Squeegee dough off mixing hand

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roboboticus on 18 Jun 2021 at 11:24

I'm working my way through Ken Forkish's Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, and while describing hand mixing sticky dough, he says,

use your other hand to squeegee any dough off your mixing hand and back into the tub

Every time I've tried to clean my mixing hand with the other hand, it's been a comical disaster, with dough sticking to both hands.

It's a small thing, and I feel a little silly asking, but I am curious to know whether there's a trick to this or it it's simply bad advice.

As Richard said grab your dough scraper with your clean hand to scrape dough off your mixing hand.  Also for extra points, wet the dough scraper and less dough will stick to it that you’re scraping off your mixing hand.

Benny

Try latex gloves. Put them on and wet them with water then shake off the excess. The dough doesn’t seem to stick to the gloves as much as it does on your hands.

What I've learned is that even without "autolyse" just giving the roughly mixed dough a few minutes of rest is enough to significantly reduce the stickiness. Hence, I use a dough whisk to do the initial mix without touching the dough by hand, cover and leave it literally enough to put the ingredients back, feed the starter that I just used or something like that, not more than 5 minutes, and already it's much easier to knead it by hand. If you leave it longer it'll be even better. Also, kneading with slap&folds leaves much less dough on your hands in my experience than traditional table kneading.

So basically, the advice is to get a dough whisk for the initial mix, and then give the dough some time.

Also, gloves indeed work great - less sticks, and what sticks is very easy to remove from them, but now they are often in short supply and I haven't bought them for a while.