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I’d feed the starter more before getting ready to bake, at least three days of room temp cycles to liven it up. A tsp of starter should float before use and smell really sweet.
I’d experiment with the timings, that’s the dark art of baking - being able to look and feel when the dough is ready for the next stage. It does sound over proved but the trade off is moar flavour...
inchpincher
@jdmitch
My rye starter has been getting a bit lackluster (I had a few going, but it was filling the fridge, so I limited myself to just rye)... I keep it in the fridge right at the back and only feed once a week usually, as I mainly make bread on the weekend. I haven't been using dechlorinated water though - am I missing a trick? I usually use boiled water that has cooled, as I thought this might be vaguely "purer" for some reason, but there's still all sorts of limescale from the kettle...
My standard loaf is about 3tbsp of wet rye starter, and the rest is white flour and a bit of salt. I bake in a dutch oven blasted at gas mark 9 to get it as hot as I can (my oven is crap and tops out at about 210 degrees on its own). I usually leave it overnight in a banetton, or even longer to prove, and sometimes it gets a decent increase in volume in the banetton, but in transfer/scoring always seems to collapse, and my oven spring is virtually nonexistent. Am I overproving, so that when it is time for the bake, the natural yeasts are already dead/spent? Or is my starter underactive? I have never managed the big dramatic bubbles really - even at the best of times it is a very even boring crumb...
Should I go back to an all-white starter? This was obviously best for pizza but I never felt like it had great lift either...