Open crumb. This is what many home bakers want to achieve. Of course, we get bread. Of course, it's food. Of course, open crumb should be the last thing on your mind if your objective is to feed your family. Honestly speaking, non bakers care nought about open crumb. They only care about how whether or not the bread tastes good.
However, it's different for most bakers I know. And... not everyone can achieve the silently coveted aesthetics of open crumb. And by that, I mean open crumb due to fermentation, and not trapping holes from lamination. Even if you have been nourishing your family with homebaked bread for years, perhaps you'd think...hhmmm... maybe I just want to try this open crumb social media obsession, just for the heck of it. Just to say, hey, I actually KNOW how to do it but I just DON'T CARE for it. So if you judge this trend negatively, but can't even produce one yourself, I judge you too.
This is my idea of open crumb. Lacy and light, perfectly fermented, still with some strength left to burst a little ear. When you eat it, the bread is soft, the crust is crunchy, and it tastes nothing like yeasted bread. It's sourdough after all. Natural, wild yeast. Long story short, how do you get it?
Strong, healthy active starter. It's hard to achieve this if you only feed your sourdough once every 2 weeks. Sure, there is minimal effort involved. You can bake your basic bread. BUT, you need to first put in effort to train your starter and be in the best condition if you want an open crumb.
Dough handling. Your hands play a huge role. The way you touch and fold your dough is unique only to you and you have to learn balance. This coincides with timing. Never ever follow someone else's timing. You have to know what to look for in your dough. When is it the right time to fold? This video that I made a while ago will show you the entire process. I think really studying the video, down to the minute details, will help immensely.
Fermentation. You need to know how much to proof your dough. You have to use the same equipment, same recipe, in your same environment, and keep trying. I advise you to push fermentation until the dough feels like a soft jiggly water balloon. Then bake it and find out the result. If it turns out flat and overproved, you then scale back the next bake. It's the effort that you need to put in because there isn't a formula for you. A formula that works for myself might not work on you because we have different starters, different hands and different environment. Heck, even the same flour from different shipment might perform differently. For every bake, change only 1 variable at a time. That way you know for sure what works and what doesn't.
Bake setting. I advise you to use a dutch oven to negate the variable of whether or not there's enough steam to bake the bread. Preheat the dutch oven. I know some bakers talk about baking in a cold dutch oven. Yes, it saves electricity. But we're not talking about just bread. We want open crumb, and we need to give it the best environment to burst.
Lastly, note everything down. That's the main reason I started my instagram account when I first started baking. It's my online journal. I could post pictures and write down how the dough felt and how it performed. It was a great reference point for me.
So, here they are. Simplified to only 5 important points, but not as easy as it seems. However, if you put in the effort, then yes, you can definitely achieve it! AFTER you have figured out what it takes, then you can come up with your own short cuts to see if you can still achieve open crumb. It is a skill after all. Take the long way to learn everything along the way, and you'll know exactly what to do when something unexpected happens.
Happy baking!
Lily
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