Hi Sharon, It may be that the "hot" water is causing your dough to be much more sticky than is really necessary. This time of year you can generally get by with using much cooler water, which will help control fermentation on a hot day and should also result in a more manageable dough. This post on Desired Dough Temperature offers some helpful tips on achieving more consistent results in your bread baking. You'll also want to be careful about how warm the water is before you add in the yeast, because yeast will die at 140 degrees. You didn't mention how much water is added to the recipe, but if the dough is very wet, you could certainly use the cutting technique prior to kneading the dough. In my experience, most challah recipes don't call for a very wet dough, so you may find that controlling the temperature of the dough makes a big difference. If you still find the dough to be extremely wet, you might want to try using bread flour rather than all-purpose flour and see if this works better for you. Our unbleached bread flour is slightly higher in protein than our unbleached all-purpose flour, which means it will develop a stronger dough and will also absorb a bit more liquid. Switching to this flour might give make the dough easier to handle without the need to add extra flour. I hope this helps! Shalom and Happy New Year to you! Barb

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