Bread Matters (13 page)

DON’T WORRY ABOUT STICKY HANDS

Having mixed the ingredients together with your hands, you can start to apply more energy when no more dry bits are visible and the dough is becoming a coherent mass. Avoid the temptation to add more flour at this stage. Perhaps it is the unconscious need to make our hands feel more comfortable (or the ubiquitous injunction to ‘knead on a floured surface’) that propels us to the flour bowl even before the dough is fully mixed. Something in our brain tells us that our fingers shouldn’t be stuck to one another, so we try to dry them off by dipping them in flour. However understandable, this reflex must be resisted.

DON’T ADD MORE FLOUR UNTIL YOU’RE SURE IT’S NEEDED

As soon as you can, get the dough out of the bowl and on to the table. Scrape the bowl clean so that you have all the dough in one lump. You cannot judge whether the dough is too wet or too dry until all the flour has been moistened and a reasonably smooth mass has formed. The action of kneading develops the gluten structure and helps the flour absorb water. This takes some time. If you add flour too soon, you risk adding too much.

WETTER IS BETTER

It is hard to describe in words or even in pictures exactly what a dough looks like when it has the correct amount of water. Flours vary considerably in their absorbency, so sticking precisely to the recipe doesn’t guarantee success. Phrases like ‘knead until a soft dough is formed’ beg the question as to what ‘soft’ actually feels like to the touch. For most breads I suggest that the dough should be
a bit wetter than you think it ought to be.
Only if the dough is going to be shaped into something freestanding like a cottage loaf does it need to be firm. But a dough that is firm at the kneading stage is likely to make indifferent bread. Only a wet dough will produce that wonderful chewy, open-textured, slightly rubbery crumb that defines good bread. Home bakers usually err on the side of drier, more easily handled doughs because no one has told them that this is the way to bake bricks. No more. If the frustration of dough sticking to your hands becomes unbearable, remember the mantra:
the wetter the better.
And anyway, soft, wet doughs are a great deal easier to knead than firm ones.

TRY ‘AIR KNEADING’

There is no one correct kneading technique. The important thing is to work the dough with as much energy as possible for at least ten minutes, preferably a little longer. Any manner of squashing, stretching, turning and folding will do, so long as it subjects all the dough to vigorous stress. My favourite way of kneading, especially for soft doughs, is to stretch the entire lump horizontally between my hands held up at about chest level. By holding the dough virtually with my fingertips, I can squeeze and stretch it without it all sticking to my palms. As the dough develops and will stretch further and further without tearing, the action looks rather like playing the concertina. Air kneading has several advantages:

• You are standing upright with a straight back, not bending over the worktop.
  
• You can apply the energy of both hands to all the dough all the time.
  
• The squeezing/pulling action develops the dough efficiently.
  
• You get a good sense of how things are going as the dough tightens and begins to come away from your hands.
  

After a few minutes’ work, the flour will have absorbed all the water, the gluten matrix will begin to develop and consequently the dough will begin to feel a little firmer and more stretchy.

USE FLOUR TO CLEAN YOUR HANDS

At this stage it may help to clean your fingers and palms, otherwise they simply go on sticking to the dough and prevent the formation of a more coherent mass. Put the lump of dough on the worktop and get the worst off your hands with a plastic scraper. Don’t be tempted to clean your hands with water. It’s a waste of time and dough, and clean damp hands will just get sticky again. Instead, dip your flat hands lightly into some flour and then rub them together firmly as if you were washing them with soap, allowing the slivers of floury dough to fall on and around your main piece. With another very light dusting of flour on your hands, you can then work all the debris into a smooth dough. In this way, you are simultaneously cleaning your hands and working a minimal amount of extra flour into the dough. The process can be repeated as often as is necessary and is certainly better than sprinkling random amounts of flour over the dough in the hope that the sticky mass will become manageable.

If, at the other extreme, the dough seems dry, tight and hard to work, it needs more water. Flatten it out as best you can and prod it firmly with your fingertips to make craters in it. Sprinkle some water into the craters and then fold the dough over on itself to prevent the water escaping. As you knead, the wetness may break through the surface, making a squelchy mess, but this will soon disappear as the water is evenly dispersed through the dough. Never be afraid to add extra water if the dough seems too tight.

