Pastry and humidity.

keep everything as cold as possible with ice or cold packs until it's ready to bake?

The effects of humidity on dough are negligible. It's an old wives tale.

>>8597705
add semen

>>8597705
Where do you live, OP? You could put plastic wrap over it to seal in the moisture and not allow any to escape in the fridge. That or you're doing a poor job of incorporating the fat into the dough..

>>8597705
you're over-kneading the dough you mong. it's not meant to be smooth like pasta dough, it's meant to have bits of whole fat in it that render off when baked and the voids are what creates a 'flaky' pastry or pie crust.

if it were simply humidity you could add slightly more flour and be ok.

>>8597960
Oh we're talking pastry dough, so this. You can't overwork that shit.

>>8598043
>You can't overwork that shit.

You fucking idiot do you know ANYTHING about gluten or do you just think it's some mysterious, evil, toxic substance?

>>8598061
Pretty sure that anon is saying "you shouldn't overwork that shit".

>>8598061
I gluten is a group of proteins present in carbohydrate groups found in many wheat flours. The problem is breaking down the chunks of fat in the dough, probably butter, and them just making a congealed mess. It's pastry, not bread, you faggot.

It's probably a few things. Moisture from the air could definitely be hurting you due to the way the gluten matrix is formed (which causes the pastry to become elastic and tough). As you incorporate water and add energy via working the dough, you're mixing up the glutenin to form sulfur bridges and sulfer/hydrogen bonds with itself whilst commingling it with gliadin, which is forming hydrogen bonds with its self and eventually you end up with a tangled web so dense it can hold in air (as is desirable in risen breads).

To avoid this, you can do a few things:
>Touch the dough less
The more you work it, the more complex the gluten matrix becomes and the more tough your final product will be
>Use alcohol
Ethanol will get in the way of the covalent bonds being formed (H-S and S-S), causing the chains of glutenin and gliadin to repulse rather than come together. Use vodka or any other desirably-flavored spirit in your dough rather than water. The higher the proof, the better.

>>8597921
Not true. This only and always happens when the air is damp, and it's always the same result.
Also the method is sound. It's not being overworked.

>>8598088
You forgot to turn your trip off.
Fuck of back to /mlp/.

>>8598179
This is the only board I frequent. Fuck off back to Cancertown, population you.

>>8598169
The amount of moisture absorbed into the dough through the air won't increase the dough's water content even by 1%. If you're consistently getting bad results during high humidity, it may just be that high humidity coincides with high temperature, and working in a warmer kitchen causes the butter to melt into the dough more.

There's also going to be a good deal of random variance in dough consistency depending on just how much you work the butter into the dough. In this case it may just be confirmation bias.