January 5, 2014 - 9:29am
Dough dried out overnight
Two questions:
1. If my dough dries out after an overnight rise in the fridge, even with plastic wrap on top, does that mean my fridge is just too cold, too dry or I didn't use enough water in the dough?
2. Follow up, I had to add a fair bit of extra water to the Bagel recipe in the Artisan Jewish Deli At Home book recipe to get the dough to form, and then it still seemed a little on the dry side. Would that explain #1? Should I just add more water next time? It used both yeast and sourdough starter and called for an overnight rise in the fridge.
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Post your recipe otherwise is hard to say what wrong, but sound like you need more water in dough.
Mirko
I'd agree that it sounds like your dough is too dry. Liquid should be at very least 60% hydration - in other words 600g water to 1 kg flour. Also, did you oil the plastic wrap and wrap tightly? If it's loosely over the dough and the dough is still exposed to air, some bits may dry out there.
Lisa
I think the hydration was much too low. When I do bread I do 75% hydration, and this recipe calls for 900g bread flour to only 350 grams of water. I added at least 100-200 grams more and it wasn't enough. Plus it called for 350 grams of sourdough starter.
How do such crappy recipes make it into books like this? Even online...I tried the KIng Arthur Flour sourdough pizza dough and it needed WAY more water than the recipe called for. Can air moisture based on climate really make that much of a difference?
Many things can make a huge difference to the amount of water a dough will need. The flour itself has a huge impact. I was making bread at someone else's house the other day and they only had a supermarket bread flour, worse still it was extra strong and it drank loads of water. In fact, I couldn't get the dough right at all. But even one batch of flour can vary from another from the same miller. I use very high quality flour but often find I still need a little extra water despite weighing everything very carefully.
I re-made the same recipe but added water by feel until I felt it was sufficiently hydrated. It survived the overnigth rise still moist enough.
They came out great: