Local Bread Pain de Campagne mixing trouble
Hi All - So I have made a lot of bread, maybe 50 batches of sourdough and straight doughs, most all successful. But this threw me. I was making the Pain de Campagne recipe from Local Bread. The recipe is typical, building a liquid levain (high hydration) overnight, then in the morning it has you mix the flour and water to autolyse, holding back the wet levain and salt, then mix it all together.
The problem is the first build of the dough is quite dry (since you'll be adding the wet levain) so when I went to mix the dough and the levain/salt, it was like oil and water. The recipe says to mix it all together with a spatula (hah!) but the gooey levain just does NOT want to mix with the firm dough. I had to try to force them together, squeezing individual lumps of the dry dough to try to press the levain in. I'm letting it sit for a bit now to try to get them to come together on their own a bit, but I'm doubtful. It's just filled with lumps of firm dough in a super gooey mess.
I often find recipes come out very wet for me - no idea why. Recipes will describe handling the dough and mne will be much wetter and tricky to work with. I know how to handle a very wet dough, I just find the description of the dough doesn't match what I get, unless I drop the hydration by 5% or so.
Anyway, my solution to this issue above is to mix the water, flour and levain at the same time, autolyse, then add the salt alone. But has anyone run into this, and is it supposed to work this way? It just seems like these dry and wet elements are just not going to blend well without extensive kneading, and I'll need to add quite a bit of flour to ever be able to knead it by hand.
Thanks for any input. I'll go back now and see if I can get them to cooperate!
It takes a lot of squishing and squeezing to get the two things to mix together! I would maybe adjust the two (the hydration of both the autolyse and the levain) so they match up a bit more. Either that or, as you say, just mix them all together at the same time. That is what I usually do - dissolve the starter in the water then mix with the flour and let sit for 30 minutes or so. This is technically a bulk ferment without salt, rather than an autolyse, but it works fine for me. I think if you were going to let it sit for four hours or so you'd have a problem, but not 30 minutes.
Yeah that's my instinct, which really moves it back towards what I'm familiar with. It did seem to come together a bit on its own, so I bailed on kneading and I'm going with a regular stretch and fold approach.
I really find kneading a wet dough seems like I'm tearing the dough more than building structure (since it sticks to hands and bench). In the recipe he talks about kneading with slow steady movements, but there is NO way to do that with a wet dough. The only way to handle them is quick and light or it's just a total mess. I guess I just tend to the S&F method - it's worked best for me.
If I'm making only one or two loaves, then I'll work it by hand until it's smooth and starting to develop and do stretch and folds after that. If more than two loaves I'll put it in the big mixer to partially develop the dough, then s & f after. My small and arthritic hands can't handle too much squishing and squeezing!
is if much of the water is in the levain and the dough flour doesn;t have enough dough water left to hydrate it properly - at least when making the bread by hand.
It doen't make a difference with a powerful, commercial, spiral mixer though:-)
What I do is pinch the dough with my index finger and thumb. I mean I go right down to the bottom of the bucket with the dough between my finger and then pinch them closed. I do that several times one way, then turn the bucket 90 degrees and repeat. I then do folds to bring the dough together and start the process over again. It takes about 3-5 repeats to get a cohesive dough.
I started there, but seriously the two mixtures did NOT want to become one. The consistencies were just too different. Best thing (as usual) was just to let it sit for a bit and come back to it later. I think the note above was a good one - adjust hydration of the two elements to be more similar. Not sure what the benefit of the liquid levain was anyway.
What I have done in a similar situation is to do the autolyse step with less than all the flour. Generally this means using just enough flour to make a dough at the final mix hydration level. When it's time to put everything together I've added the reserved flour to the levain and mixed the now-less-hydrated levain to the rest, followed by the salt when you wish.