Saving a disintegrated loaf?
I was preparing a whole wheat sourdough loaf earlier today, taking a friend's suggestion to put cracked wheat in the starter. This was going great and dandy, until I noticed a tiny rip while shaping it. Before I knew what to do next, the whole dough had fallen apart and had dissolved into a stringy, gelatenous mess. Not good!
Trying to fix it only dissolved the loaf even more. At this point, and being somewhat accustomed to the possibility of failure, I dumped placed the dough back into a container and did two more stretch and folds. It did recover the dough a bit, but clearly surface tension hadn't fully returned. In the end I just "shaped" it, proofed, and baked. I didn't bother letting it rise overnight. Why waste valuable refrigerator space over dying dough?
So this leads me to my question: What would help a loaf keep its strength up, aside from not screwing up, and, in the event the loaf does die on the table, what, in your experience, does the best job of saving the dough?