120% water "dough"

[sladflob]

I was making some ordinary French bread the other day when I realised that the dough wasn't coming together in the mixer. After a while, it dawned on me that I'd halved the recipe with respect to flour, salt and yeast, but put the full amount of water in. So what I had was a slurry which was effectively 120% water. I didn't know what to do at this stage (I didn't want to double up on everything as it would have made too much bread) so I ended up chucking out the slurry and starting again, which seemed like a terrible waste. It was only afterwards that I thought that if I'd been any kind of baker at all, I would probably have had a multitude of options up my sleeve as to what I could do with the dough (use it as a sourdough starter, etc.). I wonder what the experienced bakers here would have done in my situation (other than not made the mistake in the first place :-)

james

[Headless Chicken]

Personally

double out in the yeast so you've started making 2x batch.
Split the slurry in half to make another bread and continue on.

I really don't know how practical that would be in a real bakery though.

[KyleW]

Chances are you could have added the missing ingredients and been fine. You would have ended up with twice as much bread. If there was no salt in the "dough" you could have divided the goop in half. You could have added more flour to half and kept the other half, as a preferment, for another 2-3 days. The salt would present a problem for the preferment however.

THe only way to use all of the goop and not produce twice the bread would be to somehow "dehydrate" it. I neat trick if you can figure it out :-)

[sladflob]

Yes, it did cross my mind to add the missing ingredients but I thought that would make too much bread and the resulting loaves would go to waste. For some obscure reason I didn't perceive that throwing away the slurry was also a waste until afterwards. At least if I'd made twice as much bread I could have given it away or something. Strange how ones brain works sometimes!

[KyleW]

THe other thing you can do, in the future, is bake twice the bread and freeze what you don't want to use. Bread freezes very well.