May 17, 2020 - 3:35pm
Taffy?
I forgot to add salt to my 75% hydration flour and everything was going swimmingly until reshape. I pulled it out and it instantly turned to taffy. No amount of slap and fold got it back. It had great strings but no cohesiveness. I originally didn't remember I forgot to add the salt. Would this explain the taffy like splooge on everything in my kitchen? (And on my clothes, hair)
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My guess is that your dough fermented much faster than it would've with salt! Whatever the actual scientific reason, my understanding is that lack of salt can produce this result.
I’m so sorry about your dough & your kitchen...and your clothes...and your hair. But, I must congratulate you on getting that picture! That’s the kind of picture that’s definitely worth a thousand words. If I ever wondered what taffy-like bread dough looked like, I can wonder, no longer. Thank you for sharing.
Again, though, so sorry about your dough.
Can it be saved? Taste it first for sourness. Then add baking soda and salt so a small portion of it and fry like a pancake. Did it rise? How does it taste?
Thank you for that. Was this a sourdough? It looks very much like what I was trying to describe here:
Pesky thiol compounds
For me, the "taffy-ness" showed up early in the process, but it can happen later as it did for you. The difference between this and gluten breakdown is that this gluten will stretch and stretch, the other will become brittle and break.
There's a video my boyfriend took 20-30 minutes earlier with I think some hysterical laughing and screaming by me. My second mistake was trying to use water instead of flour to try and get it to stop sticking. I suppose I could have used flour to save it, but really it was running off the counter and hitting the top cabinets when I tried to slap and fold and I just wanted to clean it up and get takeout. (And I literally was handcuffed by the dough and couldn't reach any supplies; he would have had to get them and add them. I think it taught me an extremely valuable lesson why my breads aren't getting strength and paid special attention to temperature and salt this go round. Of course I also went back to the more complicated autolyse and stretch/fold recipe I tried before the Bake with Jack simple sourdough, but it already feels a lot better (except for the oops I forgot to add the reserve water until just after I mixed levain salt and autolyse.)
Also, argh on the whole fixing the starter. I made mine with just flour and water and nearly killed it in a preheating oven a few months ago. I guess I assumed it was pretty hardy since it survived that and refrigeration, switch to spelt when there was no rye flour to be had and back to rye now that I found it.
Hopefully the loaf with the extra salt works, otherwise I guess I will have to work on the starter next.
... switch to spelt when there was no rye flour to be had and back to rye now that I found it.
Ah, well that could have destabilized your starter and set this in motion. As long as you stick to the rye now, it will probably straighten itself out, and hopefully it won't take too long to get back there.
The dough is not bulk fermented in 5 hours, it had bubbles but no dome, so I folded it one more time and am now waiting for doubling. If it doesn’t I’ll throw it in my too cold fridge, and in the morning out it into pans and let it bake that way.
I took the starter out of the fridge and threw all but 40g away and fed it 40g rye and 40g water. Going to feed when it doubles and hope I can get it stronger. It always doubled overnight but maybe not fast enough to make bread with? I guess I have a lot more studying to do.