STICKY = BAD; SOFT = GOOD

There is a difference between stickiness and softness. A fairly firm dough can have a sticky surface and a very soft dough can be silky and non-stick. Stickiness is an inconvenience on the way to producing a good dough and can always be managed by a judicious flick of flour at a critical moment such as moulding. But if a dough is too firm (however conveniently manageable), it will make brick-like bread: the only remedy is to soften it with extra water.

One useful gauge of dough development is to take a piece the size of a ping-pong ball and squeeze it flat between your fingers. Hold it up to a bright light and gradually tease it thinner and thinner. If it has been energetically developed, the gluten matrix will show as a kind of translucent film, milky grey in colour. Ignore the creamy-coloured starch (and, in the case of wholemeal flour, the bits of bran and wheatgerm) and see how thin you can make your ‘window pane’. If the dough is not fully kneaded (or if the flour you are using is weak, i.e. with a low gluten content), the pane will tear very easily. In a nicely developed dough, the hole formed by pushing a finger end through the pane will leave clean edges without any ragged strands.

At the end of kneading, the dough should have developed something of a silky sheen on its surface (rather easier to recognise in white bread than wholemeal). If left on an unfloured table for a moment or two it may still stick a bit. It’s time for a rest, so put the dough back in the mixing bowl (or on a wet worktop – see Folding, below), cover it loosely with a polythene bag (making sure that the bag doesn’t touch the dough) and keep it warm and out of draughts. Don’t use the traditional ‘damp cloth’: evaporation causes a drop in temperature – precisely not what we want right next to our dough as it rises.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO OVER-KNEAD?

Yes, though this is much more likely during mechanical mixing than when you knead by hand. The signs of an over-mixed dough can appear quite suddenly: a structure that was smooth, silky and elastic begins to break up into a coarse, sticky mess with a ‘curdled’ appearance. Doughs made with significant amounts of acid-containing sponge or sourdough are more prone to over-kneading because the acids and enzymes that have built up over a long period get to work on the gluten at the same time as mechanical action is ‘developing’ the dough structure by aligning the gluten strands. For this reason, it is a good idea, though not essential, to add an acid sponge, leaven or sourdough not at the beginning of kneading but when the main dough has already been formed and partially developed.

Rising

The period of time after the dough has been mixed and before it is moulded into its final shape is called variously ‘first rise’, ‘first proof’ and ‘bulk fermentation time’. It has three functions:

• To enable the yeast (of whatever origin) in the dough to ferment.
  
• To relax, soften and ripen the gluten structure, making it more able to stretch and retain optimal amounts of carbon dioxide (CO
  ₂
  ) gas.
  
• To accumulate flavour from the acids and other by-products of fermentation.
  

Even a short period of rising will partially achieve the first purpose, but longer is required for the other two. Temperatures, flour types and degrees of mixing vary so much that it is difficult to give hard and fast rules for fermentation time. However, you can be sure that a ‘straight’ dough (one with no sponge or starter) will not accumulate much in the way of flavour in less than four hours at average temperatures. This is why the use of a sponge or old dough is so useful, because it effectively transfers previously accumulated ‘time’ into your dough and thereby reduces the need for a long period of fermentation in bulk. There is more detail on the use of sponges and other ‘preliminary’ doughs on page 123.

It is more important to protect a rising dough from draughts (which may chill it unevenly and produce a dry ‘skin’ on parts of the surface) than it is to keep it in a particularly warm place. The warmer it is, of course, the quicker fermentation will proceed. But a long, cool fermentation may be what you want, fitting in with your schedule and accumulating extra flavour at the same time. If you have the means to control the temperature of the place where your dough ferments, 27°C is considered the optimum temperature for a straightforward yeasted bread. If you have no choice in the matter, don’t worry: just remember that if your kitchen is on the cool side, things will take a little longer. Do not be tempted to warm the dough too much – for example, by putting it right above the cooker or a radiator: very warm, fast-fermenting dough is hard to handle and usually makes dry, crumbly bread.

