Adding flour to no knead dough

lulu3601 · February 4, 2018, 6:43pm

I like the no-knead technique and have had a lot of success with it. The only problem is that no-knead dough is too wet to form into any shape and I wind up just plopping it into the dutch oven. This works but it doesn’t create nice loaves. Does anyone have any experience with adding enough flour after the proofing stage to make the dough more manageable? Or should I leave well-enough alone under the theory that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Locksley · February 4, 2018, 8:07pm

Try 70% hydration which is what I use and get good results

lulu3601 · February 5, 2018, 12:15am

Thanks. I’ll try it.

Locksley · February 5, 2018, 12:55am

Good luck

Ronda · February 9, 2018, 12:39am

I’m new to making bread. I have had a lot of luck making sourdough no knead but I, too, would like to either make it in a torpedo shape or put in in a loaf pan. Can this be done? I don’t know what 70 percent hydration means. Could you post the recipe?

lulu3601 · February 9, 2018, 2:20am

Dear Rhonda,

I’m an experienced bread baker, but I had to look up 70% hydration, too. There is a recipe here:

Apparently, 70% hydration for bread , according to this recipe, is cup of water minus two tablespoons to 2 cups of flour. I haven’t tried it yet, but plan to.

Fermentada · February 9, 2018, 10:32pm

@Ronda and @lulu3601 Hydration is the ratio of water weight to flour weight, expressed in a percentage. So if your recipe is two loaves of bread, it might be 1000g of flour and 700g of water. That’s 70% hydration. I didn’t own a scale for a long time and baked just fine with volume and sensing if my dough was too dry feeling or too wet for me to handle. That said a scale is great for many reasons, not the least of it is less measuring cups and spoons to wash

@Ronda Here is an example of a recipe I developed for Breadtopia with two options, one 75% hydration (I give the cups and Tbsp amounts as well as grams) and one 72% hydration.

The 75% one is all whole grain flour, and seemed to absorb a lot of water. The 72% is 40% whole grain flour and felt just was wet with less water. I bring up this recipe because I shaped the loaf in an oval, used an oval basket and baked it in a oval clay baker. I have seen people put oval loaves into round dutch ovens, as long as the vessel is big enough. Also I have taken a recipe like this and decided at the last minute to put it into a rectangular loaf pan (lined with parchment or oiled).

Here is a loaf pan recipe with video

Here is one I wrote up in the forums a while back

Good luck! I hope this helps.