The point at which your bread looks almost good, but just can’t seem to get any loftier or more aerated. This is frustrating because the really bad errors have already been fixed, but there’s no improvement. What I find happens at this point is that you have to refine things a bit more. You can’t just push and knead all that much more, but you might need to fine tune your shaping technique, or your scoring depth, or proofing time.
Most likely, it’s because you’re relying on the timer, rather than the look and feel of the bread. A recipe will tell you how long to proof something, but that proofing time will vary depending on temperature and humidity and strength of the flour, all of which change from day to day. So, you might be putting your bread in the oven a bit too early on a cold day, or a bit too late on a warm day. Instead, you should be going by feel: when you press your finger into the dough, it should slowly spring back, leaving a slight indentation. If it springs back right away, it needs more time. If it collapses, it’s over proofed.
If you’re having trouble getting a sense of this, try the following experiment. Make a batch of dough, divide it in half, shape both pieces, and let one rise slightly longer than the other. Then put both in the oven. The difference in loft and crust color and crumb structure will be startling. And if you spend fifteen minutes shaping and scoring both pieces carefully, you’ll start to appreciate the difference that handling can make, too.
You might want to practice your scoring, in particular. When you slash a loaf, you’re providing a weak point for it to expand into. If you slash too superficially (as many people afraid of slashing do), the bread can’t expand into the slash, and it will tear unpredictably. If you slash too deeply, you weaken the bread, and it will flatten out. You want to make a bold slash at a very shallow angle. You’re not really cutting into the bread so much as you are lifting a flap of dough out of the way. Practice on some scraps of proofed dough.
One of the most important things to learn at this point is patience. You’re not going to make huge gains right now. You’re just going to sort of… refine your sense of bread. This loaf will teach you something about elasticity, that one will teach you about trapping gases, a third will teach you about responsiveness to temperature. Don’t be discouraged. Just think of this as a calibration phase, and once you get through it, you’ll be surprised at how rapidly you advance.