April 14, 2007 - 2:59pm
question about dough hydration
Hi, all. I have a recipe for 65% hydration and want to know if, in order to keep the percentage, do I need to reserve some of the flour for the board? Or do I put it all in and use extra flour for the board? If I do this, does it skew the percentage? What do you all do? I heard somewhere that extra flour for working with the dough, etc. doesn't become part of the actual dough, but don't know if it is true...
Susan
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Hey Susan
This is a great question. What I would do on a 65% dough is weigh out the correct amount of flour. I mix all of it in except a small amount. The amount set aside is used for kneading and handling. If you are going to do all your mixing in a mixer I would add all the flour at once. With this dough % it won't be hard to handle. If you do high 75%-80% stuff I don't bother to account for extra flour used for folding and handling. I just try to use it sparingly and brush off excess so as not to incorporate a whole lot of extra flour.
Da Crumb Bum
Crumb bum~
Actually, I am using my KA to knead, then turning out to finish briefly before rising. I threw in all of the weighed-out flour and then used extra (sparingly) for folding, shaping, etc. Is this what you meant?
When I make the higher-percentage doughs, I end up using far more to handle it than for the 65%. Wouldn't this definitely skew the percentage or do you think since it is so wet the skew would be negligible in the big picture?
I'm just clarifying...I am (obviously) still very new!
Thanks...Susan
Susan,
I had pretty much done it like Da Crumb Bum, i.e. just try to use as little as possible on higher hydration doughs, and reserve a small amount of flour to work the dough for the lower hydration doughs.
Recently, after seeing some suggestions on this site, I tried doing a high hydration, high percentage whole grain miche dough using water on my hands and the work surface. I wish I could see a video of someone experienced using this method. Even though I wasn't very graceful with it, it did work. Then you sort of have the opposite problem, which is you may add too much water to the dough, but it kept me from drying out my miche dough with too much work surface and hand dusting flour.
Bill
Hello Again Susan
When Kneading only by hand I reserve some of the weighed out flour to work in and use during handling. When using the mixer to knead I would throw all the flour in as your dough will come out of the mixer fairly well developed and not need much more than a light dusting to handle. I don't think that unless you are "working in" huge amounts of flour it is that big a deal. Technically it does skew the percentage though. The mistake I used to make was when kneading, I would add flour when the dough started to stick to my hands or counter instead of waiting for the dough to develope and firm up on its own. I would end up with a pretty firm dough every time. This dough also had flour that was in a variety of stages of development due to my adding it throughout the knead. As for real wet doughs you do need a little more flour to fold and handle but you can minimize the amount that gets incorperated by brushing off as much as you can during folding. You can tell if you get too much flour in your folds by if you have light streaks in your bread. Hope this helps.
Da Crumb Bum
Hi and thanks for this thread.
Can anybody say something about how hyderation works with flours?
I mean, what's the impact of 100gr 100% starter on a loaf made of 1000gr flours + 300fr water.
What I'm asking is what the chemical impact of the hyderation on the full thing.
Hi and thanks for this thread.
Can anybody say something about how hyderation works with flours?
I mean, what's the impact of 100gr 100% starter on a loaf made of 1000gr flours + 300fr water.
What I'm asking is what the chemical impact of the hyderation on the full thing.
Hi Ramat123,
I think that there's a mistake on your formula, because 300 grams of water won't even start getting 1000 grams of flour wet (don't ask me how I know).
you're looking for, but adding 100g of a 100% starter changes the final numbers by 50g flour, 50g water.
I know of no dough that calls for 33% hydration [350/1050]
-d
I just learned here a few days ago not to be afraid of sticky dough, and that you don't actually need (or want) to sprinkle flour on your kneading surface at all. Here's the video that I was shown:
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/video/2008/03/bertinet_sweetdough
In theory, if you reserve some of the flour for later, you are guaranteeing that you will actually need it later; on the other hand, if you throw it all in at the beginning and end up with a sticky dough, doesn't that mean that the dough is supposed to be sticky and you better learn how to deal with it that way if you don't want your dough to end up too dry?