The Step You Need To Take When Your Bread Dough Becomes A Sticky Mess

Even the best bakers sometimes face common blunders. Okay, maybe not elite pâtissières, but perhaps your great aunt who makes even greater cookies. Environmental factors like air pressure, humidity, and even elevation can play a part in the cooking process, as can minor ingredient mix-ups or misguided swaps; all flour is not created equal! Speaking of flour, some mishaps are harder to come back from, like totally overdoing it with the grain. But you might be able to mitigate other apparent pitfalls, such as a little stickiness, with some patience and maybe even, um, more flour. What can we say — it's a mercurial ingredient.

Picture it: You've used all the right ingredients in all the exact measurements to make a simple loaf or even an upgraded take on white bread. Things are going great and you're anticipating that fresh bread fragrance soon to perfume the room. But then, something seems amiss. There, right in your very own hands, the dough has suddenly become a sticky mass, looking more like the "Ghostbusters" Slimer than the film franchise's tidier, Pillsbury Doughboy-inspired, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It's a mess. But between several scrapes of your dough and maybe a little extra flour, you can begin salvaging all your hard work.

First of all, do not panic. Not only because it's just better not to amidst nearly all of life's little adversities, but also because if you get all worked up, you're more likely to over-work your dough, which will only make things worse. Instead, keep calm, carry on, and get to scraping. While plenty of single-purpose kitchen tools rightfully invite eye rolls, dough scrapers are unrivaled for this task, and you can get a quality one, like this OXO scraper and chopper, for just a few bucks more than a generic tool.

Now, it's time to get to unsticking. Use the dough scraper's edge to gather all those goopy bits and gently press them all back together. Taking the heat from your fingers out of the equation for a moment and recalibrating with the scraper's flat plane might just be enough to re-level the playing field. If it's all still a tad tacky, introduce a little more flour. Like, very little. Don't even add it directly to the dough. Instead, run your hands under very cold water (it helps!), quickly dry them completely, get them a bit powdery, and pat around your loaf-in-the-making to really pull it all back together. Proceed as normal, and next time, investigate your moisture content to make sure it isn't too high. Excess water might have caused this sticky predicament to begin with.