Foodtography: Pandemic Baking: Sourdough #6 and #7

Today we were full of confidence, so we planned half a day staggered baking of two loaves of sourdough.

Sourdough #6 is earmarked for Amy, who was taking her PT board exam as we worked on the dough for her bread. We wanted to deliver a freshly baked bread to Amy after she completed her exam and relaxed at home. We started the process on Thursday evening, for baking Friday evening.
Sourdough #7 process would start Friday morning and would be completed Saturday morning, in time for our lunch. For this loaf we added a few more experimental steps.

For sourdough #6, we wanted to reproduce the result of sourdough #5, and kept the steps and baker's percentage the same.

Baker's % for Sourdough #6:
60% Hydration
30% starter -- 100% hydration active starter, refreshed (fed)
1.2% salt

We used Pillsbury bleached all-purpose flour.
The goal for Sourdough #6 is to improve the scoring.

Sourdough #6 for Amy, 60% hydration

Amy's Instagram

The top of loaf #6 was more burnt than we expected, a puzzling fact for us since we kept the baking time exactly the same as #5, until we realized that we had used the wrong parchment paper (sorry Amy!).

For sourdough #7, we tested out a new timeline, the one that would require retarding overnight after final shaping.
We made several additional adjustments.
First we added autolyse of the flour and water for 15 minutes before mixing the starter and salt.
We increased the hydration level to 65%.
We slightly modified our baking time: we preheated the oven for one hour at 500 deg F, baked with the lid on for 28 minutes at 475 deg F, then removed the lid and baked at 475 deg F for 5 minutes, when we checked on the coloring of the loaf. We then reduced the temperature to 425 deg F and finished baking for another 5 minutes.

Baker's % for Sourdough #7:
65% Hydration
30% starter -- 100% hydration active starter, refreshed (fed)
1.2% salt

We used Pillsbury bleached all-purpose flour.
Our scoring was the best that we did for this pattern.
We are now ready to try out new patterns on the next loaf!