Poolish drying out, dough taking over my body
A couple questions from a novice bread-maker (I'm on my fourth loaf) trying to figure this out:
I started a poolish yesterday (mid-day-ish) with starter plus equal parts WW flour and water. I put it in a bowl and covered it with a warm wet towel. When I checked it this morning, the towel was completely dry. When I mixed up my final dough (adding AP flour and salt and water), the dough looked way too dry to me. I think all those careful ratios in my recipe went out the window because of evaporation.
I'm guessing the answer here is to rest my poolish with a much less porous cover to prevent evaporation. Sound right?
With that carefully-measured hydration plan in ruins, and my dough looking way too dry, I added water. Of course I couldn't know how many milliliters or grams of water would be correct, because I had not measured the evaporation. So I added what "looked about right" to me.
I then tried to slap and fold the dough per this great video of Richard Bertinet. This is a 1/4 WW flour recipe, btw. It worked great in terms of the dough not sticking to the counter, and great in terms of being able to stretch and slap and fold and move the dough.
However there was a fatal problem. The dough kept sticking to my hands (much, much more than in the video). Gradually my hands became part of the dough. It kept moving up through the fingers and down the knuckles, until I had webbed hands. As I worked it -- which I did for several minutes, hoping the process would resolve the problem -- my hands were never separating from the ball of dough: me pulling away just distorted, elongated the ball of dough, rendering it misshapen. The dough was gradually taking over my body, and I could see that soon there would be no ball of dough on my counter, just a dough shell around me.
I added a little flour, but that did not resolve the issue. Eventually I gave up, scraped what I could off my body, put the misshapen mass into a bowl to rise. What did I probably do wrong there? Was the dough most likely way too wet? Does that technique just not work with 1/4 WW flour? Should I have cleaned and floured my hands over and over? Any tips?
I'm not too experienced myself, but I have some tricks and observations that have taken my own baking up a level or two over the past few months.
Are you using an established 50/50 recipe or is it something you adapted from a 100% AP flour recipe? In my limited experiments with adapting recipes, a high percentage of whole-wheat or rye flours takes a lot more water than the same mass of 100% AP flour. In any case, like you said, it works to go with what looks right, or I think even better, what feels right. Obviously hydration ratios are different between recipes but if you can feel the un-kneaded dough to be "medium-soft," with just a bit of firmness when you squeeze between fingers and thumb, that will develop into a nice pliable dough.
In my (personal and easily countermanded) experience, the slap-and-fold thing is just too much work. My game changed when I learned about two things: the autolyse and the stretch-and-fold techniques. More than anything, the key ingredient to good bread seems to be patience, as you wait for your dough to develop on its own. Even the gloppiest of doughs (like 87% hydrated ciabatta) becomes manageable if you just wait for it to do its thing.
But regardless of the method you prefer, even for a slap-and-fold kneading technique, when the dough gets too sticky you can just let it rest for 15-20 minutes. You will be pleasantly surprised when you come back to it--it should be much easier to ply!
Thanks for your response. Not such an established recipe. I learned later that the right thing for me to do would probably have been to weigh the dough and compare it to the expected weight of all the ingredients, and added the difference in water.
I kind of gave up on this dough and left it proofing overnight on my kitchen table. That led to overproofed dough that had a thin layer of alcohol on top. When I tried to shape it, it was a liquid with no structure.
With a little research I learned that when you overproof your dough to that extent: it's ruined, there's no recovering. I decided to bake it anyway, expeditiously so further breakdown of the gluten wouldn't occur. I added a dash of WW flour, folded it as best I could, and dropped it into a casserole dish -- couldn't be in a flat dish because it was just liquid.
The resulting failure was dense and chewy, but actually not quite as bad-looking on the inside as I expected. But the flavor was delicious. That sourdough starter yeast did its work well.
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On to the next loaf. I decided I would follow the same recipe except autolyze first, change the proofing durations, and how I worked the dough. Great result with the dough so far, we'll see how it turns out after shaping and baking.
Glad that your next loaf is coming along better. The first few loaves can be tricky but, like you say, no matter what happens they are almost always edible and delicious!