I think it important you retain the idea that a loaf that doesn't turn out exactly as expected is a part of the process of understanding principles and not simply being abandoned to always using other people's recipes. You are building gradually your own. So this is nothing at all about being despondent about, it is the most useful part of learning and gaining skill and insight into what is going on.

You need to do two things. Firstly reduce the water a bit, and then when envelope folding make the first five or six folds, than wait for ten minutes or so and say another five or six .... another ten minute wait and then a few more folds and then perhaps another wait and then a final couple of folds. If I'm doing baguettes those final folds will be in the same direction to try and encourage elongated air bubbles. And the final fold should always be obviously edge to underneath centre to try and force the top crust up.

You are now learning how far you can go with hydration as a compromise against your ability to handle. If you keep a record of each attempt you will end up with your perfect loaf and understand how each decision effects the outcome. Once you have done that you are starting the process of being able to create any loaf you want from pizza, to all the worlds different type of flatbreads, to using different flours like spelt and rye .... and then there are those bagels. You are developing self sufficiency through knowledge of principles. You learn more by something going wrong than by having a good outcome as a result of a fluke.

I - to my regret - stopped bread making for some years because when following a recipe that didn't turn out right, I couldn't work out what had gone wrong. So after a few unexplained failures I gave up. Then the penny dropped that I " didn't understand the principles" and so couldn't work out what was going wrong. So I decided that most people learning bread making might be " learning it wrong" by not going the more difficult route of learning the principles rather than always following recipes. So I started again and had loads of failures, but now I think I have developed more of a "feel" and affinity for bread and therefor feel more in control. Now bread making is a real joy of exploring and experimenting and finding the exact loaves for my taste and lifestyle and there is nothing more rewarding than ending up with a loaf from your own mind rather than someone elses recipe. You end up with a series of personal spreadsheets that are your own unique loaves.

You may have gathered my real passion is flatbreads. This is often something intended to give maximum crust and used by people all over the world to eek out other things and contain some sort of fill or topping. There is a unique one in almost every culture. I will never express the joy of tasting say a snowshow flatbread from Afghanistan for the first time ..... and knowing pretty sure how to make it. Or some of the Lebanese flatbreads or those from the Balkans or Greece or Turkey ... You may have seen some of my flatbread piccies. And in the end ... nearly all are just water, flour and yeast ... but you can make those three ingredients taste and look so different each time so that each culture would recognise their own blindfolded simply from it's taste or from appearance. People forget that pizza is just another flatbread and as most of us now know it today made by fisherman's wives in Naples for the returning husbands and sons ie those Marinara to use all those wonderful tomatoes they bottled over summer to bring a bit of sun during their winters ..., hence the idea with toppings meaning less is more.

eg


(poor colour as taken with ipad under poor lighting ....







Afghan snowshoe bread

.... and the bible of the worlds flatbreads ....

Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker's Atlas ... one of my favourite books ...


Anyway ... I gotta stop as I'm getting all sort of passioinate and boring now .,....



ps I did ask the mod whether we might adjust the topic to simply "bread" to accommodate the changing and more complete nature of how it is evolving ..... but let's just read this thread as all things bread.