May 30, 2020 - 11:55am
Kneading the sourdough
Hello sourdough lovers :)
I am working on tartine recipe for a month. But my dough never becomes smooth and silky also tears while shaping. When I add the salt after 45 minutes of autholysis if I knead it more than 30 seconds or squeeze it like Chad Robertson advised it becomes sticky and I think I ruined the glutens. But here I read they are not so fragile. Now I am only folding several times with salt and waiting for 30 minutes to fold. So I think because of not kneading or mixing enough the dough it is never smooth and silky I guess. Do you have any suggestions?
Thank you.
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What flour are you using?
My immediate recommendation is to lower the hydration to 70% and try again
%90 bread flour + %10 whole wheat but in Turkey the max percentage of protein in bread flour is %12,5
and no pockets of salt are left in the dough. Pockets of salt crystals can get hard and very nasty to hands cutting both dough and skin. Salt should be fine and when added first draws out water andthe dough can become stringy and slippery, just keep blending or kneading , folding in the salt until the dough is uniform
I don't buy the salt takes water concept. Just dissolve it before adding flour and see no reason why flour would not use all the liquid available. Gluten forming taking time and/or kneading is another thing. But nothing that four sets of folds couldn't fix at my end. The first set of folds thirty minutes after mixing is really clumsy, I try to rotate 4-5 times doing envelope folds. The remaining three sets of curl folds I do usually smoothen out the structure completely. Again, I rotate 2-3 times until dough ceases stretching. So, it takes total of 2 hours before undisturbed bulk raise starts. Knock on the wood, had been working consistently.
I first tried to tell myself that no, people know what they are talking about. But then, thought came that even if salt is hijacking some of the water, so be it, my dough will be 70% hydration instead of 72% that I target. No big deal, people make great bread in a very wide range of water percentages.
btw, after 45 minutes autolysis the gluten is indeed fragile and looks like you are destroying it. But it is the third and fourth folds after 1.5-2 hours where it normally smoothens out. Looks to me that time is a more important ingredient than mechanical action. And you better don't have undissolved salt by then to ruin THAT stage - hence my comment above about dissolving it the first thing even before flour.
sprinkling dry salt onto the dough and working it in, if by chance that happens to be the case with the poster.. I also once thought salt would dissolve on its own without blending it in first.
Why? I once had an interruption just as I added dry fine table salt to a dough after autolyse. I had just started to fold and had to cover the dough fast and come back to it, figured the wet dough over the top of the salt would dissove while resting. Surprise when I started folding the dough and after several folds had to give up. Tried to smash the lumps with my fingers but had to remove hard encapsulated salt lumps completely. Couldn't get them all. As I worked my hands were getting sore and cut. I gave the dough more time and a chance but could not save it. Had to choose between my hands or the dough. It's the only time I ever remember throwing out a dough and I'm not to giving up easily.