Day 92: Bauernbrot

I think my flour might be the problem. The past few loaves have all been garbage, and they all have been the same problem: the gluten won't form. No matter how slowly I add the flour or how much I knead it, nothing happens. They all turn to slouchy goop that is extremely dense and tastes terrible. I thought I was okay because I used it in the stone ground wheat and that eventually formed into a dough, but that also had whole-wheat flour, so I think the gluten in that might have saved it. Buckwheat doesn't have gluten so it relies entirely on the other flours that it is mixed with. I've been having this issue for a while now and it seemed pretty hit or miss when I was doing rye breads: sometimes they kneaded perfectly and others didn't knead at all. I was using a different bag of flour then, but I think the problem might have been that I was overloading the flour. Now, I am very carefully mixing the flour in a little bit at a time, taking every precaution not to overload it. This doesn't seem to help so I tried to rule everything out. The yeast is alive: the bread rises fine every time, it just doesn't go anywhere because there isn't any gluten to support it. All of the ingredients are room temperature: now that it's not winter anymore this isn't really an issue. I'm not overloading the batter: if the recipe says to put flour in half cup at a time, I do a fourth cup at a time. If they recipe says to keep adding flour until the dough forms a shaggy mass that cleans the side of the bowl, then I slowly add flour in and only add more when the previous flour is completely mixed in. Overloading isn't a problem at this point. Overloading becomes a problem for me when I am trying to knead the dough and it is just a sticky mass that keeps tearing. When dough is sticky you should add sprinkles of flour to control the stickiness. This is a slippery slope because if the gluten never forms, you'll just be kneading a sticky ball forever that always tears. Which is exactly what all of these past loaves have been. So I decided to get some new flour. I'll test it out tomorrow and see how it goes and go from there. If the problem persists then I'll just have to find something else to change. The bread I made today was supposed to be an Austrian peasant bread with caraway seeds. I assumed it was similar to a rye bread, but just used buckwheat flour instead. It didn't turn out well and the only good thing about it was that it tasted like caraway.