@orienteer, I did think that when I started the dough it looked a bit wetter than I'm used to, but not crazily wet.
@Ham it's the 'same' flour. Although given it's merely Sainsbo's own strong white and stoneground wholemeal, it could well be different flour in the same packet.
Bloody annoying whatever it is.
@Ham, you keep dried yeast in the fridge?
Made bread this weekend. Paid attention, did experiments:
1.Reduced the water from 400ml to 375ml (this is the volume I ended up with when I had that malted bread flour to use up a couple of years back).
2. I ended up opening a fresh bag of strong white as I ran out, so one loaf was mostly old and the other was mostly new packet. I did notice a visible increase in the wetness of the dough made with the older packet compared with the new, so I kneaded a bit more flour into that one as well.
3. I got my Chef Alarm out and measured the temperature. This <2year old oven has always read a bit lower than advertised but this morning it was a whole 25C lower! So the recipe calls for 245C, I usually have the knob set to 255C but this morning it was 230C.
Anyhoo. The upshot of all that:
Loaves were not all gummy and full of Swiss cheese holes. Win!
They were a bit well fired on top so I maybe don't need to go the whole hog up to 270C on the knob.
They look like they should be a whole lot more edible than the last lot, but I would say the were still a little on the short side, so next time I will try a new box of yeast.