You are overproofing. My recipe is NOT for strong starters. It’s for sleepy starters. If you try to bake with a strong starter, your rise times will be much less, and if you use my rise times, you will overproof.
If your dough doubles in 8-12 hours, your second rise should be only 60 minutes. If your dough doubles in under 8 hours, your second rise should be only 45 minutes. My new MasterClass video on YouTube talks about baking this recipe with strong starter.
]]>Cream cheese is totally fine at room temp for a few days.
]]>Cream cheese is totally fine at room temp for a few days.
]]>A dense loaf results from 1 of 3 things: overhydration (too much water), overproofing (common with active starters), or underproofing (less common, resulting from blindly following the recipe’s timing without waiting for your dough to double.)
I need you to start over, mixing this up on your day off. Rise in an oiled ziploc bag, so you can clearly see your loaf. Start watching at about 6 hours and note how long it takes your dough to double. If your starter is robust, as many people’s are, and you achieve doubling in under 8 hours, you can’t wait very long after that before shaping, and your second rise should only be 45 minutes. If it doubles in 8-12 hours, also don’t wait much longer to shape, and rise only 60 minutes. If it takes your dough 12-24 hours to double, a 90 minute second rise is perfect. But if your dough takes LONGER than 24 hours to double…you MUST MUST MUST wait until it doubles. Even if that takes 2-3 days. (This is common in winter when kitchens are cold.) If it takes longer than 24 hours to double, your rise time should be 2 hours…or longer.
If the dough NEVER doubles after 3 days, take it out of the bag and touch it. Is it super sticky? If so, your dough is overhydrated. Either you mismeasured, or the extra water is coming from your starter. Watch Troubleshooting Simple Sourdough at the 6 minute mark to fix your starter, and then try again.
]]>When you need to bake with it, you take it out of the fridge, stir it if there’s hooch that has separated, weigh out what you’re going to need for the recipe, and put it back in the fridge.
Once you’ve taken out so much that you don’t have enough starter left to make another loaf, give a big feeding (my feedings are 1 pound of flour and 1 pound of water…but your container has to be large enough to accommodate the starter if it rises significantly after a feeding), leave the starter on the countertop for a few hours until you see bubbles in the matrix, and then put it back in the fridge.
]]>Your oven’s thermostat is off. Bake at 400!
]]>Starter lives in the fridge. Period. You don’t have to feed it until you need to make more, even if that’s every 6 months. But you cannot leave a starter on the countertop PERMANENTLY without regular feedings. I think you misunderstood what I was saying.
]]>Nothing, but your house has a mold colony, and it’ll be very hard for you to get a starter going. Try again, adding 2 drops of distilled vinegar to the mix. If that also molds, you need to buy a mature starter online, or adopt one from a Facebook sourdough group.
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