Possible trouble with a recipe
Hi! I'm new here, but have taken an interest in bread baking (baking in general, actually) and am starting to try new recipes. I'm pretty inexperienced, though, so am never sure if what I experience with any given recipe is usual, or within a range that could be called usual, or if I've done something wrong.
Case in point: I'm trying a recipe I found on here, a french bread using a poolish. The recipe I'm actually using from here is called "Pain de Provence [1]" (listed in the list of favourite recipes at the bottom right of the page) but I'm leaving out the herbs and alcohol to just make a plain bread (I couldn't actually find the plain recipe that this one implied existed, so I'm working from this one instead). I added the flour, water, yeast and salt to the poolish and mixed it up, and it was incredibly wet. To the point of being utterly unworkable, as my fingers were quickly glued together. I had to add probably a whole extra cup of flour to make it workable, and I'm still not certain it was enough, as it was still sticking to my hands somewhat, but so long as I didn't hold it for too long I was able to detach it fairly easily. It's sitting in bowl doing its first rise currently, so it'll still be a while before I know how it turs out. I just want to know, is that a usual thing that can happen, or did I do something wrong?
A related question: how does one find a particular recipe on this site? Is there an index somewhere? I tried some searching earlier and came up empty handed (though I'm notoriously bad at finding what I want using a search function). I'm very excited to try new things and draw on the experience of the members here, but worry I might get frustrated if it's hard to find stuff...
Thanks much for any advice!
-obax