The usual rule of thumb is to leave dough to ferment ‘until it has doubled in size’. This is fine as far as it goes, although I suspect that a mathematically precise doubling in volume would seem rather a small expansion to most eyes. The important thing is not to be intimidated by such apparently explicit instructions. If a dough is fermenting fast, if the gluten has relaxed well, if it contains flavour-carrying acids from a preliminary dough of some kind, then it is perfectly all right to take it to the next stage after as little as 40 minutes or an hour. At the other extreme, if you leave it too long in bulk, the worst that can happen is that the yeast runs out of food, the gluten softens and stretches until it collapses and a pronounced acidity builds up.

In most cases, gathering the dough together and giving it a very brief press will be all that is required to prepare it for the next stage.

Knocking back

Some recipes call for the dough to be ‘knocked back’ in the middle of its first rise. This normally means a very brief knead (15 seconds by hand or half a dozen turns of the dough hook in a machine), which expels all the gas from the dough. The theory is that an accumulation of CO
₂
begins to inhibit further fermentation. Certainly a quick reworking of the dough always results in a renewed expansion, so the yeast must like it. But there are additional benefits to be had from this action. In doughs made with relatively weak flours, when the desired result is an open-textured, Continental-style loaf, random ‘knocking back’ should take the form of a deliberate folding of the dough. This has some de-gassing effect, but more importantly it stretches and thins the gluten membrane, making it more likely to inflate into bigger – and more randomly shaped – bubbles.

Folding

This procedure is best suited to soft, wet doughs such as ciabatta. Leave the dough to ferment on a wet surface (covered by a bowl) and do the folding with wet hands and wet plastic scrapers. If you use flour to lubricate your hands and the worktop at this stage, it is almost inevitable that you will fold some raw flour into the dough, which may appear as ‘cores’ and streaks in the baked bread.

After an hour or two lying on the worktop under a bowl, your dough will probably have flowed out into a flat, but slightly puffy, disc. Imagining your dough as a flat globe, slip your scrapers (one in each hand) under the northern hemisphere, ease the dough from the table, gently stretch it away from you and then fold it back on itself so that it reaches about halfway across the body of the disc. Do this with the southern quarter and then from east and west in the same way. You will feel the gluten tightening as you stretch, so don’t go too far or it will rupture. The end result will be a disc that is smaller in diameter but quite a bit thicker than before. Cover the dough with a bowl again to stop the surface drying out and skinning over. This folding action can be performed more than once, so long as the gluten is allowed to relax between times. Each fold and stretch will thin the gluten membrane and distort the shape of the balloons of gas as they inflate. Both these effects will contribute towards an open texture and an interesting crumb in the baked bread. However, there is no point using this method if you subsequently knock all the air out of the dough while shaping it. So it is best deployed with soft doughs such as
pain de campagne,
which are supported in baskets while they rise, or ciabatta, where every effort is made to preserve the gas that accumulates in the dough after mixing.

Rising may seem boring, a period of time when nothing much is happening. But every minute that you allow your dough to ferment before shaping it will set your bread further apart from the additive-laced industrial pap that is given no rise at all. Every hour of slow fermentation makes your bread more digestible and its nutrients more available. Good things are worth waiting for.

Shaping

Most dough needs to be shaped (or ‘moulded’) for its final rise before being baked. Shaping determines:

• The texture of the crumb.
  
• The profile of the loaf.
  

Texture and shape usually reflect the character of the flour (weak/strong, elastic/extensible) and the way the bread is going to be eaten. A loaf baked in a tin, for instance, is likely to be used to make sandwiches or toast and, in British baking at least, should have a close, even texture (and definitely no holes to let the marmalade through). To shape this sort of bread, flatten the dough out into a sausage about twice as long as the longest side of your tin. Flatten it with your knuckles and then fold it in three. Press the dough down again until it is a flattish rectangle about two-thirds the length of the tin. Roll the dough up as tightly as possible without tearing the surface and place it in the tin with the ‘seam’ facing down. In this way, the dough will expand evenly in the tin, giving an attractively domed top.