Question about the Multigrain Extraordinaire loaf from Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice
Hi all,
I tried out my second recipe from Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice on the weekend (an excellent book IMHO and thanks to the members of this website for putting me onto it), the multigrain extraordinaire loaf. The final loaves turned out reasonably well and taste great (although a little sweet for my liking). One interesting thing I noticed whilst I was making the dough however was that, despite the fact it is listed as a standard dough in the book in terms of wetness, once I had finished mixing all the ingredients together the dough was extremely wet. So much so that when I made the mistake of emptying it out onto the bench to attempt to knead it, all I ended up with was a sticky mess on the bench and all over my hands. After the addition of a fair amount of extra flour I was finally able to scrape enough together to put the dough back into the bowl and continue trying to knead it there using the "dough hook" method described in the book (whereby you turn the bowl in one direction and use a metal spoon like a dough hook to stir the dough in the other direction). About fifteen minutes later it had finally come together enough to turn out onto the bench again to continue kneading by hand. Despite this the dough was still rather sticky so I kept adding flour. Eventually it started to approach the mentioned goal in the book of a dough that is "tacky but not sticky" and it was ready to be left to rise.
After that there were no problems and, like I said, the final product was fine but I am just wondering if anyone else has tried this recipe and had the same sort of experience with the amount of flour in the recipe not being anywhere near enough? Unfortunately I kept adding flour about a handful at a time straight from the bag so I couldn't even hazard a guess exactly how much extra flour I ended up adding but it felt like quite a bit. It has got me a little worried now that if that was a standard dough what the wet doughs used for ciabattas and the pain a l'ancienne are going to be like!
Anyhow I'd love to hear anyone else's experience making this recipe if they've tried it.
Thanks,
Shaun