The Fresh Loaf

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Tip - An Excellent Tutorial for Kneading and Handling Dough

DanAyo's picture
DanAyo

Tip - An Excellent Tutorial for Kneading and Handling Dough

Once again Melissa Johnson with Breadtopia schools us on stretching, handling, and building gluten in a bread dough. No matter your baking experience THIS ARTICLE is worth a look.

My favorite and newly learned technique is THIS ONE from the article.

Melissa, A big THANKS for all you do...

Danny Ayo

Sugarowl's picture
Sugarowl

Reminds me of bucket folds the sourdough guy on here (MikeAvery) had on his website (pictures are gone now though, I really liked his references). Someday I'll be able to get my dough as extensible (elastic?) as that. That link answers several of my questions on kneading, thank you for sharing!

DanAyo's picture
DanAyo

SugarOwl - extensibility

Have you tried some or all of the following?

  1. autolyse
  2. lower protein flour
  3. Nutritional Yeast - this will make a dough highly extensible 
  4. Particulars flours such as spelt will produce a highly extensible loaf

Extensible dough is very nice to stretch and fold, but it can be more challenging to get to gold it’s shape. With bread dough there is always a trade-off :-)

Extensible = stretchable, easy to change shape, like warm taffy.
Elastic = when stretched dough wants to shrink back to it’s original shape, like a rubber band.

Sugarowl's picture
Sugarowl

Thanks Dan for the suggestions. I am trying a bread again with less bread flour and it is more extensible. It's one of the over night no-knead doughs. (90% hydration)

Question: I saw that King Arthur has a post about hand kneading high hydration dough and they suggest cutting it for the 1st part of the kneading process, then slap and folds, then finally stretch and folds. What do you think of that? I've never heard of cutting the dough.

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2017/06/19/kneading-wet-dough-by-hand

DanAyo's picture
DanAyo

I do fine with 2 kilos or so. Never needed to cut the dough, but then I don’t work with super large quantities.

HERE IS A VIDEO using slap & folds @ 105% hydration. Same video below.

Sugarowl's picture
Sugarowl

Thanks again Dan. That is some very goopy dough! It made me realize I did not do enough folds with mine. I baked it anyways though. I'm only doing a very small batch, only 173g of flour small. It lets me experiment without having to wait until the next week. This one will get eaten very fast a day or so I'd wager. Next time I'll do lots more folds. I like how you just lifted it up and let it droop without force-stretching it.

Benito's picture
Benito

Thanks for sharing that Dan, I haven't seen that rolling dough method for developing gluten and structure.  I like it and imagine that it would be great to do early in bulk.

Benny 

DanAyo's picture
DanAyo

I am jazzed about it (rolling dough in air) also Benny. Since big holes is not my bag, I use that technique all the way to the end. Also pat the dough down in moderate fashion in an attempt to rid the dough of the large pockets.

Some time back I was hot on the trail of super open crumb, now big holes are a plague to me. I’ll never be satisfied, but the pursuit of perfection is a driving force that makes life interesting.

Benito's picture
Benito

I’ve always been in pursuit of lacy crumb.  I appreciate looking at bread that is super open, but that isn’t what I want to achieve, give me lacy and I’m happy.  I’ll have to give rolling the dough in the air a try next time.  Too bad I didn’t see it early this morning when I was developing for my dough for tomorrow’s bake.  I’ll try it out next time.

Benny