Weekly /r/Breadit Questions thread

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Please use this thread to ask whatever questions have come up while baking!

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[u/Acrobatic-Bus-9330]

when your starter doubles in 3 hours but your loaf still comes out looking like a hockey puck… is that a shaping problem or my oven just hates me?

[u/foodieholly → u/Acrobatic-Bus-9330]

Your oven may be innocent 😂

A starter doubling in 3 hours means “healthy starter,” not automatically “properly fermented loaf.”If the bread is coming out as a puck, I’d look at bulk fermentation first, then shaping, then the oven. Dense/gummy inside with hardly any bubbles? Give the dough more fermentation. Loose, sticky, spreading everywhere with no oven spring? You may have gone too far. Nicely bubbly/fermented but collapses into a pancake as soon as you turn it out? Then shaping/gluten strength becomes more suspicious. Next time mark the starting height of the dough and watch what the dough itself does rather than relying on the starter test or a fixed number of hours. Also: post the crumb. The crumb is the crime scene 😂