Bread & Doughs
Discover why higher-hydration doughs create an open, airy crumb, and how to handle sticky dough with confidence using folds instead of heavy kneading.
The first time I made a genuinely wet dough, I was convinced I'd ruined it. It slumped across the bowl like something half-melted, stuck to everything it touched, and refused to hold any shape at all. But that loaf came out of the oven with the most open, glossy, custardy crumb I'd ever baked at home, and it taught me the single most useful lesson in bread: water is not the enemy. Learning to work with a wet dough, rather than fighting it back to a stiff, obedient ball, is what separates a dense sandwich loaf from something that makes people stop mid-conversation.
Bakers talk about hydration as a percentage, and it trips people up because it isn't a percentage of the whole dough. It's baker's percentage, where flour is always 100% and everything else is measured against it. So a dough with 500g flour and 350g water is running at 70% hydration. Add another 50g of water and you're at 80%.
That number tells you almost everything about how a dough will behave before you've touched it:
One thing worth saying plainly: these bands are not fixed rules. A strong Canadian bread flour with high protein will happily drink 78% and still feel workable, while a soft supermarket plain flour might feel like glue at 70%. The flour matters as much as the number, which is why I never trust a hydration figure copied from someone else's recipe without adjusting to what's actually in my bag.
Here's the mechanism, without the biochemistry lecture. Bread rises because yeast produces carbon dioxide, and that gas gets trapped in a web of gluten. For those bubbles to grow large and irregular — the open crumb everyone chases — the gluten walls between them need to be able to stretch thin without tearing.
Water is what makes gluten extensible. A dry, stiff dough has short, tight gluten strands that resist stretching, so the gas ends up in lots of small, uniform pockets. That's a perfectly nice, tight crumb, ideal if you want to spread jam without it dripping through. But add more water and those same strands become long and elastic. The dough can inflate into big, thin-walled cells, and when it hits the oven's heat, the trapped steam pushes everything wider before the crust sets.
The other benefit is one people underrate: moisture equals shelf life and tenderness. A well-hydrated loaf stays soft for days longer than a dry one, because there's simply more water held inside the starch. A 65% loaf can go stale overnight. A good 78% loaf is still lovely on day three.
The trade-off, and there's always a trade-off, is that wet dough holds its shape poorly. It wants to spread. So everything you gain in the crumb, you have to earn back with structure — and that's a handling problem, not a water problem.
This is where most people give up on high hydration. They add the water, the dough turns into paste, they panic, and they knead in an extra fistful of flour to make it behave. That flour quietly drops the hydration back down and undoes the whole point. I've done it. It's a very natural mistake.
The fix is to change your tools and your hands, not the dough.
Wet dough sticks to dry skin. It does not stick to wet skin. Before I touch a slack dough, I dip my hands in water — a bowl kept on the bench — and I re-wet them every time things start clinging. It feels counterintuitive to add more water to a dough that's already wet, but a film of water on your fingers is a release layer, not an ingredient, and a few grams smeared on your hands changes nothing about the loaf.
A metal or stiff plastic bench scraper is the single best £5 you'll spend on bread. It does what your hands can't:
Once I started shaping wet doughs with a scraper in one hand and a lightly wet other hand, the whole process went from a wrestling match to something almost calm.
The classic image of breadmaking is aggressive kneading — the heel of the hand driving into the dough for ten minutes. That works fine for stiffer doughs, but it's miserable and largely pointless with a wet one. You can't knead soup.
Instead, you develop the gluten over time with stretch-and-folds, and this is genuinely the technique that changed my bread most.
Here's how I do it during the first hour or two of bulk fermentation:
What you'll notice is remarkable. In the first set, the dough is a sloppy mess that barely holds a fold. By the third set, it's smooth, springy, and starting to pull back at you — it holds a rounded shape when you gather it. You didn't add anything. You just aligned the gluten and let time and gentle tension do the work.
A few honest caveats from experience:
A few failure modes come up again and again, and none of them mean high hydration "doesn't work for you."
The dough spreads flat when tipped out. Usually this is under-developed gluten or over-proofing, not too much water. Try one more fold set next time, and shape a touch earlier. If it's already happening, a well-preheated Dutch oven and a confident, quick shape can still coax decent oven spring out of it.
It sticks to the banneton and tears. Rice flour is your friend here — it doesn't absorb moisture the way wheat flour does, so it stays powdery against a wet skin. A generous dusting of rice flour in the proofing basket has saved more of my loaves than any other single trick.
The crumb is open but gummy. That's almost always underbaking, not hydration. Wetter loaves need longer in the oven and a proper cooling period — at least a couple of hours — for the interior to finish setting. Cutting in too soon on a high-hydration loaf gives you a wet, pasty centre and an unfair reputation for the technique.
If you normally bake at 68%, don't leap to 82% overnight. Go to 72%, get comfortable with the feel and the folds, then nudge up 3-4% at a time. Each step teaches your hands what that dough should feel like, and you'll develop the instinct to know when a dough is properly developed by touch rather than by the clock. That instinct is worth more than any recipe.
If you want a low-stakes experiment, take whatever loaf recipe you already trust and add water in stages across a few bakes, keeping notes. Nothing fancy — just the hydration, the flour you used, how the dough felt, and how the crumb turned out. Within three or four loaves you'll have a personal map of what your flour and your kitchen can handle, which is far more valuable than any number I could give you.
Wetter doughs aren't a party trick or a purely aesthetic pursuit. They genuinely bake into softer, longer-lasting, more interesting bread. The only thing standing between you and that crumb is the willingness to let the dough be sticky for a while, trust the folds, and keep a bowl of water and a bench scraper within reach. Do that, and the loaf that once looked ruined in the bowl will come out of the oven looking exactly like the reason you started baking in the first place.
Ben has kept a sourdough starter alive longer than some friendships and baked through every failure worth learning from. He demystifies bread with honest timelines and real dough photos, because good bread rewards understanding far more than gadgets.
Keep reading
Compare baking steels and Dutch ovens for home bread, weighing crust, oven spring, and price so you can choose the right tool for the loaves you bake.
Ben Alcott
Stop guessing when bread is proofed. Learn to read dough by feel and the poke test, with visual cues for under, over, and perfectly proofed loaves.
Ben Alcott