New bakers often ask why their sourdough bread is too dense. How to make sourdough bread lighter and get the open crumbs? This is something we home bakers struggle with a lot.
Sourdough bread is all about texture and flavor. The flavor is easier to accomplish and comes naturally by adding appropriate ingredients, but for getting the right texture on your bread, a whole lot of skills go in.
In this post, we will try to understand the factors that affect the texture of sourdough bread and how to use them to our advantage and make light sourdough bread.
Why Is My Bread So Dense? How To Make The Bread Softer?
There are two types of dense sourdough bread in my opinion. First is the too dense bread. And the second one is just dense bread.
Too dense sourdough bread is basically due to insufficient yeast activity in the dough. The first thing that comes to mind is under-proofing. In sourdough bread, if you do not give enough time for the wild yeast to multiply and reach a decent population where it can cause enough leavening, your bread is bound to be too dense. Another possible reason for a super dense bread could be the death of the yeast due to some reason. The reasons could be chlorinated water or bleached flour that still has a high percentage of bleach residues.
Also, adding salt directly to yeast. In our case, if you add salt directly to a sourdough starter, it can cause a lot of yeast causalities. How much damage it can cause will depend on the quantity of salt and starter and also the vigor and endurance of the starter.
Tips To Make Sourdough Bread Less Dense And More Airy!
It happens rarely that sourdough bread is too dense. It is basically due to a major blunder, that either killed the microbiota( Yeast and LAB) in the dough or did not let them grow at all. Contrary to that a dense sourdough loaf is a more common problem that could be attributed to many factors.
It simply means that the yeast should be active or the sourdough starter should be ripe and dough should be well fermented ( bulk proofed and proofed) before going into the oven.
If you are interested in learning what goes on in your sourdough bread Get a sneak-peek into the chemistry of the bread baking.
Is Your Sourdough Bread Too Dense? Lets Make It Less Dense
Now that we have ensured that there is going to enough yeast activity and enough gas production in the dough. We have to ensure that our dough is capable of holding on to that gas( or carbon dioxide in this case). This is possible by a developing strong gluten structure, shaping the dough rightly, and building the tension on the surface of the dough.
Many of us keep our starter refrigerated and take it out and put it directly in the dough. The microbiota, i.e wild yeast, and Lactobacilli in the refrigerated starter are mostly in the lag phase. Such a starter is called an inactive starter.
Sometimes they could be in the decline phase. From either of the stages, the yeast takes more time to start growing and multiplying. So, we must feed and bring it into an exponential growth phase and use the starter once it reaches the peak or stable stage. Make a point to add the starter to the dough when it is at its peak.
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If you are having difficulty understanding, what the hell is this lag and log phases mumbo jumbo…read this detailed post on the sourdough starter to understand the growth cycle of yeast in a starter.
Day. At this stage, the starter is not mature enough. The yeast colonies at this stage are very susceptible. Sometimes, all it needs is some direct contact with salt to die. Whereas a stable and sturdy mature starter is resistant to most pH differences.
Most recipes ask for 10-20 percent of the starter. Though you can bake with as little as a 5 percent starter and make levain. But, like I always say, there is no perfect recipe for sourdough bread. Simply because all the starters are different and all are baking with different flour at different kitchen temperatures. But if you have a stable starter, most recipes will work for you. But no two people using the same recipe will get the same result. So, add the sourdough starter depending on the vigor of your starter. If you have a clumsy starter you need to add more than the recipe suggests.
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If your starter does not peak( double or triple, whatever the maximum rise looks like for your starter) in less than 6 hours at room temperature ( 65-75 0 F) at a 1:1:1 feeding ratio, consider your starter as clumsy or less vigorous. The low or cold ambient temperature also makes the starter feel clumsy. In both, situations try making up for it by bumping up the percentage of the starter in whatever recipe you are following.
Bread made with high fiber flours or say whole-grain flours are dense by nature. There is just not enough protein content( gluten) in such flour. Gluten helps to give the body to the bread and creates a network of web-like structures to trap the air, which eventually makes the bread lighter and fluffier. Very low protein content (gluten) and too much bran is another thing that might be making your bread too dense.
When baking with wild starters, we must avoid using bleached flours. These flours are mostly bleached by chemical bleaching agents. A new batch of flour might have more residues in it and it is pretty much capable of killing the yeast from the sourdough starter. And with no live yeast in your dough, you are bound to have a dense bread or rather too dense of a bread.
Why Is My Bread So Dense? 10 Common Reasons & Solutions
Using highly chlorinated water can negatively affect the yeast growth in the dough and make sourdough too dense. By highly I mean anything more than 2 ppm(parts per million) of chlorine in the water. Most tap waters contain an acceptable level of chlorine. According to CDC most of the community water supply systems in the United States have to disinfect water using Chlorine and chloramine.
4 ppm( parts per million) being the safe drinking water level, on average any tap water can have 1-4 ppm of chlorine.
According to the CDC free chlorine concentration of 1 ppm is enough to kill all the disease-causing germs. Yeast is not a disease-causing microbe, but chlorine does not distinguish between microbes. So, yeasts are lost as collateral damage.
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Though the baker’s yeast might not be affected as badly as the wild yeast. Naturally occurring microbes are more susceptible to most chemical disinfectants.
That is why it is important to use unchlorinated filtered water to feed the starter. In the case of bread dough, on the other hand, the chlorine concentration is further diluted, which in most cases will go well below 1 ppm. So, it is very unlikely that it can affect your bread so much. But it can have detrimental effects on wild yeast activity. Surely, something to keep in check.
There are two other ways in which chlorine affects the dough. Firstly the taste of bread is replaced by the chemical smell. And secondly, it affects the functions of some enzymes in the flour.
Why Is My Bread So Dense? (bread Machine Section Included)
While preparing the dough, two steps are crucial for making a light and well-risen bread. The first is to autolyse the dough. Autolyse helps naturally in gluten development. So, if you are not autolyzing your dough, you are missing something that could help to make your bread less dense.
Another big mistake adding salt and yeast together. Salt hurts the yeast activity. It absorbs most of the water from the yeast through osmosis and makes the yeast weak enough to reproduce and multiply.
Kneading helps to develop the gluten structure of the dough. Gluten is the key protein found in wheat. And gluten is the most important factor in bread making. It helps in the retention of the gas to make the bread lighter.
My Bread Doesn't Come Out Fluffy And Is Just Dense. It's The Third Time Out Of Three Times That This Happened. I Followed The Recipe Exactly And I Don't Know What's Wrong
There are Glutenin and gliadin proteins in the wheat flour. On hydration, they immediately bind together to form gluten. That's why autolyse is important as it allows natural gluten structure formation. On kneading, we further strengthen them to become longer and stronger. The well-kneaded dough will have a very strong gluten structure to a level that you can stretch the dough to form a thin translucent film.
Underdeveloped gluten structure in the dough will make your bread dense. Take it as a web of strong gluten structures that help the bread to hold up its shape and allows for trapping more air in them, making the bread lighter and fluffy.
Proofing is the stage where we let the dough rest so that enough yeast activity is achieved in the dough. Under proofed dough is one of the main reasons for a dense and gummy bread. Since there is not enough yeast activity in the dough, there will not be enough gas in the dough. Hence it will bake as a loaf of sourdough which will be super dense.
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Once the maximum population of yeast is achieved inside the dough, it will quickly reach its optimum potential as soon it will
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