Hello, so I've made a few sourdough loaves now, each one gets better since I can kind of see where I might have gone a bit off. Anyway I was making a baguette recipe from a YouTube person I follow. The recipe was pretty much like a regular sourdough loaf, except for the shaping. Had an issue with the autolyse step. The recipe called for the following:
500 grams white flour (I used bread flour, which might have been the mistake)
500 grams whole wheat flour
650 grams of water
So this is all mixed into a bowl for the autolyse portion. I had a really hard time getting all of the flour mixture damp, it was very dry and crumbly, so I splashed in a little more water. The loaves didn't have a lot of oven spring, and the crumb was ok, not too dense, but they didn't last more than a day before they started to go stale.
Is there a trick to getting the flour completely damp? Does it affect anything negatively to add more water?
One thing that's really challenging for new bread bakers to realize is that every single bag of flour will behave differently, and you have to adjust your recipe to make the dough 'right'. In this case, you need to look at the video. Is his dough moist and elastic? You dough needs to be moist and elastic! Was his dough relatively easy to mix? So should yours be. Your high-protein flour just needs more water than his lower-protein flour.
Add more water or flour as needed to make your dough behave properly. Not only will it not harm the dough, it's essential.
Here's what you DON'T want to make changes to: dramatically increasing or decreasing the percentage of salt and leavening.
So the wheat flour I'm using seems pretty course compared to the one in the recipe, and yes the video shows a much smoother dough than mine ended up.
A 65% hydration loaf should be fine, though bread flour and whole wheat flour both tend to have high water absorption so if you were not using bread flour previously and switched, this might be part of the problem. But your description of the process confuses me a little. I don't see any levain or starter mentioned and you did say that it was a sourdough loaf so I wonder when the sour goes in. Normally the levain and water and flour are mixed without the salt and allowed to rest for at least 20 minutes. So I am inclined to think that you somehow mis-measured something along the way. Perhaps try mixing 50g each of bread flour and WW flour with 65g of water and see if you have the same problem.
So in this recipe the autolyse part doesn't have the starter or salt yet. You mix the flours and water then let it sit for 45 minutes or so before adding the starter and beginning the bulk fermentation. Here's part of the recipe:
1. In a bowl, mix together with white flour, whole wheat flour, and enough water to get about 65% hydration. Let that sit (autolyse process) for at least 45 minutes.
2. After the autolyse process, pour in the sourdough starter and add in some salt. Mix that all together until it’s nice and incorporated.
3. Start stretch and fold for every 45 minutes for 2 hours to develop the gluten structure.
4. You can perform a stretch test
Try mixing 50g white + 50g WW + 65g water and see if you can get it to come together without any dry spots. That is just a test to see if you made some obvious error last time. The flour should all get wet.
Whoever wrote the original recipe clearly doesn't understand what autolyse is about or how it works.
An autolyse step allows the amylase enzymes in the flour to break down starch and make maltose available as food for the yeast (and LAB). Salt dramatically slows down both yeast and LAB growth rates and also inhibits the amylase enzyme activity. So you don't include the salt during the autolyse. But there is no reason not to include the starter, since there is some free maltose in the flour as well as some other fermentable carbohydrates. After 20 minutes or so (20 min is enough, but there is nothing negative that comes from letting it go longer - except the lost time) there is enough maltose in the dough so that the yeast and LAB will not be limited by maltose availability as they multiply, and the amylase enzymes will continue to work at a slower rate after you add the salt but they will be ahead of the demand for maltose.
There are some wives tales about other things that autolyse is supposed to do (like breaking down gluten by activating protease enzymes in the flour). There is NO evidence to support anything more than making maltose early enough and fast enough to keep maltose availability from becoming a limiting factor in yeast growth.
Personally I would not add anything to the flour other than water and starter during autolyse (and this is supported by this paper except that in a production bakery operation holding the yeast back probably makes sense from a process efficiency perspective since they then have a single step where everything except water is added to the flour).
I think you will be more satisfied if you include the starter as part of the autolyse. The increased water availability will aid the enzymatic breakdown of the starch and improve the hydration of the flour before you start mixing. Calvel observed that complete pre-hydration of the flour reduced the energy required to mix the dough (and in a production bakery energy is money whereas for you if you are mixing by hand energy is energy).