Why kneading dough

What does kneading do? Should my arms be this tired? And, Oh No! I'm freaking out, how do I get this dough off of myself? Before we get into the nitty gritty of actually making our dough, let's take a quick look at what exactly we'll be tackling today.

Mixing a basic bread, like our workhorse loaf , boils down to five simple steps. You can read through them all, or jump to a step from the list below! Sounds simple enough, right? And it often is. But it's also hugely important! This is the part of the bread-baking process where we make some of our biggest decisions about what kind of bread we're going to bake. Whether it's about making a grocery run or shuffling through our cupboards, this step is always our start, and it will have a major impact on how we go forward.

Lucky for us, today we're keeping it simple. The workhorse loaf is a recipe for a classic French white bread, similar to a baguette. In the future, we'll be moving on to tips and techniques for how to work with fancier or whole grain flours, as well as working with a wide variety of yeasts both store-bought and harvested from nature , but for now, we're keeping things simple: plain old all-purpose white flour, any potable water, some store-bought yeast, and pure salt.

I can hear you: But I love using my organic flour! So do I! But it's not necessary here. Any white all-purpose or bread flour will do just fine. I only drink sparkling water! Well that's a silly code to live by. The only thing you need to worry about with your water is the temperature. If you're baking in a cold environment, use water that's a little above room temperature. Working in a warm environment? Use water that's a little cooler. What sort of yeast should I pick? Whether it's fresh, active dry, or instant, the end results will taste pretty much the same.

Just grab what's easiest to find. Will my fancy black Hawaiian volcanic salt work? Lets keep it boring for now: plain old un-iodized table salt or kosher salt is what to use. Most importantly, don't try and use anything too coarse. Very coarse salt won't dissolve properly, which will inhibit the development of dough structure later on.

This is what it sounds like, and it's important! Use a scale when baking. Let me repeat that. A scale ensures that your dough comes out the same way each time. Make sure to weigh your ingredients carefully and separately. Pay careful attention to what kind of yeast you're using and how much you need. Get familiar with your scale's tare zeroing function—it allows you to ignore the weight of your measuring vessels, making it easier to accurately weigh your ingredients.

Scared of scales? Don't be. Just follow our handy guide to using a scale. Don't own one? Get yourself the winner from our review of the best scales on the market. Now that we've gathered and measured our ingredients, we're ready to actually start mixing.

You can do this in a stand mixer if you have one, but working by hand will work just as well. For those of you working with a stand mixer , start by placing the water into the mixing bowl, and then dump your flour on top. This will help to ensure that flour doesn't stick to the bottom and clump—flour clumps make for lumpy bread. For those of you using active dry yeast, now is a good time to bloom it, following the instructions on the packaging.

When doing this, make sure that you deduct the water you use from our overall formula or you will alter our dough's overall hydration level. Set your mixer to a medium-slow speed to get your flour and water combining. In baker-speak, this is called incorporating. When your flour and water first start chasing each other around, your dough will look really dry and you might think you've made a mistake.

Fear not! Just let it ride until no more dry pockets of flour remain. With a wet dough spatula—or some other, flexible bench knife—scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl a couple of times to make sure all of your flour joins the party. For those of you mixing by hand , get ready to get messy. Place your flour and water in your bowl, then, with your dough spatula , begin scraping the flour into your water, paying special attention to the sides and bottom.

As your dough comes together, get your spare hand into the mix and, starting at the edge of your bowl, fold the dough over itself with the spatula as you use your other hand to squish any dry spots to ensure they get incorporated.

Once your flour and water are fully incorporated and there are no dry spots, stop and wait. Your dough should look loose and formless. This is known as the shaggy mass stage. At this point, you might be thinking, OH NO!

This is way too wet! It isn't. I promise. Hearth breads are made from really wet doughs, which is part of what accounts for their exceptionally open crumb. If it looks like our pictures, then you're on the right track. Cover your dough and step away from it for a half hour. Set a timer if you want, or go distract yourself with an episode of New Girl. This resting period is called an autolyse, and it allows our flour to hydrate more fully, ultimately giving us a better impression of how far to take our final mix.

While our dough is autolysing, let's take a minute to talk about some dough chemistry, and explain why stepping away is good dough parenting. Don't worry. First, lets talk about what happens when water meets flour, or, in more baker-chemical terms, when flour is hydrating.

