I am a newbie. After 4 (instead of 2 stretch and folds and adding more flour) my dough did not really get the sheen that was shown in the video. It still felt a lot wet. Now after the 12 hour rise. It is SUPER wet, not able to do coil and fold. Is there any salvaging this or is it a throw away?
Probably salvageable. Do you have a bread pan? If you do, try following the instructions from this recipe for einkorn bread in a bread pan:
Handling wet dough is a challenging exercise. I’ve found that wetting the counter and my fingers makes it a bit easier to manage without the dough sticking to everything.
@spiderpeck, I have been struggling with the same recipe for about a week now. Although this is not an answer to your question, I would suggest you adjusting the dough consistency not strictly on the recipe but primarily by touch and feel next time. I achieved the dough consistency similar to the one on the video at 65% hydration in my case as an example. It was quite sticky at that point, but was still manageable with wet hands and fingers. It remained manageable (perhaps even a little better) following the bulk fermentation. Just a thought from another newbie…
THANK YOU @hakayova!!! I am getting ready to try again with a new batch. For this try, I was too impatient so I added more flour and did more stretch and folds but it is soooooo wet. I can see now that the itty bitty flour I am adding is no comparison to going from 85% down to 65% hydration. I think (from a newbie point of view) that it is easier to add water than it is to add flour?
I mix the ingredients in a Kitchenaid stand mixer, since I am lucky to have one. In this particular setting, I find it easier to start with all other ingredients being in the bowl then adding water. I feel like it gives me more control in making the judgement when the dough is saturated enough and not too wet. However, if you do the opposite, admittedly, you can always add some more flour to stiffen things up. I was curious of calculating what percentage of hydration I would come up with, and for that purpose adding water was just simpler for me. It is definitely a learning curve, and “listening to your dough” is a big part of it since the percentages are more fluid than fixed based on your ingredients is what I learned from this process so far.
Please see the other thread I started, so far a monologue 
:
https://forum.breadtopia.com/t/newbie-failing-to-replicate-no-knead-sourdough-tutorial/13709/2
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Thank you Homebreadbaker Paul and Abe? I thought I saw a post from an Abe suggesting I salvage the dough by making Focaccia? Just to show how much of a newbie I am, I dorked around with my “failed” dough before I saw any of the posts. By then it was too late. I have dough soup at hand even when I added so much more flour. I am new to bread making let alone sourdough bread baking is cuz. I think I do not understand the “science” behind it all. In any case I am baking the dough soup ala Focaccia. I figure I can feed it to the chickens at the very least.
Thank you Hakayova Eyrup Duran. I tried the recipe with 65% hydration. That was too dry. Then I read your posts and link more carefully and realized you only used white flour. I do have 50% wheat. I upped the hydration to 70-75%. Dough was much more workable on stretch-and-fold. Will report back on result.
Here’s an article I wrote that might help getting your bearings:
And here is a relevant section from that article:
Dough Hydration
After confusion over length of proofing / fermentation time, probably the next most common mystification in sourdough bread baking (or maybe any form of bread baking; I’m not really sure because I’m pretty much just a sourdough guy myself) has to do with the dough hydration ; how wet it is. Technically, in bread baking, hydration is the percentage by weight (or, if you must and in my opinion, you mustn’t, by volume ) of water to flour in your dough. For example, if you have 1,000 grams of flour and 900 grams of water, that is 90% hydration. 1,000g of flour and 650g of water would be 65% hydration.
Dough hydration is another area where you are likely to experience problems sometimes if you try to follow a recipe to the letter. This is because different flours have wildly different responses to water. You could measure out the same weight of two different flours and mix them with the same weight of water and have two doughs that feel completely different; one might be relatively stiff, dry, and very manageable and the other might be wet, sticky, and hard to handle.
And when I say “two different flours,” I mean any two different sources of flour, which could include even two different batches of flour of nominally the same grain, milled in the same way (though those will tend to be more similar than flour from two different grains, or floured milled in different ways). White (roller milled) flour has very, very different properties when mixed with water than 100% whole grain flour. Bolted (sifted) flour is different from either white or whole grain. In general, all other things equal, the closer the flour is to whole grain, the more water you will likely need to use to get the same dough consistency. In other words, a 70% hydration dough made with white bread flour might feel similar to an 85% or 90% hydration dough made with 100% whole grain flour.
As with proofing time, in my experience, you also have to hold any recipe instructions that specify a certain amount of water very loosely, develop a sense of the useable range of dough wetness, again, listen to the dough and expect to adjust the ratio of water and flour in a recipe (maybe fairly dramatically) in order to get the dough into that range.
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I think it is MUCH easier to add flour to a “too wet” dough than to try to incorporate water into a too dry dough … in fact, trying to add water to a too dry dough makes me say bad words!!
I would strongly advise reading @homebreadbaker 's article linked in the comment above.
The other thing about adjusting flour-water is that if you add flour, mix a little bit, decide it is still too wet … you might not be giving the dough enough time to absorb the water and ultimately end up with a too dry dough. As @hakayova noted, go for the consistency in the video and go slowly. You might try adding flour a little at a time (30-40 grams approx. 1/4 cup), mix and let it sit (mini-autolyse) for 10-15 minutes before deciding if you want to add more.
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Since the flour = 100% and everything is in relation to the flour, young can add water to a dough without upsetting the balance of other ingredients. However adding flour to a dough will upset everything else. I prefer to add water till it feels right.
P.s. glad you found the focaccia idea helpful. I did write the idea initially and intended to write another more detailed response when I got side tracked. But you still saw it and made use of it.
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