Kitchen

[gloriajean]

I just may give it up - it's so hard to knead.

My other breads are so much easier.  

But I can easily make muffins, pancakes etc. out of the dough.  

[LizzieInSRQ]

Maybe if you have a dough hook and stand mixer?

[Shihtzursqmom]

I hate you are having difficulty with the kneading of the bread I could never make it by hand I always had to use my mixer

[Sooner]

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@gloriajean wrote:

I just may give it up - it's so hard to knead.

My other breads are so much easier.  

But I can easily make muffins, pancakes etc. out of the dough.  

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@gloriajean Use less flour.  

[gloriajean]

Maybe I'll give it another try someday.  I even used my food processor. I don't have a mixer anymore that has the dough thing.  The KA I used to have, was way too heavy for me to handle.  By the way, the bread tastes good!!

[gardenman]

This will sound stupid, but it works. Hand kneading high hydration doughs like most sourdough recipes is best done with wet hands. Yeah. I know. "You want me to make the dough wetter?" Oddly enough, it works. A wet board and wet hands will make handling a high hydration dough much easier. It's counterintuitive and seems crazy, but it works. 

In most bread making you're told, "If the dough is sticky, add more flour." That defeats the purpose of a high hydration loaf and the amount of flour needed gets absurd. Wet hands and a wet board lets you handle a high hydration dough much more easily. Also, rather than the intense push/pull of conventional kneading, high hydration doughs can often be folded more than kneaded to achieve the same effect. 

It's a different world than "conventional" bread making when you step into the high hydration bread making process. There are tons of YouTube videos out there showing how to fold, knead, shape, high hydration bread dough. It's a whole different aspect of bread making. Fun, tasty, and good, but different.