What if my sourdough doesnt rise

A somewhat drier dough, suitable for most breads, will form a single piece of dough with a bit of effort, with no seam to show where the dough had been joined. This is suitable for making most breads. A drier dough will form a single piece with considerable effort and will have a seam to show where the dough was joined. This may be suitable for bagels, bialys, pizza and Challah.

It may also be a bit too dry. The final stage we'll talk about is a dough that will not form a single piece. When you fold it over, there is a top and bottom flap, much like fat sheets of a newspaper. You can easily unfold the two pieces. This dough is much, much too dry to do anything with. It needs to have water added to it.

There are many ways to develop dough, and dough development is critical to the dough's rise. Flour has two proteins in it, glutenin and gliadinin. When they are combined, they form gluten. Gluten is the springy protein that holds the dough together and traps the gasses of the riser. Gluten, and dough, can be developed through mechanical action, such as kneading; stretch and fold ; through chemical action, as in the New York Times no-knead bread where flour and water are mixed and left largely undisturbed.

There are many ways to develop dough. Kneading emphasizes the physical action, but depends on the chemical action of the water on the flour as well.

The New York Times no-knead technique largely depends on the chemical action of the water on the flour, but it also gets a boost from the physical action of the riser stretching the dough. The stretch and fold technique uses a more deliberate combination of physical action, chemical action and boost from the riser. It's a great technique that people who have trouble kneading can use, and which lends itself to scaling up to large quantities of dough. A second recurring theme in my classes is that everyone seems to think they know how to knead, but most people don't do it very well.

Most people do it very inefficiently and thus have to knead too long. I rarely use my mixers because I find it is as easy to knead by hand. I strongly recommend you view the kneading and stretch and fold pages. We went to a lot of trouble to make sure the dough was at the right temperature. We also need to make sure our rising area is at an appropriate temperature. Simple organisms like yeast and bacteria speed up as they are in warmer areas, and slow down in cooler ones. Normally, I raise bread in a 78 to 85F area.

There are some times when it pays to reduce the temperature drastically. We talk about that in the dough retarding page. Loafing techniques are a very important part of building the strength of the loaf, and a topic we are not presently addressing, We plan to add some videos to the web site after the site redesign is complete, For now, I suggest looking at the "Kneading and Converting" and "Stretch and Fold" pages.

My first rise was great, and then nothing! This is fairly common. There are two major issues. The most common issue is not kneading enough between rises. The yeast cannot float through the dough, so it has to just eat the flour near it. If it exhausts that supply, it's stuck.

Kneading the dough a bit - and it doesn't take much - puts the yeast and bacteria back in touch with fresh food. Next, and much less common, some starters just don't have the strength for a second rise.

If you find this to be the case, you need to cut back to one rise. Just knead the dough, let it rest enough to let it rest and relax, then form a loaf and let the dough rise once.

How much dough did you put in the pan? It's not always easy to know how much dough to put in a bread pan. Different doughs rise different amounts. Some will double in size. Some will rise less. A true German pumpernickel will rise at most a little.

And that's OK. Many breads will rise to twice their heights. Others will rise to three or even four times their starting height.

That's cool, but where does that leave you? Let the dough rise, and then adjust the amount of dough the next time you make the bread. I prefer a loaf of bread that is somewhat taller than the loaf pan, and I prefer the top of the loaf be rounded.

So, I play with the amount of dough I put into the pan to get the loaf I want to make. Of course, every bread is slightly different, so you might want to take notes when you make the bread, so the next time you'll know how much dough to put into pans. So, what's doubled, and why do we care? Many recipes, including more than a few of mine, tell you to let dough rise until it has doubled. We're trying to remove that phrase from this site because its really a lazy turn of phrase.

It's so easy to type, "let it rise until it doubles" without even thinking about it. You could even put a macro in your word processor so all you had to do was invoke the macro and BOOM that magic phrase is there. Fluffy bread really benefits from fat and some lecithin which can be found in vegetable oil, eggs and soy flour.

Sounds fun, but not sure if it will make it fluffier — let me know! Feel free to email me if you want any more help.

Howdy, Gareth. I have enjoyed all the suggestions and comments. I had problems with my initial starter failing until switching to non-chlorinated bottled spring water, no RO.

NOTE: My municipal water is treated with chloramines, that are MUCH more stable than chlorine, does not dissipate at room temperature but may be removed by boiling for up to 60 mins.

It could be that you need to work on your shaping. How firm is the dough? Are you using a couche to proof them? How long are you proofing them? My recipe implies i can proof the loaves without a couche or bread pan and Im still not satisfied with the consistency.

Is it possible to over-kneed? Most of the stickiness is gone and it has a somewhat satiny finish that passes the window pane test. But still have difficulty getting good rise and round shape. Sourdough bread needs time to ferment minimum of 3 hours at that temperature. During a long first rise not only do the organic acids build up to mature the dough, but the gluten structure also continues to develop.

