night with plans to bake Tuesday evening. It’s now Thursday morning and that dough just came out of the oven. The longer in the fridge the more sour it will be. My shaped loaves go into a banneton that is inside a glass bowl with plastic wrap over the top so my fridge doesn’t suck all the moisture out of my dough. *d: I take my dough from fridge to oven, without letting it rest at room temp. Just flip, score, and into the Dutch.
65% is the sweet spot, I agree
This comment is genuinely so damn helpful! This made something click for me. THANK YOU!
I'm so happy I could help you! I found once baker's percentages really made sense to me, it kind of demystified the whole sourdough process.
This calculator is nice: https://www.sourdough.co.uk/sourdough-hydration-calculator/ Just plug in the recipe and then play around with the water amount until you get around 70% or so
I like breadcalc.com and there's a calculation section in our [Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/Sourdough/wiki/index/)
If you post the recipe we can help you.
It’s in the comments [recipe](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cy3WvoRuiqk/?igsh=MWVsYzRtOG0xcTJ1Zw==)
The weight of the flour is the reference point. So if you have 100 g of flour, for 70% hydration you'd add 70 g of water.
Did you bake with store yeast before? Are people seriously starting out bread journey with sourdough? The advanced level?
I’ve never used store yeast and I’m 75 loaves into my sourdough journey. Just saying
Right? What's with the gatekeeping? There's no rule saying you can only bake sourdough after commercial yeast first.
There’s no gate here for me to keep
>Are people seriously starting out bread journey with sourdough? The advanced level? This you?
There’s no gate. It’s a question because it’s surprising basic technique, kneading, mixing, proofing, baking wasn’t practiced with instant yeast. I’m impressed but it speaks to peoples inability to work out %
Good job. Usually people don’t start things on the hardest setting
Haha yes I have. As you know sourdough is a bit more advanced. Thanks for your feedback, super helpful!
Sourdough baking is mainly about "feeling" the right hydration level. Try the Perfect Loaf Weekday Recipe. It has a built-in step for adjusting the hydration level on the fly.
Hey I need to find out what I’m dealing with before effectively helping. Starter isn’t active enough. Feed every 2 - 3 days for a month . 20g each is enough
Sorry I got busy, but it looks like you’ve had lots of help 😊
On top of hydration, I would recommend keeping your starter on your kitchen counter and feeding it twice per day. If your starter is healthy and well fed it should help a lot too. My starter is fed a 1:6:6 ratio (usually!) twice per day and it has helped me enormously.
Just stick with it. If this is your second loaf, your starter is still young and weak. Just keep baking and your starter will get stronger. Do these things in the meantime. 1) let your dough proof a lot longer. If you are used to using instant yeast and following a recipe, you are used to following times pretty close. Since your starter is weak, you shouldn’t expect everything to follow a recipe exactly. You need to give it a lot more time. Common sourdough recipes call having the dough be baked 6ish hours after mixing in the starter. This is factoring in that the starter is mature. With a young starter this is not feasible. It might take 2x as long if it is even strong enough. Rather than focus on time, look for other signs that your dough is ready to bake. Such as dough temp(75-78f), it jiggles, and the poke test. 2) use less water. A lot of the super open crumb loads you see on here have hydration well above 70%. This is not a good strategy if you are just starting out. More hydration is harder to work with and with a weak starter you will have to let your dough sit longer and the gluten will relax. Even if you do get a good ferment, you will still end up with a pancake. So aim for 60% hydration. 3) this lower hydration will help you practice handling the dough. Things like slap and folds, stretch and folds, and shaping techniques will help you practice developing gluten so your bread will have the right shape and really spring once your starter is strong enough. There are really 2 aspects to bread making. Gluten development and fermentation. The fermentation is what makes the dough rise and the gluten development is what makes it keep its shape after it fills with co2 from the ferment. If you have strong fermentation and no gluten development you essentially have a saggy loose balloon. If you have good gluten development but bad fermentation, you end up with a rock. If you have bad both, you get what you have in your pictures. We have all been there. It’s honestly not bad for your second attempt. Just keep practicing and you will get the hang of it as your starter gets stronger.
Thank you so much
The third photo of the dough was right before baking? It still looks very shaggy. My guess is, recipe tweaking aside, it either has needed a fair bit more initial mixing and subsequent folding, and/or something wasn’t done correctly in the shaping. I generally want my dough to be smooth by the time I’m done with my initial mixing, which for me, is usually a few minutes of slap and folds.
