Do you HAVE to punch down your dough? What happens if you don't? Is there a specific or best way not to?

"Punching down" dough as fallen so deeply out of fashion that I suspect some readers are reluctant to weigh in on your query because they fear it's a joke or a scam.  But maybe not.

No, you don't "have" to "punch down" your dough.  In fact, in the current era of open crumb and holier-than-thou breads, nobody "punches down" their doughs anymore, in general.  Exceptions:  Some uber-gentle deflation can be desirable during or after bulk fermentation to reduce accumulated CO2's inhibition of further fermentation.  And indeed there may be some particular breads out there whose process requires a vigorous flattening to achieve a traditional (and inevitably dense) crumb structure.  But the current fashion is to treat dough as gently as possible so as to preserve and protect gas bubbles within it so that they may grow and produce an airy crumb.  The "best" way to do that is be extremely gentle.  Extremely gentle.  Of course, the dough's hydration, the chemistry of your flours, the vigor of your starter and the efficiency of your monitoring fermentation progress also impact ultimate crumb structure. 

I did a search in the box at upper right for "punch down", thinking that perhaps getting very few hits would be  evidence that the practice is no longer even discussed here.  But in fact there are pages and pages of hits (though very few are recent).  So the terminology is at least still in use. 

Finally, it is often desirable at the shaping stage to very gently flatten your dough to reduce or eliminate any very large bubbles and enable the dough to be folded properly into its final pre-banneton/brotform shape.  But that manipulation cannot be considered a "punch".  More of a light, even "press", depending upon how much the dough needs it.  If it has over-fermented during the first rise, then a firmer overall "press" can promote a more even distribution of the internal gases during the final proof and an opening up the crumb structure of the baked loaf.

Hope that makes sense, and helps. 

Tom

Or, to oversimplify, just eliminate the few bubbles that are too big. A certain amount of unevenness is fine, maybe even good - but the really huge bubbles get in the way.

So is there any point in doing the first rise in a separate bowl to and then transferring to the baking tin or is it best to just put the freshly kneaded dough into the baking tin let it rise for an hour then bake it?  If the latter is best why did anyone ever do the former.  Some recipes recommend kneading after the first rise.  that sort of maybe makes sense as maybe the gluten can be stretched better after soaking for a while but I cannot understand the idea of just punching down or even reshaping. (I'm fairly inexperienced at bread making so maybe that would all be more obvious if I had done it myself more).

Thanks

The more even you’d like your crumb to be, the more you might pat down (punching down sounds so violent and probably should be reserved for commercial yeasted doughs) your dough as you’re shaping it.