A 78% summer sourdough that nearly beat me, and the number that saved it

There is a moment on a warm Friday evening, about an hour after the second set of folds, when you can tell a dough has other ideas. Mine was sitting in the tub looking less like bread and more like something that had given up on structure entirely. Slack, shiny, pooling towards the edges. I had house music on and a beer open and I genuinely thought I had lost the whole bake.

The culprit was me, not the flour. It had been 26 degrees in the kitchen all day, and in that kind of heat I always get greedy with water. I had gone in at 78% hydration on a flour that is honestly happier around 72, and the warmth had done the rest. Warm dough ferments faster and feels wetter, and the two together turn a confident 78% into a sticky mess you cannot shape.

Reading a dough that has gone too far

Before you reach for more flour in a panic, it helps to know what you are actually looking at. A dough that is genuinely over-hydrated will not hold any shape at all when you tip it out. It spreads flat, tears when you try to build tension, and the surface stays wet and glossy no matter how many coil folds you do. That was mine. It was not underproofed, it was just carrying more water than the gluten could hold at that temperature.

The fix is not to keep folding and hoping. The fix is to work out where the dough should have been in the first place, then bring the next one back to that number so you are not guessing at midnight.

Working back to a number I could actually shape

I did the sensible thing a day too late and put the ratio through the free DoughRise Hydration Calculator. Punch in your flour weight and current hydration, tell it the target, and it gives you the exact grams of water to add or hold back. For the rescue batch the next morning I built the dough at 72% from the start, which for 500g of flour is 360g of water, and left myself room to add a splash later only if it felt too tight.

That last bit matters in summer. It is far easier to add a little water during mixing than to claw it back out once the gluten has hydrated. So I now start lower on hot days and top up by feel, rather than committing to a big number and praying.

How it baked up

The 72% loaf was a different animal. It held tension when I preshaped, it took a score cleanly, and it went into the oven looking like an actual boule rather than a landslide. The crumb was still properly open, just with walls thick enough to stand up, and the crust had that deep colour you only get when the dough is confident enough to spring. I ate the heel standing over the board before it had even cooled, which is the only real test that counts.

If you want to keep a record of which hydration actually worked for a given flour and season, that is exactly the sort of thing DoughRise Pro is built for. It saves your formulas and your full bake history so next July you are not relearning the same lesson from scratch. The calculators themselves stay free forever, Pro just remembers your bakes for you.

None of this is about being precious with a scale. It is about spending thirty seconds on the number so you spend the rest of the evening enjoying the bake instead of fighting it. Summer dough is forgiving if you meet it where it is, and brutal if you pretend it is January.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store