47 minutes ago, dtremit said:
So glad it was helpful! It was a bit of a shot in the dark based on a few experiments I've done recently.
I can sadly not offer much advice on the banneton -- I struggle with that myself, and had a similar mishap on my last loaf!
For the dark crust and Dutch oven, though, I've found that flipping the loaf onto parchment and using that as a sling to lower it into the pot helps a lot. It also lets me pull it *out* of the pot really easily to do the last ~10 minutes of the bake directly on the oven rack; that has helped me get a darker top crust without a tough/burnt bottom.
I say this as a frequent sourdough baker, but I often question how much of the sourdough flavor is actually unique to the starter vs just coming from a forced, repeated, slow fermentation in the starter. If you built a "starter" with a tiny quantity of commercial yeast, I wonder how different the results would be?
this sums up my feelings on the subject. I’ve often kickstarted starters with commercial yeast and lactobacilli from yogurt whey (because you have an established, working starter from the get-go); the starter will behave identically to something wild with results I wouldn’t know weren’t traditional sourdough if I hadn’t done it myself. Could you tell a difference side by side between two loaves? Perhaps. But after a while such a starter will inevitably be colonized by a selection of microbes anyway so at that point the question is likely moot.
