My wife created her own sour dough starter. She’s been feeding it unbleached white flour. It’s doing great. When she is making her dough during the first step she is using a recipe that calls for bread flour and whole wheat flour. However we don’t have bread flour so we are using all purpose flour.

She’s rested the dough a few times and when she is trying to work it in the preshaping step the dough is really wet and doesn’t seem to have good surface tension. She keeps adding flour to try to dry it out.

The dough basically is just flat on the counter...

What are we doing wrong? Do we need to adjust the recipe for the all purpose flour? Or work the dough differently?

update I did more research and Cook’s Illustrated suggested holding the salt temporarily for 15 minutes. Salt hinders autolyse. They found that delaying salt hastened gluten development by an hour.

ratios/recipe
400 g warm water
100 g sour dough starter
400 g bread flour (which we don’t have)
100 g whole wheat flour
Rest for 60 min
add 10g salt and 10g water
Repeat following 3x:
Then stretch and fold, etc.
Rest 60 min

After this the dough was as described in my post.