The Water Argument

Ask why your crumb came out tight and you will get one answer faster than any other: add more water. It arrives within two replies on every forum thread, and it is the only advice in bread that costs nothing to try. A hundred more grams and you have a different dough by lunchtime.

It is also the advice that two of the most careful bakers writing today disagree about, in public, at length. The disagreement turns out to be more useful than either answer on its own.

Why water became the answer

Hydration is the only variable a new baker can move without learning anything first. Changing flour means learning flour. Changing fermentation means learning to read a dough, which takes months and cannot be rushed. Changing hydration means holding the jug a second longer. One dial, no prerequisites — of course it became the answer.

And the photographs back it up, sort of. The loaves with the wild cavernous crumb really are wet loaves. The correlation is real. What the photograph leaves out is that they are also loaves made by someone who has shaped a few thousand of them.

The 80% loaf that actually exists

Maurizio Leo publishes an 80% hydration sourdough at The Perfect Loaf, and it is not a stunt. Eight hundred grams of bread flour, two hundred of whole wheat, a whole-wheat levain, six sets of folds with the first four vigorous and the last two gentle, and an overnight cold retard that firms the dough enough to take a blade. It works, and he says out loud what it costs: “Shaping becomes incredibly difficult as you get up past 80%.”

The more interesting number is on his other page. His beginner’s sourdough is 72%. Same baker, same site, same flour aisle — and the loaf he hands a first-timer carries eight percentage points less water than the one he wrote the hard method for. That gap is the entire argument in miniature.

The baker who says it barely matters

Trevor J. Wilson, who wrote Open Crumb Mastery, pushes back on the premise. His position is that hydration is one variable among many and not the one that decides the crumb — that fermentation and dough handling build most of a loaf’s structure, and water ranks well behind both of them. In his reading, telling an inexperienced baker to wet the dough is usually the wrong advice, and often actively counterproductive. It does not produce an open crumb. It produces a flat loaf and a discouraged baker.

That is a contrarian thing to say in a hobby where hydration is the number everyone leads with. It is also hard to argue with once you have watched it happen.

Both of them are right, about different questions

Leo is answering: how do I bake this particular loaf? For that, 80% is a specification, and the method is built around it. The flour blend, the fold schedule, the retard — all of it exists to make that much water survivable.

Wilson is answering: why is my crumb closed? And for that question, water is almost never the honest answer. A dough pulled from bulk twenty minutes early is tight at 65% and tight at 85%. The fermentation was short. That is the whole story.

Which is why the two positions sit together fine. One is a recipe. The other is a diagnosis. The advice only goes wrong when the recipe gets handed to someone who needed the diagnosis — and on the internet, it usually does.

What actually changes as you climb

Nothing breaks at a threshold. Things get less forgiving gradually, and they get less forgiving in a fairly predictable order.

Around 72–75%. Stretch and folds start tearing the dough more than they build it. Coil folds handle it more gently and quietly become the better move. Hands go from floured to wet.

Around 78–80%. The bench turns against you. Shaping is where the loaf is won or lost now, and the window between enough tension and a torn skin narrows to a few seconds. The cold retard stops being a flavour decision and becomes structural — you are chilling the dough so it is firm enough to score at all. This is the band where flat loaves start appearing for reasons that have nothing to do with the starter.

Past 85%. You are managing a batter with opinions. Constant bench scraper, a basket that supports the dough rather than merely holds it, and a much shorter list of mistakes you can recover from. People do make beautiful bread up here. They also tend to make it on strong flour, in a cool kitchen, having already made it a hundred times at 75.

And the number is not portable

A hydration percentage is a fact about somebody else’s flour. Eighty percent on a high-protein bread flour and eighty percent on supermarket all-purpose are not the same dough — the second one is soup. Whole grain and rye drink far more than white, which is exactly why that 80% loaf has 20% whole wheat in it rather than none. Mill, harvest, grind, and how long the bag has been open all move it as well. The Flour Compendium has the ranges flour by flour, and they overlap less than you would hope.

So the only honest way to read a hydration number is: this worked for that baker, with that flour, in that kitchen. A starting point, not a target.

All of this keeps rewriting itself

Worth noticing how much of the received wisdom has turned over. In about a decade, sourdough writing has been through no-knead, long autolyse, stiff levain, liquid levain, lamination, coil folds, aliquot jars, and an entire grammar of poke tests. Each one arrived as a fix for a real problem somebody actually had. Each one then got repeated for a couple of years as universal law before settling down into being one option among several.

Hydration numbers are the most copied of these and the least transferable, because they depend on three things that never come with the copy: the flour, the kitchen, and the hands.

So the useful question is probably not what hydration should I use. It is what breaks first when I add water — and that one is answerable, but only in your own kitchen, one loaf at a time. Bake the same formula three times at 70%. Take it to 75 and find out what changes. If it is the shaping, you learned something about your hands. If it is the bulk, you learned something more useful than any number.

If you want to see what a change does to the hydration and the timings before committing a kilo of flour to it, that is what Choose Your Own Crumb is for. Move the water, watch the bulk move with it, and read what it says will get harder.

Nobody has ever eaten a percentage.