Hi Barbara: I enjoyed this subject a lot. Thank you! I know I'm coming to this discussion late and someone might have already touched on this point. I have been using autolyse for a while with my sourdough bread and have not had the problem that you had with mixing. Possibly there are several issues here? One might be temperature of the starter and autolyse. A second might be that your sourdough starter and the autolyse have differing amounts of water to flour proportions by weight. Finally, it might be that you are trying to mix using a mixer. I started using autolyse after skimming Ken Forkish's book on breadmaking and find that it does seem to make the dough more elastic. He recommends working a fairly wet mixture of dough and doing it by hand. In addition, he recommends using a specific technique to mix. I have arthritis, but have found the method fairly easy to use. Others who reviewed the book did not, however, and many people don't like to knead (or even fold) bread by hand anymore. Still, using his method, I have gotten the best sourdough bread that I have ever made. Also, as I mentioned, I have never had this problem with mixing the starter and the autolyse. That is why I think that it might be a technique issue. As I am not a professional baker by any means, please do let me know if this doesn't make sense or if I might be mistaken. . .

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