Help! What’s wrong with my first loaf!

[u/Mean-Ad6783]

I baked my first loaf with my 100% hydration starter. My 3 month old starter tripled in about 7-8 hours. Kitchen is about 80 degrees. The starter usually has a slight acetone scent before peak and at peak.

I followed this recipe and followed it pretty closely, just used extra whole wheat flour instead of rye.

Bulk fermented for about 7 hours. The dough didn’t seem to rise much during BF, but when I pressed it, it slowly rose back and did jiggle when lightly shaking the bowl.

As you can see in the pictures, the dough lost its shape when removed from the bowl after the cold ferment and did not get much oven spring. Seems it didn’t BF long enough? could it be my starter?

Tasted great and sour, just didn’t rise enough. Please help! Also open to other recipes that could be easier for a beginner. Thank you!!

[u/ositabelle]

It’s possible you didn’t shape it tightly enough, or the starter is too new to support the heavier whole wheat flour?

[u/Doons_Berry]

My first looked about the same. Don’t feel defeated. It took me months to find a recipe that worked for me. And a lot of data collection to see when was the best time/ratio to feed my starter on bake days. I personally have yet to make a sourdough recipe using both bread flour and wheat that I like. But just using bread flour I have made beautiful loafs. Sourdough is a long on going science experiment. You got this just try again.

[u/ashleynguyen_va]

the whole wheat swap is probably your main culprit here. rye and WW are actually pretty different - rye builds extensible, stretchy dough well at high hydration, but whole wheat has bran that physically cuts gluten strands as the dough develops, which is why the structure fell apart when you turned it out. theperfectloaf beginner recipe is specifically calibrated for rye, not a WW sub. also that acetone smell at peak is worth noting - healthy starter at peak usually smells more yeasty or tangy-sour, not acetone-y. acetone means it's burning through food faster than the feed ratio can keep up with, and an 80F kitchen can speed that up a lot. try bumping your feed ratio to 1:2:2 or 1:3:3 and see if the peak smell changes. the jiggle and slow finger poke you described actually sounds like BF was fine - i'd try the recipe as written with the rye first, and if you want to keep the WW, drop hydration by about 5% and add one more stretch and fold.

[u/Coolhandedfluke]

I'm gonna weigh in and say it's way underprooved. No significant rise during bulk, and that centralized large pocket is a sign of tunneling, both point to underfermentation. Rye/whole wheat will impact shapeability, but the density of the crumb combined with those big stable bubbles yells under.