What happened to my dough?
I'm making my regular baguette recipe (9% protein T65 flour, 65% hydration, poolish), and because normally the dough is a bit too wet for my liking, I decided to reduce the hydration to 62%. However, instead of becoming easier to work with, the dough actually got even stickier! The only other thing I changed was going from a 30% of total flour poolish down to 12% of total flour. The dough was so sticky that it was almost impossible to work with, it acted more like the 80% hydration ciabatta I made a while back. I did about 5-7 minutes of slap & fold, which did not improve anything; gluten development was there, it passed the windowpane test easily, but it did not behave anything like a 62% hydration dough. Against my better judgment, I had to add a large quantity of flour to get it to the state where I could form it into a ball. Now I'm waiting for it to rise so I can divide and shape, then bake and see what results I get (I am expecting a disaster).
Does anyone have any idea why this would happen? I did open a new bag of flour (same brand same type), could it be a bad batch of flour? Could reducing the poolish to 12% instead of 30% cause this?
Thanks