Don't make this ONE STUPID MISTAKE when Baking Bread

Intro i would never have expected changing this one single parameter can get you from that bread to this bread oven spring happens when you've done everything exactly right with your sourdough in this video i want to show you one parameter that can dramatically change whether you receive amazing oven spring or not now how did this journey start i've been working on an overnight high hydration recipe for you i wanted to enable you to make the perfect sourdough while you sleep sounds amazing doesn't it you sleep and your doe ferments doing all the hard work for you win-win furthermore you could do this while you leave to work and then have an amazing dough once you return now i wanted to develop a recipe for you using a relatively wet dough made overnight requiring no work after you mix the ingredients i personally think that wet high hydration doughs are amazing featuring a crispy crust and then really moist somewhat open crumb the play of textures is just amazing the dough is unfortunately a lot more tricky to handle as it's more sticky but still there had to be a way to make this possible based on the experiment i The recipe conducted i would just mix together all the ingredients right from the start it's cold now in germany and then you can safely skip the autoleases which is just mixing flour and water for an hour or so in advance for long fermentations this is not required so i'm using 80 grams of sourdough starter that's 20 in terms of baker's math 320 grams of water 80 and baker's math 8 grams of salt 2 percent in baker's math i'm making two loafs so i'm just multiplying that by two that's where baker's math comes in very handy then afterwards you mix everything together for an overnight bread you want to create a lot of those strengths i don't want to go too much into detail but i made a video before on five great ways to create a lot of those strengths please check that out if you want to you then extract a small sample of the dough to show you the fermentation progress this really makes fermenting on points so easy well then you go to bed and in the morning your sample has doubled in size and voila you're ready to shape your bread now this sounds so easy and like a dream No ovenspring come true but then i failed around 10 times now master yoda said the greatest teacher failure is i thought okay i might have fermented too long then i also thought about maybe i didn't need enough for this dough overnight the gluten relaxes making it impossible for my bread to have oven spring so i thought i went to my whiteboard and tried to come up with a plan but even then nope whatever i tried no of in spring at least not in the way that i was used to well and then i tried my regular sourdough recipe which starts early in the morning but suddenly i also only had mediocre oven spring what has changed did i lose my mojo i recently did an experiment where i would test baking at a higher temperature initially my sourdough had a Finding the mistake little more oven spring since then i have always been baking at around 250 degrees celsius at the start and then reduced the temperature to 230 degrees celsius before i would have always preheated the oven to the max for around 30 minutes and then bake at a steady 230 degrees celsius the 30 minutes would always give me 230 degrees celsius inside of my dutch oven now the 30 minutes of preheating my oven in the past has worked excellent but i changed another thing i had to clean my pizza stone it wasn't looking so good anymore and then i decided okay i don't need it for now i'm gonna leave it away before i would always preheat my dutch oven sitting right on my pizza stone so of course if you have a pizza stone below that could explain why the dutch oven didn't heat up as fast in comparison to now when i don't have the pizza stone the dutch oven heats up way faster and then i also notice that when doing my baking temperature experiment i measured the temperature on top of my dutch oven i should have measured the temperature inside of the dutch oven so both things combined i thought okay maybe my dutch oven is too hot maybe the crust forms too quickly preventing my dough from rising the reason why you want to use a dutch oven is because it traps all that steam that nose sauna really makes sure that no crust forms and you will get that oven spring but yeah maybe there's a limit to temperature you want your dutch oven to be hot to get over in spring but at the same time you also don't want it to be too hot then i asked all of you amazing The best baking temperature hobby bakers on youtube most of you bake at around 230 degrees celsius to 250 degrees celsius so i tried going back to what i've previously done baking at 230 degrees celsius all the time and boom i Amazing oven spring really got an amazing sourdough i was really face palming myself i was so frustrated with myself but then i thought okay maybe this was just luck the other option was that i was actually onto something so i wanted to do another a b test to verify what i found and show you see for yourself i was really surprised so i have been Testing different temperatures preheating my oven for around 30 minutes just like i normally do and this is now at 270 degrees celsius roughly i place the small sample inside of the dutch oven and now let's see what i bake when using my regular temperature that i always do now i'm changing from fan to upper and bottom heat and i'm reducing from 270 degrees celsius to to 50 degrees celsius and it's going to be baking like this for around 25 minutes 25 minutes are over and let's check what's siding inside of the dutch oven