Help: Dough metldown
Hi,
I could really use some help making sense of something that just happened. So I was attempting to experiment with one of PR's whole grain recipes. It was his miche recipe. I modified the recipe I though keeping the proportions the same in order to use slightly different amounts. I was using his soaker/biga method. The details of the experimentation may not be so important as the fact that i ended up with a very pancake battery biga and very wet soaker. I thought I would correct for this by adding more flour when I combined the two, but what ended up happening was that as I added more flour the dough became and more sticky to the point that it became impossible to knead. I tried to put it backin the bowl and mix it with my hands for a while and then to knead it agian, but it was just as sticky. Then I trieed for probably 10 mintues or so to use the folding method where you slap the dough down onto the work surface and then fold i tover itself. This also failed. The dought remained totally sticky and at the point I was making such a mess that I just gave up. I'm now letting the dough rise inthe bowl again and give it a fold and then let it rise again and see if I can knead it at that point. My theory is that the dough was stick because there was less and less gluten development as I added more flour (that I in effect dilluted the gluten). Could that be right? Does anyone have 1) any advice about how I can save this loaf at this point and 2) what sort of things are going on here? Why couldn't I make the dough less sticky by adding more flour so that I could knead it effectively. As I continued to handle the dough it seemed to loose rather than gain structure... Please help.
Thanks, EZm