Dough too sticky.

It is glued to your hands, welded to the counter, and every attempt to shape it makes things worse. Your instinct is to add flour. Hold that thought — the water is usually not the problem.

Watch: Dough Too Sticky
sourdough fixes

Search YouTube →

1. most common

   A dry hand and a floured counter

   This is the biggest single cause and it is pure technique. Dough sticks to dry things and slides off wet ones. A wet hand handles a slack dough cleanly; a floured hand picks up a coating of paste and then everything sticks to that. Flour on the counter during shaping is worse still — it stops the dough gripping, so you cannot build tension, and you compensate by handling it more, which makes it stickier.
2. very common

   Under-developed gluten

   Sticky and slack are not the same as wet. A dough whose gluten has not organised yet has no structure holding the water in, so the water is free at the surface. The same dough after three sets of folds is dramatically less sticky at exactly the same hydration. If it is early in bulk, the answer is time and folds, not flour.
3. common

   Over-fermented

   Past a point, fermentation degrades gluten and the dough turns slack, sticky and soupy — and this kind of sticky does not improve with handling. The tell is that it was fine earlier and got worse, and that it will not hold any tension at all. See overproofed; there is no rescue for this one beyond baking it as a flatbread and adjusting next time.
4. common

   Weak or high-extraction flour

   Lower-protein flour absorbs less water and builds less structure, so 75% hydration in bread flour and 75% in all-purpose are genuinely different doughs. Whole grain absorbs more overall but slowly, so it can feel wet early and normal an hour later. Same number, different behaviour — see the Flour Compendium.
5. sometimes

   Actually too much water

   Real, but last on the list. If you are above 80% on white flour, or you scaled a recipe up and the starter’s water was not counted, the dough may simply be wetter than you can currently handle. Note that this is a skill threshold, not a fault — the same dough is manageable to someone with more practice.

1. Wet your hands. Not floured — wet.

   Keep a bowl of water next to you and dip before every touch. This single change fixes more sticky-dough complaints than everything else here combined, and it adds no flour and changes no formula.
2. Bare counter for shaping, floured only on top

   Flour the top surface of the dough, and leave the counter dry and clean. You need the friction to build tension. Use a bench scraper rather than your hands to lift and turn — it does not stick and it is faster.
3. Give it time and folds before deciding

   If you are in the first hour of bulk, do not judge. Three sets of folds spaced thirty minutes apart will transform how the same dough feels. Sticky at mix is normal; sticky after four folds is information.
4. Chill it

   Twenty to thirty minutes in the fridge firms a slack dough up considerably and makes shaping far easier. This is a legitimate technique, not a cheat, and it is the standard answer for high-hydration dough.
5. Only then, drop the hydration

   If it is genuinely unmanageable, take 5% out of the water next bake — 75% to 70%, not to 60%. Adding flour to a mixed dough is a worse fix than starting drier next time, because it leaves you with unhydrated flour and an unknown formula.