Of these proteins, two of them glutenin and gliadin are the most important. They're the guys who get together to form gluten. In their normal state, the long, kinky proteins no, not in that way are tangled up with themselves, like a knotted fishing line. Your goal is to untangle the proteins, tie them together into a longer line, then use those lines to weave a net, which can be used to trap carbon dioxide produced by yeast.

This is what kneading accomplishes. By gently rubbing the proteins against each other, you stretch them out and cause them to line up and cross-link. With enough kneading, you eventually form them into sheets of gluten. So how does the no-knead bread recipe, which, appropriately, has no kneading involved produce the same effect? With the help of enzymes. Flour naturally contains enzymes that break down long proteins into shorter ones in a process called autolysis auto meaning "self" and lysis meaning "break down".

Bakers have known about this process for years, and many incorporate an autolysis step into their recipes, mixing together flour and water and allowing it to rest before adding the remaining ingredients and kneading salt can inhibit the action of autolysis.

By breaking down the proteins into shorter pieces in this way, they become much easier to untangle and re-align, greatly increasing the efficiency of kneading.

The No-Knead Bread recipe simply takes this concept to the extreme. By mixing together your ingredients and letting them sit around at room temperature for a long, long time at least 12 hours, and up to 24—remember, there's salt in the dough which inhibits autolysis, so you need to compensate for this , the proteins are broken down so much, that even the tiniest of mechanical actions can cause them to align and link up. But I thought this was no knead dough, not "tiniest amount of kneading" dough.

Yes, indeed it is, and truth be told, there is some kneading going on, but it's not being done by you, nor any other human or even by a member of the kingdom Animalia, for that matter. It's the yeast.. Let's take a quick look through a time lapse series of photos of the dough as it sits overnight. Gluten formation is minimal. As these bubbles slowly grow, their stretching causes proteins around their edges to align with each other. Thanks guys! What you're left with is a slack, easy-to-work dough that stretches beautifully, and bakes up with excellent gluten structure and massive bubble formation.

They stretch easily, practically pouring out of their rising vessel. My advice is to use plenty of flour, and practice, practice, practice! The main complaint I had with the original No-Knead Dough recipe is not the technique or texture of the final product—it's the flavor. First off, it's way undersalted which, again, Lahey admitted after the original recipe ran , presumably to keep the salt from inhibiting autolysis too much.

But worse than that is the background flavor of the bread itself. Yeast produces different byproducts depending on the temperature it ferments at. So dough formed with a warm ferment ends up with a sour, yeasty off-flavor, as opposed to the richer, maltier aromas you get from bread fermented at cooler temperatures. As I've shown before , giving lean doughs like this a stay in the fridge for three to five days can massively increase its flavor and its performance.

Same goes for the no-knead bread. After allowing it to rise at room temperature overnight, I'll stick mine directly into the refrigerator for three days. There's another advantage built into this as well: cold dough is much easier to handle.

Gluten gets stiffer as it cools, which means that refrigerated dough will be much simpler to shape into a ball or a long loaf, or whatever shape you wish to bake it in. After shaping, cover is with a bowl or a flour-coated kitchen towel and let it rise at room temperature for a couple of hours to take the chill off it and leaven for the final time before slashing it with a sharp knife this allows it to expand faster in the Dutch oven, and makes it look pretty , and baking.

How do you know your bread is done when you bake it? Same way you know your meat is done: with a thermometer. As bread bakes, water is both evaporated and bound into the structure of the crumb. This occurs pretty much in correlation with the internal temperature of your bread. If you want to make your life even easier, get yourself a good gram scale to allow you to easily calculate ingredients without having to dirty up measuring spoons, cups, or bowls.

Using a scale and a metal bowl, you can make bread and end up with only a single bowl to wash! Here's the basic method I use:. To parts flour, add 1. Whisk those together. Add 70 parts water, and stir to combine.

Cover, then let rise overnight. Transfer to the fridge, let ferment for three days, then turn dough out on to a well-floured surface. Without well-developed gluten, your bread or rolls would be flat and tough. These four simple step-by-step instructions will yield well-developed gluten.

I love the video, I love making my own bread too. I even mill my own flours and next year I'm hoping grow my own wheats. I just planted a few of my favorite wheat grains. Milling your own flour really makes the bread taste unbelievably better. Although, homemade bread of any flour is fabulous! I still love my white breads, which you can't produce your own.