Dough – Help! Too much salt in the sourdough dough!

saltsourdough

Help! I added three times the amount of salt needed for my sourdough bread recipe (1/4 c. versus 1 T.)
Can I save it?

Best Answer

The short answer is no, unfortunately you cannot save this bread. Once the salt is mixed in you cannot remove it, and that much salt is likely to kill all the yeast in that dough, or at least slow it way down.

Diluting the salt by mixing it in with 3 times more bread is possible in theory, but realistically there's a lot of potential to be throwing away a lot of good ingredients. You could also use 1/4 of it mixed in with 3/4 fresh ingredients, but for my money you may was well start out anew as you aren't saving enough ingredients to make the extra trouble worthwhile. Mixing autolysed salty dough in with other dough so it completely combines and distributes the salt is problematic unless you mix it with the recipe's water, and then you're adding the salt before the yeast, which creates a hostile environment to put your sourdough starter in.