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23h • 🥖 Saturday Bake Along
That Moment Your Dough “Falls Apart” After Adding Salt 🧂
If you’ve been doing fermentolyse with me, you’ve probably had this moment.
You add the salt. You start working it in. And suddenly the dough looks like it’s coming apart. Tearing. Going lumpy. Falling away in pieces in your hands.
A lot of bakers panic right there. Some grab more flour. Some start over. Some assume they ruined the bake.
Don’t. This is normal. And here’s why it happens.
Salt tightens gluten. That’s its job. But when you sprinkle salt across the top of a dough and start pinching it in, the salt doesn’t hit the dough evenly.
There’s more salt in some spots than others. The gluten where the salt is concentrated tightens fast. The gluten where there’s no salt yet stays slack.
Tight gluten next to slack gluten means the dough literally pulls apart. You’re watching two different doughs in the same bowl, briefly, while the salt finds its way through.
Keep working it. Pinch and fold. Wet hands. Two to three minutes of patient incorporation. The salt distributes, the gluten evens out, and the dough comes back together stronger than it was before.
Then rest for 45 minutes before your first coil fold. That’s when you’ll really see the structure show up.
This is the kind of thing you only learn by watching the dough through the moment instead of bailing on it. Trust the process.
Saturday’s poppy seed bake is going to give a lot of you this exact moment. Now you know what to do when it shows up.
Perfection is not required. Progress is.
Henry ⭐🔥
4:17
21
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That Moment Your Dough “Falls Apart” After Adding Salt 🧂
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