Weigh Your Flour
I know I've admonished you to weigh your flour before. I've done mean things like put all my recipes in grams and mocked you whenever I heard you mention measuring flour by volume. But if you'll bear with me I have a very interesting anecdote, and it just so happens it happened to yours truly.
I've been trying to refine my recipe before I inflict it on our unsuspecting ward relief society in their cookbook. So I've been measuring my flour like a "normal person", by volume, to make sure it at least comes close.
Thursday I measured it out and it was wet. Way too wet. Like thick pancake batter wet. I added some flour and managed to get it only a little bit too wet, but due to a minor crisis (running out of flour at the wrong moment) I wasn't able to accurately measure how much more flour I had to add to get a decent consistency. And then the bread went to rags, I think partly because it was still too wet. It was a bona fide disaster. So the next loaf I tried with heaping cups of flour, and still too wet (though not as much too wet). This is with my recipe that should give 74% hydration, but I promise you this was not 74%, it was much higher. And, my recipe uses less water than Bittman and Lahey call for in the NYT No-knead bread recipe. (By my calculations Lahey's recipe comes to 83% and Bittman's comes to 90%)
Today I demonstrated the technique at a friend's house, though instead of the overnight rise we did a few stretch and folds. 3 cups flour (again, scoop & shake like Lahey does in the video) and 1⅓ cups water. Dry. Way dry. So I add about another ⅙ cup water, and it gets sticky and soft. It worked fine, but it was a bit on the dry side after all, giving a tight crumb and holding its structure. It was good, but it wasn't wet enough for the true artisan style.
So on the one hand, way too wet. On the other hand, too dry even when following Lahey's recipe. Same person measuring. Same weather. Same city. Same week. I think it's obvious. Measuring flour by volume is just plain silly.
This week I'm going to do a binary search and find just the right hydration, by weight, for the artisan bread that Lahey and I want you to have. Then if necessary I'll update my recipe, using the 5 oz per cup conversion, hopefully putting things in the middle so that on the average, average Joe/Jane will get reasonable results. I'll probably err on the side of too-dry-for-artisan-but-still-makes-good-grandma-bread, because people are much more likely to be satisfied with grandma bread than the seriously frustrating experience that is trying to manage dough that's tooo wet.
about 6 hours later:
Differences in the type of flour, its age, and the manner in which it has been stored probably make some difference in the hydration too, at least as far as I understand things. Is that all reflected in the weight, or does it just vary less when you measure by weight?
about 11 hours later:
I suspect in this case the age and storage of the flour was the biggest factor. I was using flour we bought last week which had been dumped into another container—I think it might have been fairly uncompressed for that reason. My friend's flour was in a big bin and was probably fairly old, so it had probably compressed over time.
Weighing gets rid of those factors. The only one that is a problem is the amount of water the flour has absorbed. It's fairly dry here, so when I weigh I probably get a fairly close approximation. But if it's very humid where your flour is stored, you may indeed be getting a higher hydration than you bargained for, even if you weigh. Luckily this factor is somewhat consistent based on where you live, so you can learn to account for it as you would high-altitude cooking.