Bread sticky after baking

What kind of salt are you using?

In the presence of iodine, starch can turn a surprisingly purplish-black color. This phenomenon has be leveraged for many decades in medical examiners' offices, to help determine the contents of a last meal in a cadaver (pardon the unappetizing digression).

Iodine is an essential nutrient, vital for the proper functioning of our thyroid (read more about Iodine Deficiency) that has relatively few ways of entering our bodies through our diet other than through shellfish, meats, eggs, and some dairy products.

One way to combat the problems of iodine deficiency is its addition to our salt, which we consume in predictable quantities and never goes bad. Table salt contains up to 25mg/kg of iodine and that number has been on the rise since its safety and helpfulness have been demonstrated repeatedly. Sea salt contains some iodine, as it is naturally occurring in the ocean, but in a much smaller quantity.

Maybe when you were at the beach, your salt supply changed to sea salt or an uniodized version and and when you returned and used the regular Iodized Morton's or Iodized sea salt.

I think the real answer is this: cutting into the loaf too soon is the problem. When it's straight out of the oven it's still very moist and soft inside. A bread knife hooks tiny bits of the bread and squishes them together into beads because it's still very moist and malleable until it's had a chance to cool properly. Once it's cooled, the bread knife will saw through it properly, but until then, it doesn't have enough strength in the texture to properly separate while being cut. On top of that, during the cooling, it's still finishing cooking a bit on the inside, and the cooling allows that process to complete properly.

Edit: I verified this yesterday when I cooked two loaves of bread together. The first loaf I cut into almost immediately after removing it from the oven and encountered the exact problem I described in the original question. Later on after it had cooled I cut further into the bread and there were no beads of dough. In addition, the other loaf, which I gave to someone else and so was able to cool before being cut, was also devoid of doughy beads.

Also, it may have helped that these two loaves were the first two that I forced myself to stop being afraid of stickiness in the dough, and which I improved my kneading to stop squashing the dough so much (it's not a pancake!) and instead tended toward rolling and massaging it, with some lift-and-slap thrown in due to the stickiness. The stickiness eventually lessened, especially as I added a little more flour over time, and the texture of the final dough ball was fine.