Sourdough dough too runny after kneading and no rise during cooking.

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Hello everyone,

I'm new to making bread and the baking as a whole. With the quarantine i decided to try my luck and make sourdouh bread. After feeding my sourdough for days it was finally ready to be used. I followed the recipe from this video on youtube : 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJpIzr2sCDE&t=228s

 

The ingredients are: 

Ingredients you'll need: Levain- 35g mature sourdough starter (just a little bit from your mother starter) 35g whole wheat flour 35g all purpose flour 70g room temperature water Dough- 804g good bread flour 75g whole wheat flour 740g water @90F/32C 18g fine sea salt

The bread was meant to go to my grandma and i decided to not put salt inside ash she has blood pressure. In the video the guy kneads the dought wit the startes after the autolyse, lets it rest for 30 mintures and then adds the salt and remaining water. At that stage is simply took out the dough and did a few more slap and fold for a few more minutes. The more i did it the glossy surface became stickier and stickier. The dough would stick to my hands and become impossible to remove and as i put it on the table and tried to remove my hands from underneath it, it would stick and stretch all over the place. Eventually i managed to get it in the bowl, let it rise, did the folds and proceeded as intended. The remining process went smoothly. The dough rose, i separated it into 2 loaves and let it rise in the fridge overnight. (~12-14 hours give or take). I did the poke test and the dough was springy to the touch. I preheated my oven and placed them in my dough oven at ~ 250 C (the highest my oven can go). The loaves were well shaped and everything seemed normal. The loaf spread out instead of springing upwards and had a very mild crust inside.

What could have gone wrong ? Is there a way that i over-did the slap and fold ? can that damage the final result ?

 

Tl;dr : i followed this recipe and i can't seem to get what i did wrong. I did autlyse + slap and fold (2 time separated by 2 mintures ) + folds +resting + shaping + rising + dutch oven cooking at 250C. There was no real rise and the the bread just spread out insted of having a nice oven spring.

Thank you for your help :)

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Now you know what dough without salt feels like.  Can cut the salt in half but no saltt leads to all kinds of problems with dough handling and fermentation control.

Oh. wow... good to know. I will try and use salt in my next attempt and see how it changes things. 

Thank you for your reply :) 

I’d cut the dough water back to about 600g.  Sourdoughs naturally “loosen” as they ferment, which can make even a firm dough seem slack. 

Paul

Remember that salt or sodium is absolutely essential to human health.  Some salt will not harm your grandmother.  I don't know where you live, but in the US, what is commonly referred to as "SAD" or standard american diet, contains way more sodium than people need.  Most of this comes in the form of highly processed foods which use salt both as a preservative and as an attempt to make up for some of the taste that is lost when you don't use fresh ingredients.  Also some restaurants, even when preparing things with fresh ingredients, just add way too much salt because people used to eating the SAD have trained their taste buds to expect the salt.  If your grandmother is doing a good job of keeping her sodium intake under control by eating more fresh foods at home and avoiding or at least limiting those things that are unavoidably high in salt, then the amount of salt in your homemade baked goods should not be an issue.  I say this is based on the advice of several doctors over the years who have treated my grandmother, mother, aunt, and sister for high blood pressure, and my father and myself for heart failure, which also requires a low sodium diet.  However, this is not intended to overwrite any instructions she's been given by her doctor; I'm sure there are some circumstances where sodium intake must be much more strictly controlled, so if that applies to her, disregard what I said.

You might know this already, but baking is something like a complex chemistry experiment.  More so than most cooking, small changes can cause huge differences in your final product.  Unless you understand the chemistry and what the results of your changes will be, it's often best to stick very closely to the original recipe.  I used to watch my mother make changes to every recipe she made, but when I was learning to bake (mostly cookies and cakes), she made me follow the recipes to the letter, and I had to measure everything precisely.  She told me someday I would be able to make changes, too, but not until I had learned more.  In contrast, she allowed me to do other things, such as assembling a casserole for dinner, by eyeballing the ingredients, or adding extra of some ingredient (usually cheese in my case) that I wanted more of.

With the internet you can shortcut a lot of that hands on learning by simply googling.  You might want to look for low sodium bread recipes or try a question like "what happens if I don't add salt to bread?"  Just try to make sure you are taking your answers from reputable sites and/or check several places before you proceed.  Sometimes that's still not enough to get the correct information (as I am learning with my starter, which literally every site I checked said it would be ready to bake in 5-7 days.  ha!) but on average you'll come out way ahead of doing your own experimentation.

Hey, thank you for your answer :) really appreaciate the time you took to explain those things to me.

I live in Greece and as a familly we tend to follow healthy mediteranean diet in general. Lost of fresh vegetables and littel to no processed foods. The doctor has recommened a low sodium diet as so I try to cut it down from anywhere I can really ... 

I tend to cook a lot but baking is a completely new experience. I have made about 4-5 batches (? not entirely sure) The second to last batch can be seen in the attached picture. It was a relative success to the previous loaves i'd made and i've always used the same recipe. I always held back on the water that the original recipe said because as a newbie i had a hard time handling it properly... Have gotten better with practice but i doubt i can handle a very high hydration dough. >80%.

I will try and use a lower hydration dough in combination with adding salt and see what i get. 

 

 

Here in the Netherlands there is a max percentage salt commercial bakers may add to bread. 
This is 1.5% and I have read that is also to minimal amount your dough technically need.  

So I never use less then 1.5%.
And that 1.5% of all the flour icl. the amount of flour from the starter/levain. 
Not adding it to the starter of course. 

Hello everyone. I really appreciate your comments and it actually helped me make some amazing loaves that everyone enjoyed ! 

I added 2% salt to my recipe and reduced the hydration to 65%. In addition i found a bunch of test to make during the process to make sure everything is going well. I started using the windowpane test to make sure my dough had enough gluten developed. Finally i changed my shaping and preshaping methods. And like magic my loaves came out perfect.

Thanks again for the help :)