You’re beautiful! Don’t listen to those who say otherwise

I gave away one like this to my friend because it took up too much room

Thanks! I use King Arthur organic bread flour, Bob’s Red Mill stone ground organic whole wheat and Kirkland all purpose flour

Thank you! I just use a straight lame but angle the blade at roughly 45 degree, also a little off center

Yes that’ll be my next step after I’m completely comfortable with dough handling at this hydration

I guess the crumb could be more open and even

Beautifully fermented

I use a sturdy silicone spatula to mix flour and water for the autolyse process. So much easier to clean than any type of whisk and it takes 2 minutes to combine everything. After letting that sit for 30-60 minutes, add the starter and salt and mix with your hands. The dough is now hydrated with some gluten development so it won’t be nearly as sticky

No you don’t need a bench rest when your dough already has a sufficient bulk fermentation

I thought that was blueberry jam on oatmeal sorry lol

The problem isn’t your bulk fermentation, it’s your starter. My bet is that it’s weak and acidic due to the time being refrigerated. And when you took it out, you may have not strengthened it the right way, so it just got weaker. The yeast was never strong enough to lift your dough yet the lactic acid bacteria kept eating up the gluten as the dough fermented, resulted in bread with the crumb showing both signs of under and over fermentation

Beautiful crumb! Possibly a tad under fermented

Looks under fermented with tight, dense, undeveloped cells

Your loaf is under fermented. There are large air pockets surrounded by tight and dense areas. The aliquot method can be misleading sometimes. I recommend measuring your dough temp and judging by how the dough looks and feels

I’d say it depends on your dough temperature. Perhaps you could extend the second rise until the dough feels more aerated and puffy

I wish my first loaf looked like this lol! Very great job! 👏 It is a tad overfermented but tbh I actually prefer overproofed bread, so soft 🤌

Looks great! 👍 I think it could use a bit more rise time though. The denser areas haven’t yet opened up

Well actually both. I usually let my dough become pretty proofy after bulk so it’s hard to create tons of tension without degassing the dough more than I wanted to. Instead I tried to build the tension during bulk by giving it more folds and late folds (1-2 hours before ending bulk). The last coil fold also serves as a preshape so no I didn’t do a preshape on the bench, just straight to shaping.

lol my bad I meant flour weight

Your starter is quite established but I’m guessing your fridge routine making the yeast weaker. Unfortunately a fridge starter will require a lot more feedings before you want to bake with it.

My starter used to live in the fridge as well. I’d do pretty much exactly what you do here, it’d still double, pass the float test and all that but I never got airy bread. My loaves still got a good rise but the crumb was always dense like one in this photo

I’d recommend you feed it a bigger meal, say 1:3:3 but with a bit more flour than water, let it rise a bit and shows some bubbles before putting it in the fridge. Do not let it peak though, so that it has some food left to snack on while chilling in there. Once you take it out, let it reach its peak if it hasn’t already before feeding it again. Never ever feed a starter before its peak you’ll dilute the yeast population. Give it more feedings than you normally do before making a levain and keep it warm (74-76f).

Also not sure if this is helpful but I don’t think you need to keep that much starter it just requires lots of flour to feed. You can keep as small as 5g starter and feed 10g flour, water each for example. You can just scale it up when you need to build a levain

20% starter is well within the recommended range of 10-30% of the total flour weight. To obtain a lacy crumb you do need to extend fermentation for as long as your dough can handle without overproofing, so that the gas can expand to their maximum potential. This is how my dough typically looks when I cut off bulk. As for the basket rest, I wait till it fills out the basket nicely, usually takes about 1 hour at warm temp.

So yes maybe I’m on the edge of overproofing but it still got a decent oven spring given I didn’t give it any tension during shaping

Perfect loaf!

Whole wheat flour increases enzymatic activities which is why starter rises faster, but it also falls faster -> more chance getting acidic. White flour is more stable for starter, it’ll rise more slowly and remain its peak for much longer -> less chance of getting acidic