Too much development will lead to the structure collapsing. You should be looking to pass the windowpane test at the end of the first rise, ready for shaping. This means the dough is at its optimum point to retain CO2. This should stop your dough from being sticky too as the water will have time to be soaked up in the flour. If the dough is still sticky at the end of the first rise, use less water next time. For the last two bakes, however, the loaves are just so flat. That sucks. How are you storing your starter and how often are you feeding it?

I leave approx 20 grams in a jar. And feed it 50g water and 50grams rye flour. Leave it on the bench to double and get bubbly then into the fridge til I make bread the following week.

I mark the jar with a rubber band so I can confirm the activity. And then use it to make up the dough. OK, sounds like it needs some regular attention to wake it back up. The new flour and the spending the majority of time in the fridge have slowed bacteria growth.

I would keep it out of the fridge, ideally somewhere warm and complete regular discard and feedings when it peaks which should be twice a day. Waiting until you see a deflation means you will probably end up with a denser loaf.

To get the biggest rise in sourdough bread, use the starter when it is at its peak. This means using it when it has reached its peak height in the jar, just before it begins deflating.

Having a high heat in the intitial phases of the baking process in the oven is extremely important to how high the bread will rise. Knock up the temperature to as high as it will go and make sure the oven has preheated for long enough. The hotter the oven, the better.

This will give the bread the strongest boost to burst open and give a high rise. Using a baking stone increases the temperature of your oven. There are a variety of different baking stones available on Amazon to suit different budgets. After the initial phase and once the crust has formed around 20 minutes , it is fine to turn the oven temperature down again to give the inside of the bread time to cook through.

Once the the bread is having its second proof, put it in the oven at just the right time. You want it to have fermented most of the sugars and starches and done almost all of its rising, but you need to still have enough strength left in it for it to rise properly in the oven. Over time you will get to know roughly how long that period of time will be just by looking at the dough, but as a beginner, it may be best to preheat your oven nice and early so that it is hot and ready as soon as your bread is.

Sourdough needs to be handled gently. Bread recipes need A LOT of strength to rise properly. And for sourdough, that strength is going to come from your starter. If you have made a starter from scratch, it should be at least 2 months old for it to be strong enough to rise bread properly.

You may find that your bread will get better as you go along purely because your starter is also maturing and developing more yeasts. A preferment is essentially where you add a larger amount of flour and water to some of your starter, and then use this as your starter in the recipe. And then you go ahead and give it more from your recipe right after, so it gets crazy happy and becomes super active! Why does the bottom get burned? How can you differentiate between all those types of flour?

There are many questions that sourdough bakers ask themselves when troubleshooting common problems, and sometimes bakers might even give up altogether because of their frustrations. Just send me an email to heather leavenly. It sounds like your dough is over-fermented, and is a problem I struggled with for close to a year. This is a common issue when beginner bakers need help with their sourdough bread.

I recommend some trial and error experimentation. The Perfect Loaf has a great post called The Importance of Dough Temperature in Baking that you should check out for very detailed information on this factor!

Another factor is time. To combat this, I reduce my bulk fermentation to three hours, and it seems to help. The finger dent test is your best bet to determine if your dough is over-fermented. When you pull it from the fridge, gently poke a finger about an inch into the dough. Just bake it as usual. It might surprise you and come out beautifully!

Take notes and keep trying! It works best for me because the dough is more firm and easier to score, and because I live at elevation, allowing it to come to room temperature first would risk over-fermenting the dough.

Give both a try and see which one you prefer. Take notes along the way, including the temperature of the room, how long it sat at room temp, and what your baking result looked like. If both work well, just choose the method you like best! If you like a hard crust, I would aim for a longer time with the lid off.

If you were doing 30 minutes with the lid on and 15 minutes with the lid off, for example, you could play with shortening the lid on time and extending the lid off time. Just make sure your total bake time is always 45 minutes.

Another technique you could try is to spritz the dough with water right before putting it in the oven. This creates little water droplets on the surface that evaporate quickly, leaving behind beautiful blisters. You may find that it increases the crunchiness of your crust as well. This is also a pretty common sourdough bread challenge that sourdough home bakers need help with. You may have to do some trial and error until you figure out what works best in your oven.

Here are some things I would try:. It entirely depends on who you ask. Some bakers prefer the former, and some prefer the latter. I experimented with both ways and I found no difference between autolysing with or without leaven. After all, I have young kids running around and am constantly distracted, so the less chance of forgetting something, the better! Try putting a strip of tin foil over the ear for the last 10 minutes of baking. This should deflect the heat and protect the ear from burning at the same time.

For making sourdough, all you need is whole wheat flour and white flour, either all-purpose or bread flour. Temperature affects fermentation in a major way. Try these steps:. One key characteristic of over-fermented dough is a loose, almost runny consistency.

The best way to test this is with the finger dent test: gently poke your index finger into the dough in your proofing basket, about an inch deep.