Wetter dough, bigger mess

One quiet Tuesday evening I finally sat down with my notes on hydration. There is flour on the kitchen radio and I have stopped trying to clean it off.

What surprised me

The dough spread across the tray like something escaping, and I baked it anyway. A friend from work has a much simpler approach, and I suspect it’s better than mine. Since the start of spring I’ve been trying to do less and pay more attention.

The part nobody mentions

The advice in a book I picked up for almost nothing made perfect sense until I actually tried it. I’ve since gone back to doing it the old way, at least for the feeding schedule. One quiet Saturday morning I went back to the beginning and started again.

Small improvements

The honest answer is that I don’t know why it worked this time. I keep a note of these things now, because I forget them faster than I’d like. There’s a lot of strong opinion about this, and most of it seems to come from people with more time than me. I’d like to say I planned it this way, but I didn’t.

What surprised me most was how small the change was. Most of what I know about hydration came from getting things wrong first. Part of the problem was the cast-iron pot, although I didn’t want to admit it at the time. Nothing about this is difficult in theory, which is what makes it so annoying in practice.

Note to self: it was fine. It’s always fine.

On to the next thing, then.