For the last, I don’t know, several months I’ve been watching FoodTube. I love watching Kenji, Babish, and Joshua Weissman. Who doesn’t?

Well, after a couple weeks of watching videos from the latter of the three, I decided to try one of his pizza recipes.

I didn’t think to take any pictures last night when I was making the dough, so you’ll have to use your imagination. I followed the recipe for the Roman Dough on Joshua’s website. I measured everything out accordingly since I have a food scale (which all of them say you need for baking) and started following the directions. It did not go as I had hoped.

When I started to mix the wet and dry ingredients I didn’t fully know what to expect having only ever watched the videos (typically on my phone) so I didn’t recognize right away that something was wrong. The dough was too sticky. I pushed on anyway, thinking “maybe this is what he meant in the recipe?” I kept following the recipe as best I could. Mix, rest, slap and fold, rest, slap and fold again. Each time the dough was still too sticky, so I decided to let it rest a third time and rewatch Josh’s video on the Neapolitan vs roman pizza. Surely it was something minute that I overlooked. Nope, nothing.

So at the end of the night, after I had put my little dough baby in the fridge, I checked the recipe again. Being the usually vigilant and detail oriented person I am I did eventually notice something was off and wondered how I had missed this all important detail. Like, so important that everyone on FoodTube making dough calls it out EVERY TIME.

The measurements were wrong. I did some cross checking with other unrelated sites to confirm my suspicion as I did the math.

What Josh had in his recipe was 600g of bread flour and 432g of water (for 64% hydration). This was huge. So I took this information and submitted a message on his website to let him know. 432g would actually be 72% hydration… No wonder it was too sticky all the way through the process! If I had truly wanted to hit the 64% mark I would have ACTUALLY needed 384g of water.

So like I said, I submitted a message on the site. We’ll see if I get a response. In the meantime, if you come across this post and you’re having the same issue, know that you’re not alone.