Dough spreading a lot
So I tried Tartine's Country Bread which is a sourdough. I've made 4 different recipes now (some used slap and fold before the bulk fermentation) and it always seems like the dough is very viscous. I try to follow each recipe to the letter to see what works and what doesn't. This time, after the bulk fermentation (4 hours with 30 minutes folds for the first 2 1/2 hours) there was definitely increase in mass and lots of fermentation bubbles. I put the dough onto the work surface and the next instructions are to separate the dough into two and form rounds, using the bench scrapper to get surface tension. Right now the dough is so viscous it won't hold a shape no mater what I do and it's very sticky. I did expect the sticky part. Again, this has happened before but this is rally difficult to get into a ball shape. Any ideas?
Here's the ingredients:
For the Dough:
750 grams water (80 degrees)
200 grams leaven
900 grams white bread flour
100 grams whole-wheat flour (I used spelt for this)
20 grams salt
My starter is 25 grams mature starter, 50 grams AP, 50 grams dark rye, and 100 grams water.
A 75% hydration dough is (as you have discovered) very difficult to work with! This is a highly technical bread developed by a highly skilled baker who is pushing the limits of what bread can do by going for a very extreme style: very very dark crust, very moist 'custardy' crumb. It's great bread but it's like starting with a wedding cake when you want to learn to make cake. People have been making everyday, good eating sourdough bread at home for a very long time, and this isn't the kind of recipe they've been using. I would make a simple suggestion: reduce the hydration to 65%. Learn to make delicious, fresh, homemade bread. Enjoy yourself. Enjoy the dough. Take it easy.
Once you have been baking for a while, you will naturally want to expand, to try new things. You will start adding seeds and porridge, making enriched doughs, and yes, trying out the super-hydrated fancy sourdough. Sometimes your bread will be spectacular and sometimes it will fall flat. But you will always have that familiar, successful bread to fall back on!
I feel like I don't like having a recipe I can't figure out. As I mentioned I've made a bunch of other sourdough recipes. Usually they involve the slap and fold before the bulk fermentation and folding. This recipe involved mixing the starter with water first before what I would consider the autolyse.
I've alway been very good at math but the hydration percentages has been a little hard to wrap my head around. Is there any good tutorials on this I could study up on? Thanks.
4.5 hours in my view is too long. You didn't indicate the bulk fermentation temperature - what was it?
Recipe notwithstanding, variables change every day, in every kitchen. The adjustable variable for the baker is time, and secondarily hydration.
Read about DDT - desired dough temperature. It will help your learning. It helped mine.
This recipe had me do the folding only, no slap and fold, and the folding was every 30 minutes for 5 folds. I then left the dough to bulk ferment for the rest of the time period, total of 4.5 hours in my oven which was 78 degrees when it isn't on.
To roll the dough into rolled oats if you like them. Or fold them in gently. They are great soaker uppers and will help reduce the hydration. Give them about half an hour and then plop everything into pans or line the pans with rolled oats pouring the dough onto them. Sprinkle some decoratively over the top. :)
So what did you do? Have you run the recipe name thru this site's search box? Misery loves company.
divide the total amount of water weight by the total amount of flour weight then multiply by 100 to get %
850/1100 = 0,77 x 100 = 77%. (That assumes the 200g starter is 100g water & 100g flour)
And what does that mean?
Well an AP wheat flour dough at around 9 - 11% protein will generally be between 50% and 65% hydration, a bread flour dough will be between 60% and 75% hydration and that tends to give the reader a little understanding on how the dough will behave if it is firm or wet or somewhere in between. Different flours have different water absorption rates depending on their grain type, protein, fiber and moisture content. There are a quite a few recipes that push these percentages higher.
Thanks
with recipes that have cooked vegitables, milk, egg, the water content can sometimes throw a dough hydration way off resulting in very wet doughs or as in the case of milk, dry ones. Milk has 10% milk solids and can vary with fat content so roughly 90% water. Many cooked potatoes are roughly 80% water, do check on this. You may never need this info unless you try to formulate your own recipes or do substitutions. One starts to think about the water in ingredients. :)