nice but as you see not that much of an ear development so let this finish baking for another 15 minutes or so until the crust has the perfect color and then let's have a look at the other bread and now for the second bread i'm gonna be opting for the 240 degrees celsius pretty much the middle of all the recommendations that you gave me and let's have a look half time for the next bread let's check what happened with this one oh well i had hoped for better over in spring i was very very sad [Laughter] but the last time i baked with 230 degrees celsius it was way better so i didn't want to give up failure is the greatest teacher i wanted to repeat the experiment one more time and show you and please don't worry there's gonna be an amazing happy end in coming and next attempt dutch oven has been pre-heated and just look at that temperature i don't know my oven just heats so fast i'm gonna be loading the first bread inside now [Music] back to upper bottom heat and i'm lowering the temperature to 250 degrees celsius just like the last time and brett number one coming out of the oven nice and as you can see we didn't get that much oven here i'm gonna finish this baking this now and then let's check the other one very interesting so i'm now pre-heating the oven to 230 degrees and i set the oven directly to 230 degrees and it has been almost an hour and the oven is still not there this just shows how much you have to test your own oven every oven is unique and don't trust the controls that you have on your oven very important you need to test this on your own okay dutch oven and estrella it's going to cool down a little bit time to load the second breath this time going for just 230 degrees celsius The best temperature for oven spring so same thing again our bottom heat and this time at 230 degrees celsius and dough number two 25 minutes passed [Laughter] look at that we got so much better oven spring i'm gonna finish baking this and then let's compare the two results Comparing the results number one not that nice oven spring but look at number two what an incredible look in here now let's compare the surface you see that not as many blisters on the one which we baked hotter initially and just look at those nice looking blisters right there on the crust this one is looking so much better i would expect the bottom to look a little bit darker on the one which make that hotter temperature but it's not that much darker i would say it's quite similar i would never have expected changing this one single parameter can get you from that bread to this bread yeah really interesting how the bread looks so much different the one which we baked at a lower temperature definitely has more oven spring nicer blisters overall to me this is the perfect sourdough bread that ear that we got here it's gonna add so much incredible flavor and texture the moment you take a bite this one is looking nice and it's probably also tasting amazing but still it doesn't have that visual wow effect to it so overall i think there are three things to be learned from this experiment number one too hot 3 tips on baking temperature doesn't necessarily get you more of in spring at some point the crust forms too quickly and this is something you don't want you don't want the crust to form too quickly you want your bread to be able to grow upwards inside of the oven an oven with a built-in steam functionality might behave different but for the dutch oven you don't want to go too hot number two don't just follow a suggestion to preheat your oven for x minutes every oven is truly unique the small change i did by just removing the stone had such a dramatic impact so you want to be using a thermometer to make sure that you don't heat your oven for too much or too little and number three which i learned the hard way before don't just trust the heating indicator of your oven if your oven says is 230 degrees celsius it might easily be 250 or 210. this is something that you have to experiment with with your own oven i think we also need to do further research or maybe you can help me there Further research ideas what about adding an ice cube to the dutch oven to give it additional steam another thought i add is why not just preheat the lower part of the dutch oven this way your dough would be shielded from the high heat coming from the top furthermore how is this dependent on the type of bread that you're baking what about a stiffer dough in this case this dough is relatively high in hydration what are the differences if you have ideas for further experiments further research please do drop a comment in the comment section i would truly appreciate that now let's cut those open and have a look at the crumb Closing remarks and taste test brat number one beautiful crumb are you excited i am wow [Music] look at that amazing crumb let's compare them next to each other i noticed quite a few large pockets of air here towards the top on the one which we had in the hotter dutch oven which is this one and this is typically a sign that the crust formed too quickly and then the pockets of air just collapse into gigantic ones whereas here i would say that everything is a little bit better distributed a lovely soft texture the texture from both of them is amazing so taste wise they're likely going to be very very similar except that we have this additional crunch factor coming right from that ear and this is definitely missing on this bread this show work now there's one thing left for me and that is eating all of this bread and feeling very guilty afterwards i hope you enjoyed this video and you learned something new as always happy baking and may the gluten be with you