One Night Sponge San Francisco # 4

Building on yesterday’s post, I made up a sponge last night and this morning I added the rest of the ingredients to make a nice dough. The first bulk ferment took only 3.5 hours. I pushed down the dough and let it raise another 1.5 hours. Then I took half the dough and put it in the refrigerator for 1/2 an hour to slow it down so all of the loaves wouldn’t be ready at the same time to be baked. The other half I shaped into loaves. I am using my nice Marine canvas couche. Gary won one of the other couches in the contest on the forum, I’ll have to see how he likes it once he starts baking up bread again this Fall. Here is the dough 3.5 hours after mixing:

I divided the dough into four pieces at 1 lb 4 oz each. This dough is a lower hydration dough so it is not as sticky and is easy to work with. I do prefer the higher hydration dough, I have just gone in the direction of lower hydration dough to work on San Francisco Style loaves. Here are the loaves in their couche, the two on the right were shaped first and the two on the left were refrigerated for a short time to slow them down:

I slashed the dough with Bill’s handcrafted lame:

The loaves came out really nice. Because of the shortness of the fermentation, the crust didn’t have the blisters. The first two loaves were slightly underproofed and were a bit denser and didn’t show as pronounced a grigne as the second two. Lower hydration dough is a different beast and I am still getting used to the proofing of it.Here is the crumb which needs to be more open. Try try again!

The flavor of this starter is quite good. I am working on another batch, which will end up being a two day dough. It should be interesting.