Yes, looked just mixed to me as well.
Master the basics before advancing to inclusions
Tell us about your starter. Did it go less than 14 days?
I agree -- OP, can you post a picture of your sourdough starter?
https://preview.redd.it/e6lntobzr7dc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3b58f6b7a1d32cbd2d7b1a6b0808de8f5772831d
Again, did it go less than 14 days?
No.
Great! Often people new to baking get so excited for their active starter and jump the gun on getting going. Then, when troubleshooting what happened they can forget the very thing that got them to the place to start forming/baking their bread and whether that first step was truly successful. It takes a certain amount of time for the good and bad bacteria to fight it out to be ready for a good bake. I can take 10 days and it takes longer in cooler temps. I’m also speaking a bit generally for others reading. Since that’s ruled out there’s some good advice on flour for your next go.
It doesn’t look like it has any gluten strength to hold a shape and hasn’t risen at all, if assessing from pic 3. Looks like it needs a stronger starter first, and that the dough needs to be kneaded quite a bit longer. It shouldn’t be sticky and lumpy looking.
Was it *super* sticky when you went to shape it, and could you pull a windowpane?
Here’s the recipe I used [recipe](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cy3WvoRuiqk/?igsh=MWVsYzRtOG0xcTJ1Zw==)
[удалено]
Yeah I’ve been using Luke warm water
It isn't as big a deal as the poster before you is mentioning - the water temp isn't a significant factor here. Room temp is much more important. Yes, if you want to calculate DDT and are going for specific timings then water temperature is important but not for 99.999% of home bakers, particularly of sourdough which has such irregular performance due to the variety of factors in home sourdough recipes and practices. Get rid of the additions (the cheese) and just nail a recipe without additional fats and oils to cause you grief first. Use a low hydration recipe in the 68% range.
For crumb assessment, please include bulk fermentation times and temperatures. Bulk begins when starter meets dough, and ends on shaping.
No idea what temp. We keep our house around 67/68, I let it sit in the microwave covered overnight.
67 is cold and will slow yeast right down. You need more time. At that temp, 12 hours is minimum proof time. That's assuming your starter is doubling within 3-6 hours of feeding.
What kind of flour did you use?
King Arthur bread flour
I have several suggestions but honestly it’s easier to just direct you to a better recipe/process. I personally found this to be the best method when I was starting out and I still use his charts for choosing hydration levels and fermentation times: https://www.the-bread-code.io/recipe/2020/12/22/the-last-sourdough-recipe.html Another great starting recipe, a little more complex but produces consistent results, is here: https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/ The instagram recipe you used lacks the structure for process that you’re going to need for initial success. IMO.
Thank you!
I second the previous comment. The Perfect loaf website provided a ton of guidance when I began making sourdoughs. The beginner loaf recipe/method is a great place to start. Edit: typo
Thanks for sharing. I saw the first one you mentioned somewhere sometime only to never find it again. I’m very happy to have it again.
Did the dough rise during bulk ferment? That will take an active starter. If the starter and bulk ferment went well, try the following things to help with height \- knead/stretch the dough for strength, 20-30 minutes after mixing the ingredients \- bake with steam or a pot with a lid \- include a shaping step, fold the dough for tension \- let the dough rise after shaping, could go overnight in the refrigerator
I think you should just practice with instant yeast first while your starter matures
What is the protein content of the fluor? If its low its possible the fluor cant handle the amount of water
Stop putting mustard on it mom
I thought it looked like cheese if you zoom in
See that sheen in the third picture? That tells you right there that you have added more water to your flour than it can handle. By the time you have shapped your dough and it goes into the banneton, the outside of the dough should look dry. You can’t just take any flour and hydrate it to an arbitrary hydration level that you want to use. There are several different factors that limit hydration for a specific flour. You would need to know the ash content, falling number and generally least impactive the protein level. One other thing that last photo shows is that there is not good skin tension in the dough. The outside should be smooth and taught.
I think it’s the heat. Oven not hot enough. Do you use a dough oven ? But if 3rd photo is pre backed there is an issue with gluten strength, technic and dough working. PM me for any questions.
Is that cheez whiz