YES! You most definitely can bulk ferment sourdough too long. If you leave the dough to ferment for too long, it will become "over fermented". Over fermented dough will lose its structure and become a soupy, sloppy mess that you will not be able to shape.
The dough will rise slowly overnight or up to 24 hours. Allowing the dough to remain longer in the refrigerator isn't beneficial, as an extended time in the refrigerator will lead to off flavors and diminished dough strength.
After kneading, shape your loaf, cover it, and let it proof for 4-24 hours, depending on your specific sourdough starter and ambient temperature. You can manipulate the sourness of the bread with a longer rise time. A 24-hour rise time will produce much more sour bread than a 4-hour rise time.
We've actually left our bread in the refrigerator for up to 18 hours with no problems. When you're ready to bake, remove the shaped dough from the refrigerator and let it sit on the counter while your oven preheats. Place it in the dutch oven, score it, and bake as usual.
Sourdough bread can be time consuming to make, and it can be difficult to fit it all in in just one day. Leaving it to rise in the fridge overnight means you can just pop it into the oven the next morning. This can be handy if you don't want to spend all day in the kitchen, or simply need to go out during the day.
Poke the dough lightly with your finger and take note of how the surface of the dough bounces back. If the indent comes back quickly and disappears, the loaf is not proofed enough and needs an additional half-hour (or more) proofing time. If the indent doesn't bounce back, your loaf is over-proofed.
You absolutely can leave your sourdough starter out overnight after feeding it, particularly if you are going to bake with it the next day. I highly recommend feeding it a higher ratio to prolong it's peak and ensure that it's ready for the you in the morning.
It's virtually impossible to overproof (mature) your loaf using the refrigerator (unless you leave it for days) and the nice long second rise allows some overnight ZZZZ's or workday to take place without supervising the proof of your sourdough loaf.
If you autolyse for too long, it can result in a sticky, weak dough that potentially degrades through extended fermentation.
“If the dough has risen too long, it's going to feel fragile and might even collapse as you poke it,” says Maggie. If this is the case, there's a chance you can save your dough by giving it a quick re-shape. Learn more about this fix in our blog on saving overproofed dough.
The second proving has given the bread more elasticity, and made it harder to deflate the air. Second rises may add significantly to the total time it takes to complete a loaf of bread, but the step can be essential to achieving the taste and texture inherent to a number of popular breads.
While underworked dough can simply be fixed by a little more kneading, severely overworked dough cannot be fixed. Instead, the overworked dough will result in a hard loaf that will likely not be eaten. It's important not to overwork your dough and continually check for overworking throughout the kneading process.
Overproofed is when the dough has rested too long and the yeast has continued making carbon dioxide while the strength of the dough (gluten bonds) have begun to wear out. The dough will look very puffy, but when you touch it or move it you may notice it deflate or sag.
Leaving it out would allow the yeast to multiply much more quickly resulting in a fully populated, "strong" starter. Yeast doesn't just starve to death instantly when the easy pickings run out, by the way. It goes into dormancy.
Overproofed sourdough dough loses all structure, so it's stretchy and slack when turned onto a work surface. The dough is also stickier than usual due to the lack of remaining gluten structure.
If you're using bread flour, an autolyse of 1 hour is more than enough. If you're using whole grain or whole wheat flour then at least one hour and up to 5 hours is perfect. Going past this time frame will not add any benefits to your bake and in fact can cause problems with your sourdough bake.
Can I autolyse overnight? You can, but you should do it in the refrigerator or at a low temperature. If you leave a flour and water mixture overnight at warm temperature, you are essentially initiating the first step of creating a new starter.
The longer you leave your dough in the refrigerator, the more sour and complex flavors it will develop. You can easily leave a loaf in the refrigerator for 3 days before baking. I've gone as long as 5 days, but you will see some deterioration of the loaf after Day 3.
You can gently deflate the dough, reshape it, and set it to rise again. Watch it very carefully, as this third rise will go quite quickly and probably won't be as high.
To proof them, let them sit, covered, at room temperature for up to 3–4 hours, or let them proof for a little while at room temperature and then place in the refrigerator for 12–15 hours. Or you can speed the process by using a proof box, warm cooler, or slightly warm oven to speed things up.
Cover the bowl with wrap or a very damp kitchen cloth. Let rest in a warm spot to rise. The dough is ready when it no longer looks dense and has doubled in size. This can take anywhere from 3-12 hours depending on the temperature of your ingredients, the potency of your starter and surrounding environment.
Most recipes call for three or four rounds of stretch and folds, repeated every 20 minutes or so. What is this? By the last round, the dough should keep its shape, and not feel as sticky as it did at the start. It may also have small bubbles on the surface depending on the recipe.
Dough appearance should no longer be rough after sourdough bulk fermentation. It should be smooth looking and even a bit shiny. If you lift up a section, it should move together. You should see the formation of lines of gluten strands and/or webs of gluten that have formed.
The good news: We found an easy way to rescue overproofed dough. Simply punch it down gently, reshape it, and let it proof again for the recommended amount of time. In the test kitchen, these steps resulted in bread that tasters found acceptable in both texture and flavor.
The sourdough should reach at least 50 percent higher—so not doubled in size, but 50 percent larger in size before you want to shape it. But know that the more whole grain you use, the less you can tell fermentation from volume.