July 22, 2015 - 3:22am
Why do I ALWAYS need MUCH MORE flour than the recipe requires?
This most recently occurred with The Fresh Loaf Lesson 2 bread (I skipped Lesson 1). I ended up using about 4.5cups rather than the 3 in the recipe.
I've tried both weight measurements and cup measurements, for very different breads, using plain flour and other times bread flour, but the same problem recurs.
The dough start off sticky like glue, I 'knead' it for about 5 minutes before I give up. I add flour about 1/4 cup at a time, and ends up being about 50% or more flour than the recipe just to get dough to stop sucking my hands into the table.
However once I saw Rachel Khoo working a similar very sticky dough and saying that after about 10 minutes the dough forms into a smooth ball. It seems impossible to me.
Any thoughts?
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What flour do you use?
Where do you live?
What's the recipe you're following?
What's the finished product like? Are your white loaves light or heavy and dense? Same for the whole wheat - light and flavorful or dense and heavy? How much liquid goes in to dough?
You can work a pretty high hydration loaf into a beautiful light piece of dough. It is not done by adding more flour to make it less sticky. One works past that sticky point to get a beautiful supple piece of dough.
I am only recently enjoying almost consistent results. I am playing with hydration levels and really enjoying (a little too much!) the results I'm getting. And your comment is something that I remember well. In my case I would add flour for ease of handling. Not anymore. It is true that there are very obvious differences in flours and their ability to soak up liquid but I'm more often working now with a floppy piece of dough that eventually will hold it's shape without the addition of flour. And it's very seldom I serve up a brick anymore.
So keep playing with the dough. Don't fall in to that trap of adding flour if it's sticky. Assess whether you really need it or whether it's ease of handling that you're adding it for. Watch a video on YouTube of Richard Bertinet and his "slap and fold" technique and then re-assess your idea of sticky.
Have a little faith and enjoy it. It won't take long and you'll be giving away loaves to your family and friends because you're as obsessed as the rest of us here and you have a surplus :)
I just looked at the lesson 2 formula. It is a very dry mix, 3C flour and 1.25C to 1.5C liquid. It's hard for me to imagine that this produces a wet sticky dough, and a dough this dry could not be "slap and fold"ed in the Bertinet method, it's just too dry. If you're in the tropics, your flour may already have high moisture content, so you'll need a bit less water.
I wasn't suggesting anyone should take that recipe and "slap and fold". I suggested it as a resource to see what sticky looks like and what can be done with it. Bertinet does a white bread from start to finish - great resource.
Sorry if I wasn't clear.
Dough has to be a little sticky (unless it's Einkorn -- then it is very sticky) one also has to be quick with touching, more with the finger tips. Try not to smear the dough into your hands
Another tip for easier handling is just to let the mixed up dough sit covered for 20 minutes before starting to knead. Let the flour absorb the water you just put on it. Adding too much fresh flour while kneading will give you very uneven dough structure and make it difficult to have a smooth dough texture.
instead of kneading, learn and try the stretch and fold technique. It can even be used with very wet ciabatta, so it should be fine for your dough. A really long autolyse can also make a wet dough easier to handle. Trust your measurements, give your dough some time, and it should be easier to handle. I read somewhere that kneading is a great way to feel inadequate. I almost exclusively use stretch and fold now, even with an occasional quick-rise yeast bread; just needs an abbreviated schedule.
Don't be clingy or kneady.
IF a cup of flour weighs 125 g and a cup of water weighs 238 g then 3 cups of flour weigh 375g a 1.5 C of water weighs 357 g for a hydration of over 95%.You would have a goopy mess. For a newbie using white flour 68% hydration is plenty and 72% should be the goal for the perfect white bread - if you aren't making ciabatta. If you are using low quality , weak UK flour then it would be worse.
cut the water back to 255 g and use 375 g of flour. This will solve your problem.
Happy bread baking
like the others said, the dough is supposed to somewhat sticky. Try to be quick to touch & release (like it's a hot potato) the dough, using fingertips and sides of hands. Even having a thin layer of dough on your hands sometimes helps - just ignore it. If the dough is sticking to the board, you can add a very small amount of flour and use a dough scraper to get under the dough and turn it over. In general, wet dough is better than too dry - and try not to keep adding flour. My 2 cents.
Wet hands help when handling sticky dough, it might not seem intuitive but it does help.
Gerhard
I'm not talking just 'sticky', I'm talking absolutely glued to the table and my hands.
My breads always turn out hard and heavy, never light and fluffy. I use plain generic white flour from the Australian supermarket. Sometimes I make a light beautiful calzone when I make the dough VERY hydrated (so hydrated that the dough splits apart just by folding it over).
I make handmade noodles and pasta at home so with those I understand whether the dough's too wet or too dry to turn out into noodles/pasta because you have to be able to turn them into noodles/pasta, but bread seems so different. (BTW handmade noodles are very easy and fun to make and taste completely different to dried noodles and to the 'fresh' rice or wheat noodles in the store. Handmade noodles chewy, thick and very smooth. Google 'laghman noodles' for the easiest type).
In Australia unlimited or high-data download internet is expensive (about $75 a month including line rental), so I only rarely use Youtube or I'll run out of data. But I'll view the slap and fold method at midnight during off-peak download time.
While there are many good thoughts in the answers proposed by your question, which one is correct? How are you to know? Of course you can try them all one at a time. I propose this: find your own local expert, possibly by posting your location on this website requesting hands-on help. But you might also try using a step-by-step approach suggested in a textbook. Take your bread baking back several notches and study it from the beginning with the advice of the expert that wrote the textbook you've chosen. I suggest that you look, not at recipe books, but at a text book written for a school's course in bread baking.
Here are two choices, but there are others: DiMuzio's Bread Baking and Hamelman's Bread. They are sometimes available in public libraries. My personal choice, given your level of experience, would be the DiMuzio text. It's good because it's shorter and has excellent questions and practice sessions at the end of each chapter.
Try lesson one and tell us how it comes out. (click on "Lessons" or click below:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/lessons/yourfirstloaf