The first and most essential step in bread making is to mix the dough correctly with a bakery mixer. Understanding what occurs throughout the mixing/kneading process might assist you in determining whether you’re on the correct track.
So, here are our top ten suggestions for you to get started.
- We realize that when we ask bakers to join us in urging: Please, please use a scale rather than a volume measure! This is the only way to guarantee that your ingredients are correctly weighed, which is essential for maintaining consistency in the kitchen.
- The easiest approach to keep the temperature of your dough within a specific range is to use cold rather than room-temperature water. The most straightforward technique for a home baker to alter the water’s boiling point (DDT) in order to get the right flavor is by adding ice. Check out our suggestions for dough temperature!
- Kneading dough with a mixer generates heat, raising the temperature of your dough (by approximately 1°C each minute of mixing). The room temperature is crucial to managing. Our bread recipes are pre-calculated and include a built-in dough calculator that lets you input your room, flour, and water temperatures to compute mixing time automatically.
Step By Step (Bakery Mixer)
- Get all of your ingredients ready and weighed out before starting so you don’t overlook anything. Only add the salt or yeast at a later stage to avoid missing it!
- Start by combining the poolish and flour in your mixing basin to get a general idea. We add 3/4 of the water to the poolish before adding the flour. You may remove any extra after you’ve added all of the water (particularly with new recipes) to see how the dough develops. Working in opposition might be required, for example
- Gluten is formed from gluten-forming proteins in the flour. When you mix dough for a lengthy time, it becomes more solid. It’s possible to overmix dough and have the gluten strands break, although home bakers are more prone to under-mixing than over-mixing their dough. Due to the spiral design and blades on professional
- The general rule of thumb is that longer mixing results in a tighter and more regular crumb structure, whereas shorter (using stretch and folds) mixing results in an irregular open crumb structure with a bakery mixer.
- If you, like us, prefer artisan bread with a smooth, creamy texture and lots of flavors, try decreasing the amount of flour in dough produced by hand or low-speed fermentation times.
Next Step…
- The flour absorbs water as it is being combined, resulting in a dough that feels dry early on. Later on, however, some of the water is restored to the flour, making the dough seem somewhat wetter once again. This is a minor variation that you should not make right away.
- It dries somewhat during the bulk fermentation and stretching and folding, as a result of which it becomes harder. As you stretch and fold the dough, it gets less sticky. So keep a wetter dough in mind when preparing your dish.
- Doughs with a higher water content (i.e., greater than 64 percent hydration) have a more open irregular structure and are easier to handle than doughs with a lower water content (less than 64 percent hydration), although their handling may be daunting at first.
- Water absorption varies from one type, brand, and even a lot of flour to the next, so it’s critical to be aware of what sort of flour you’re using. While you execute the same recipe over and over, you’ll need to modify it. Small modifications occur with each new bag of flour; thus we must make minor adjustments to the water content so the dough remains manageable.
