So yesterday's second big mistake, unreported at the time, was that I didn't take away half the dough before mixing in the new flour and putting it back. That's probably because I conflated two things: cutting off the dry rind from the outside, and managing the quantity of dough. Because my dough didn't have much in the way of a hard rind I mixed 100% of it with the new flour and put it back in its bed until lunchtime today. The result was that the dough ball had risen enough to break through the flour covering it in about six hours, rather than taking until this morning to do it.
Still and all, when I finally got to take the dough ball out of its bowl today, it had managed to create a bit of a rind all over, though the ball still showed structural weakness, with a distressing tendency to almost tear as I manhandled it out of the bowl. I'm not sure if that's par for the course or if I'm doing something wrong...
This time I had all my flour and water ready! Instead of the small, wooden bread-board that I was mixing stuff on before, I decided to use a round, lap-sized, white plastic tray—the sort of thing you put your meal on when eating in front of the TV :). About 20 inches across, this had plenty of room for putting one cup wholemeal flour directly on to it at one side for the ultimate in sticky-handed convenience later on, and a half-inch rim meant that I was going to be able to chase the last bits of flour around the tray without losing a lot of it over the edge. I also had a half cup of water in a measuring jug just next to the tray.
I'm not sure if I'm just clumsy, or if the lack of stiffness of the risen dough was a factor, but I think the pile of cut-off rind contained about 60% of the original ball, rather than the 50% I was expecting. The 40% from the interior was once again quite wet and sticky, but this time once I started mixing in the cupful of flour, it dried out quite quickly (today is the hottest day of the year, if that's a factor), and I ended up adding about half the water in the jug—so about 1/4 of a cup—to get a nice, stiff, and reasonably-sized ball of dough.
Learning #2. Cut the rind off if it forms one, but whether you end up with discarded dough or not, you still have to reduce the risen dough ball by about 50% in volume altogether before adding today's cup of flour and today's water: the dough ball that gets buried in the bowl of flour should be about the same size each time!
I've also had a go at making desem dosas from the cut-off rind. As my wok is a living masterpiece of old burger fat and bits of burned protein from a hundred different sources, I'll pass over the actual frying of the dosa itself in silence and simply comment that although after a good deal of stirring, and cutting and crushing especially recalcitrant bits of dough rind with a knife, I got something that resembled a batter, the dough shows no signs of "dissolving" as I'd been led to expect. Perhaps I just haven't waited long enough: Makiko says to let the batter stand for three hours at room temperature before making the dosas and, of course, I just couldn't wait.
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