February 3, 2010 - 2:50pm
Hydration, recipes, aging eyeballs
I was making the whole wheat levain recipe in Jeffery Hamelman's Bread book this last weekend which I haven't made in a while, and the dough seemed wetter than I remembered it. I had a chance to re-open the book today and noticed what happened. For some reason I misread a measure in the final dough step. Where it says 1 lb, 1.3 oz water, for some strange reason I thought it said 1 lb, 8 oz water. As Homer Simpson says,
DOH!
anybody know what that mistake resulted in hydration?
Russ
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You've mixed it up already. Solutions... could double the recipe and reduce the water in the doubling or add enough flour (keep track of it for the salt calculation) to make the dough. So that is the real Q right? How much flour needed to get the same hydration?
Too much brain work for me, I'd add rolled oats and salt to the recipe, they soak up lots of water... Add some and wait 20 minutes and then add more if needed. I'd start with half a cup. Rolled oats are great!
Mini
Thanks for the suggestions Mini but this is a day after the fact....
Russ
If I've got it right you upped the % water to 88% of the flour. If you figure in the 100% hydration levain your overall hydration is 90% Were you still able to produce something that resembled bread?
88%? Ha! No wonder this was so much fun. Yes I managed to get two low rider loaves out of it. I kept it at the hydration it was at and just went for it. Nothing pretty enough to post pictures of, kind of spread and flattened out but with a few inches of rise in the middle, really good eating fortunately. Moist crumb and chewy crust, good flavor from the whole wheat (Bob's red mill).
Believe it or not, I had no idea what was going on. This was the first I have strayed far from Vermont Sourdough in quite awhile, and also I just started using a bag of Gold Medal AP flour I picked up recently just to see the difference, whereas I always use King Arthur.
Pretty comical.