5 Tips: Working With High-Hydration Dough

hey friends it's martin i'm in the studio today with five tips for working with high hydration does [Music] [Music] okay tip number one for working with high hydration dose know your dough you should know what the percentage of total hydration is that you're working with so take the total quantity of liquid and put it over the total quantity of flour and then you'll get a percentage right so if the dough is 70 percent hydration it's going to feel a certain way and if it's 90 hydration it's going to feel pretty sticky right so know your dough okay tip number two for working with high hydration doughs and this is pretty basic but it's super important and that is just simply fermentation you need to ferment well if you have a really wet dough that's quite slack and you don't ferment it well it will not have as much strength as it should have when you go into the divide pre-shape shape and everything else so make sure that you're fermenting well make sure that your doughs have good temperatures so if the dough at the end of mix is 72 degrees or 74 degrees and it's a cold time of year you're going to want to do something to make sure that your dough is fermenting well and that could be moving it to a warmer place or maybe it's fermenting for longer so make sure that you're fermenting well the other thing that's going to affect the quality of your fermentation is the health of your leaven so make sure that your cultures are good make sure that they're happy and healthy as you go into the mix so fermentation tip number two tip number three for working with high hydration doughs fold for strength i'm going to show you three folds which will add strength to your dough during fermentation okay the first fold that i'm going to show you is what i would call a bowl fold i dip my hand in some water and then i start on the outside of the dough and i lift and press in and lift and press in hand starts to stick just get a little more water so up and down up and down and basically i'm just circling the bowl until i feel the dough start to come together and you can kind of see that happening and now often at the end i'll just put it back in the bowl like that the second type of fold that i want to show you is what we might call a coil fold or sometimes what i would think of as a tub fold and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to wet my hands and then i'm going to go in and under the dough and lift up and then sort of flip it away from me so i go down up and then let it fall forwards see i'm lifting and then i'm letting it fall forward i'm going to go in and lift and i'll let it stretch a little bit and let it fall forward i might do one more and that's it okay the third type of fold that i want to show you is what we'll call a lamination fold so i've got a little bit of water and i'm just going to get my work surface wet you could also spritz it if you wanted to with some water then i take my dough which has been rising here in the bowl it's pretty soft so i'm going to work this dough stretching it and once i get it sort of spread out a little bit then i can just go ahead and put it back together by bringing it in like this a couple of those will really add a lot of strength during the fermentation process okay tip number four for working with high hydration does be gentle when you're shaping really use a light hand i'm going to show you two examples of how to do that and that will help you avoid having these sticky spots and tears which can be really problematic so i have these doughs pre-shaped already and i'm going to set it down seam side up okay so for the batard what i'm gonna do is on a very lightly floured surface very lightly floured i'm gonna set it down i degas just a little bit i'm going to bring the side in and i'm going to bring the other side in now as i'm shaping i'm making sure that i'm still mobile on this surface and if i'm not i can go out to a part of the surface here where i have a little bit of flour and i can grab just a little bit and bring it back and now all i'm gonna do is just roll it down and just pressing very gently to seal very gently to seal and very gently to seal now that can go into a pan or it could go into a banaton for a final proof and then bake so there's the batard and you can see how just how gentle i was right okay set that aside and then i have another one and now this surface doesn't really have any flour left on it so maybe i grab just a tiny bit of flour and just give just a whisp so let's do a bowl again this is a whole wheat dough that's well over 90 hydration just judging by the handling of it i think it could have gone to a hundred percent okay so for the pool what i'm going to do is i'm going to make my way around folding to the center folding to the center very gently right i'm working on the outside of the dough i'm not putting the weight of my hand into the loaf if i do that this dough is wet enough that it's just going to smear and immediately i'll have these sort of tacky spots so i'm staying kind of on the outside just only using the force that's required to seal the dough in this case making my way around and then it's almost done i'm going to turn it over and again this is a bool and now i could do one of two things i could either use my hands which is my normal way to shape or i could use one hand and then in the other i could use a bench knife let's use a bench knife you see i'm going to try and move slowly you see how i'm adding some tension to this that's all that's required it's done if i turn it over you can see that it's pretty well closed on the bottom and i'm only touching it just very briefly just to make sure that my hands don't stick but that's done so there's a bool and a batard shape okay tip number five for working with high hydration doughs and that is cold fermentation so after you have bulk fermented divided pre-shaped shaped and you have your dough that you want to bake in a basket or whatever your proofing vessel is i really recommend cold fermenting at that point so a period of eight to twelve hours in the fridge overnight covered loosely with a plastic bag or similar that will allow the dough time to not only develop flavor which is excellent it will also improve the quality of the crust and it will make scoring on day two a little bit easier so after you shaped i recommend cold fermenting eight to twelve hours for those nice crusty sourdoughs especially if they are high hydration dough so that's tip number five in the five tips for high hydration does [Music]

Channel: King Arthur Baking Company

Views: 388,025

Keywords: baking, king arthur flour, flour, dough, bread, high hydration, king arthur

Id: WQvym-wMEFA

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021