Whole Wheat Bread - sticky dough
I am fairly new to bread baking, and very new to whole wheat bread baking. I have been working with Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. I made the Loaf of Learning a few times. While it didn't rise as high as I hoped, the loaves came out well. This week I moved on to try making the Whole Wheat Bread recipe. I'm using the same flour I was using in the Loaf of Learning (which I bought within the month and have stored in the freezer), but I cannot get the dough to take form. No matter how much I knead (I've done a minimum of 20min, and also tried longer) or how much flour I add, the dough remains incredibly sticky. I will have a thick layer of gooey dough on my hands throughout the entire process. When I first add more flour, the dough will start to take form, and start to pull off my hands, but inevitably it returns to the sticky mess it started with. The dough still rises, but the loaves come out very dense, far more dense than my Loaf of Learning did.
Is the problem my flour? not a high enough protein percent? When I do the math, I see the flour is on the low side - 13.3% (I bought the flour before learning about protein percentages and the need for higher percentage flour with ww bread. But if it's the flour, why was my Loaf of Learning able to lose it's stickiness and take form?
Is there something else I might be doing wrong? Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks :)
I'm sure there's someone here with suggestions/solutions but I suspect they'll need more details to help you. Can you give the details of the recipe you used and outline the protocol you followed?
Recipe for the WW Bread:
2 tsp active dry yeast
1/2c warm water - 110degrees
6c (900g) Whole Wheat Flour
2.5tsp salt
2.25c luke warm water
2Tbsp honey
2Tbsp oil
I dissolved the yeast in the 1/2c warm water. While the yeast sat, I mixed the flour and salt. In a separate bowl I dissolved the honey in the warm water, then mixed in the oil. I then created a well in the flour and poured the liquids into the well. I slowly mixed the liquids into the flour by gently stirring from the center outward, as the recipe directed, creating a batter-like mixture. Finally I folded in the last of the flour from around the rim of the bowl. Once most of the dough was mixed, I started using my hand to fully mix the dough, to ensure all the flour was mixed. I then started to knead the dough in the bowl, as the dough was so sticky and gooey, I couldn't even form enough of a mass to pull it all out of the bowl. However, even after waiting a while to ensure the flour had completely absorbed the water, and having continued to knead, the dough remained sticky. So I started to add flour a few tbsp at a time. But despite the continued addition of flour, and continued kneading (20min+) the dough remained very sticky. As I said in the initial post, after I would add some more flour, the dough would initially start to come together, becoming drier and smooth and holding some form, but as I would continue to knead it would return to the sticky mess it started out as.
Please let me know if any additional details would be helpful to understand what might be going wrong. I plan to buy some Bob's Red Mill Whole Wheat Flour the next time I'm at the store to see if the higher protein percentage will make a difference, but if there are any other suggestions on what I can do to make this bread work I'd love to hear them. I'd like to avoid another failed loaf(s) as much as possible :)
Thanks!
there are 2.75 cups of water. Assuming those are U.S. cups, that's approximately 660g. There's a little bit of water in the honey but not so much that we need to be concerned with it for this exercise.
As a percentage of the flour weight (did you weigh the 900g? or did you measure 6 cups?), that's 660 / 900 = 0.733 = 73.3%.
For a 100% whole wheat bread, 73.3% hydration shouldn't produce the blob you are wrestling with. Yes, whole wheat dough is somewhat stickier than white dough and, yes, the honey also enhances the stickiness. Still...
Have you tried an autolyse? In this case, mix the 2.25 cups of water and the honey with the flour (which I would expect would make a stiff dough) and let it sit, covered, for an hour or two. That will give the flour opportunity to absorb the water. Bran is very thirsty but it takes time for it to soak up water. After the autolyse, add the water/yeast mixture, the salt, and the oil. It will be a mess to incorporate those items into the dough but once you do, the finished dough ought to be much more amenable to kneading and shaping.
Just one thing to check: the flour isn't whole wheat pastry flour, is it? I don't expect so from the 13.3% protein content you mentioned but I don't want to make any more assumptions than necessary.
If the autolyse approach doesn't work, tell us what happened and maybe a better idea will emerge.
Paul
I make a similar recipe but at 80% hydration using a no-knead method. I just mix all the ingredients together and let the dough ferment at room temperature for about 5 hours, or until the dough has completely risen and then flattens on top. I then store the dough in the fridge overnight. The next morning I gently shape and proof the loaf in a pan for about 90 minutes at room temp. Then into the oven at 350° F for 55-60 minutes.
The dough is very sticky after the initial mix but by loaf-shaping time it's workable.
See Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois' book, The New Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, p. 134.
Thanks for the ideas! Being new to this whole bread baking thing I have never tried autolyse or no knead methods before. I will try these suggestions out this weekend and see what happens! I'll keep you posted...
Thanks again for the tips and suggestions :)