Dough – Is using hot water to make chapathi dough a good idea

I can't speak to your specific flour but I have worked with coarsely ground whole wheat flour.

My standard bread recipes required quite a bit more kneading than usual. Additionally I had to work with them while they were still quite sticky to eventually get them to an elastic consistency.

I use a stand mixer to do the kneading for me- I'm afraid that it would be quite a mess doing it by hand. Remember that, when forming gluten, you can always trade work for time. If you can't find finer flour then I would recommend kneading the dough as much as you are able, let it rest for 15 minutes so the proteins relax, and then knead it again and see if you can't get the consistency you want without kneading all day.

Make sure the flour isn't so coarse, or has shards or bran, that would actually cut the gluten and prevent it from forming sheets. If this is the case then I don't know if you could make bread out of it predominantly. Perhaps if it were soaked overnight as in a poolish?

I mill my own flour to the finest possible setting and this seems to produce a much better textured bread.

As for the lack of rising and yeast- it is the same problem. Yeast are perfectly happy eating damaged starch in your flour. Adding sugar wouldn't necessarily help. If your dough was not elastic and failed your window pane test then there is nothing to really hold the structure of the bread. Your yeast may have been going crazy and there was just no balloon for them to blow up.

I don't think you're doing anything wrong, I think the dough is just more slack than you're used to. As @Jay noted, it can take some practice to work with a wet dough. But once you do, you'll be rewarded with a much more open crumb and a better final product. In my experience, I've found wetter dough and higher oven temps = better artisan bread (in general).

The recipe appears to assume the reader is familiar with the process, but does offer some hints. She talks about scraping the dough out onto the work surface, then stretching-and-folding.

The recipe isn't as wet as the ciabatta I'm making below, but the process will be similar, so I hope this is helpful. I start by putting a bed of flour down, then scraping the blob of wet dough out onto it.

Then comes the stretch-and-fold part, which is just as it sounds. Using a wet pastry scraper and/or wet hands, just get under one edge, lift and pull it away, then plop it back on top of the main dough blob. Then do the same with the other side. Cover with plastic wrap and walk away. There's no process of kneading like you're used to. This photo is after a few stretch-and-folds at 20-minute intervals (I think!), and you can see the dough has started to smooth out and become cohesive.

By the time you're ready to shape, the dough should be a lot more cohesive and easier to deal with. I folded mine into little slippers and put them on a couche to rise.

Add 500 degrees and a baking stone, and I'm rewarded with an open and gelatinized crumb, and a nice crisp crust.