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There are some people, thankfully fewer than there were, who blithely post recipes as gospel even though they haven't even thought of trying them. There have been several recipe collections that have made the rounds for years -- 100 recipes for French bread, 19 for ciabatta, 40 for challah and gullible people flit from one to the other and wonder why they don't work out. For starters, most of these recipes have never been tested. Most of these recipes could have been written by a computer. Maybe some of them were. But nowhere in these compilations are there notes of corrections, alternatives, etc.
These things usually show up when someone requests a recipe for a specific bread. Some people hit a google and find some recipes and then post them. Thanks for nothing. Cudda done that myself. I think of these as zombies -- they walk the earth but have no connection to life as we know it.
Anyone who says this either has never met a thermometer or has never learned how to use one. If you take a batch of dough out of the refrigerator and put the container on the counter for an hour, the dough will maybe go from 35F to 45F. Yes, dough is a pretty good insulator. Try it some time. Take a batch of dough out and let it warm up. Then take the temperature of the inside of the dough after an hour. What you'll no doubt find is that the inside temp of the dough is somewhere between 45 and 50F. The solution is to run warm water over the sealed dough container for a minute of two. Wait a few minutes, then take the dough out of the container, turn it inside out, put it back in the container and run warm water over it again. Wait a bit and repeat. Within an hour, you should be able to get the temperature up to 70-75F, which is a good starting point for further work.
Obviously, these instructions don't apply to doughs that go straight from the refrigerator to the oven or which are designed to be baked after a minimal warm-up period.
There was a hilarious example a while back of a cookbook author who proposed that bakers percentage be named the ----- Ratio, after His/Her Own DeLuxe Self. (I left out the author's name to prevent legal recourse.) Needless to say, this was greeted with howls of laughter and roundly denounced.
But there are a lot of other examples out there of people who, for one reason or another, either invent a new name for a traditional process or misapply a traditional term or name. It seems that the sourdough process is especially fertile ground for this, since the whole sourdough thing is a bit magical. The thing to do is get a firm handle on the terms that most people have agreed on. That way, when you run into somethng that sounds whacky, you'll know what's going on and will be able to make the proper translation or adjustment. The first sections of Hamelman's "Bread" and of Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice" are excellent sources of information on terminology and usage.
You've seen these recipes. The ingredients and technique can't possibly give the result the recipe promises. This will be something like, "5 cups of flour and 2 1/2 cups of water (and some other stuff). Knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, not sticky. Add sprinkles of flour as necessary." As Necessary my foot! With a recipe like this, you'll be adding flour and kneading until the dough breaks down and you STILL won't have a dough that's smooth and elastic. The reason these recipes won't work? The writer never tested the recipes in the real world of a kitchen. This is an affliction of the cups-of-flour cookbook author; I don't have nearly as much trouble with authors who specify in weights or in metric units.
I wish I had a dollar for every mis-match of volume and weight of flour in bread books. There is no quick and easy solution to this one. You are going to have to do your own research to figure what a cup of flour means in each recipe and keep track of it. I use 4 1/2 ounces per cup as a starting point; it seems to get me pretty close to where I wind up.
This is especially vexing when it's in a recipe written by someone who specifies cup measurements and you have no idea what a "cup of flour" is supposed to weigh. I add no flour to the final kneading before shaping most of my doughs. I keep careful notes of what goes into each batch of dough, so once I get to a recipe that works, I don't add flour when I shape. In fact, I think adding flour in shaping is usually a bad idea. Here's why.
A recipe is a thought-out formula that has the proper balance of ingredients, flour, water, salt, yeast, whatever. By adding flour at the very end of the process, you do several things, none of them very good. 1. You add flour to the recipe, which can disrupt the balance. Obviously, if you add a tablespoon of flour to a recipe that has 20 pounds of flour, no one will notice. But if the recipe has 20 ounces / 570 grams of flour, you will have added 1/2 ounce / 14 grams,which is another 2.5% of flour. Most "adjustments" will require a considerable addition, which can alter the bread. 2. You are adding flour that hasn't been through the hydration process and thus isn't fully a part of the dough. 3. If you are the least bit careless in adding the flour, you may wind up with white streaks in the baked bread.
What to do?
The first time you make a recipe, take careful notes of the total amount of flour you use. In the notes,
put an indication of whether it was a drought or a Biblical deluge outside, in other words, the ambient humidity.
The next time you make the dough, use your revised total flour as the starting point, unless you
are operating under drasticly different conditions.
You may find that you added so much flour that the recipe is now a bit out of whack.
If this happens, try REDUCING THE WATER next time by enough to bring the amount of flour used back to the original amount.
If you are making a 65% bread, each ounce / 28 grams of flour requires roughly 5/8 ounce / 18 grams of water. If you find that you've added 2 ounces / 56 grams of flour, then next time, reduce the water by 1 1/4 ounces / 32 grams This should bring the dough into workable hydration and preserve the balance of the rest of the ingredients. This change should bring the hydration down a bit so the dough will work properly and it will retain the balance of the recipe.
As an example, if the original dough called for 30 ounces / 850 grams of flour and 19 ounces / 540 grams of water, a hydration of 63 1/3%, and you needed to add 2 ounces / 58 grams of flour to make the dough behave like you thought the recipe said it should, then next time, you should decrease the water by 63 1/3% of the flour weight you added, or 1 1/4 ounce / 37 grams. This would give you a recipe of 30 ounces / 850 grams flour and 17 3/4 ounces / 513 grams of water, or 60% hydration. This is a different dough than the one you had set out to make, but the dry ingredients, flour, salt, sugar, yeast, whatever, will be in better balance, since the flour is staying as it was specified and the adjustment is being made in the water. You can always add a bit of water to make the dough wetter.