August 6, 2023 - 12:17pm
Mixing: how to incorporate flour encrusted on sides of bowl?
I hand mix dough in a large metal bowl, and I always end up with some flour encrusted on the sides of the bowl. I've seen videos where people cleanly scrape down the sides of their mixing bowl with a bowl scraper to incorporate the dry bits, but this doesn't work very well when I try it. It seems like I'd need to introduce a fair amount of additional water to soften and free up the encrusted flour, and since I'm already making a pretty high hydration (75%) dough, I'm hesitant to add more water.
Is there some technique I'm missing that would allow me to incorporate all of the flour and end up with a clean bowl?
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Is your bowl scraper big or small? Small plastic scrapers do a much better job, in my experience.
There are a couple of solutions, well, three that I can think of
1) make your bowl non stick. Spray a tiny bit of non stick baking spray and distribute by hand all over, so that nothing will stick to the sides as you add flour and wet ingredients. You can make your own non stick blend at home from liquid lecitine and ghee (1:1)and keep it frozen, use 1-2 grams at a time.
2) use the well method of slowly adding wet ingredients to the dry ones. This way, water does not touch the metal at all and the sticking problem won't happen.
3) leave the dough inside that same bowl to rest for a while, to autolyse or to ferment, covered, and it will naturally moisten the crusts should they occur and they will be easy to scrape off and mix in later.
If the bowl is large and the batch of dough is small then lightly mist the sides of the bowl from a small mister, it will barely add two or three grams of water to the total.
Alternatively, mix your 75% hydration dough with 70% water content and use the remaining 5% of water to moisten the hard crusts should they occur.
These are great suggestions, thanks!
I've been using a relatively large bowl scraper, but I have a smaller one I'll try.
I probably won't try to make the bowl non-stick, but I'll try the other suggestions and report back. Thanks so much.