How to Tell the Bread Dough Has Risen
Too many home cooks are confused about homemade bread. This is a big bummer: bread is one of the nicest and healthiest things you can learn to make , but complex recipes and unnecessary observation scares away all but the most stubborn novice bakers.
The sad truth is that the most common fears about baking are not entirely unfounded. Even when you really know what you are doing, bread dough can be very finicky and difficult to work with. Depending on the temperature in the kitchen, the humidity, the moisture in the dough, the flour used, the presence or absence of fatty ingredients, the temperature of the moist ingredients, the age of the yeast, and a million other factors, you can make the same batch of dough every day for a week, and each times to rise in different ways. Despite this, most recipes have only one guideline for the most important step of the ascent: a rough estimate of the time.
Timers will only break your heart. Visual cues are the only reliable way to measure dough fermentation, but unfortunately knowing what to look for usually comes with experience. This is where I come in. I know a thing or two about yeast dough, and while the specific methods will depend on the type of dough you’re working with, the basics never change. Know them and you will be on your way to the homemade bread paradise.
How to measure changes in volume and resiliency
While what’s going on at the molecular level is incredibly complex, baking great bread doesn’t require a master’s degree in testing. If you know how to control the big two – dough volume and stability – you can bake whatever you want .
Most recipes recommend letting the dough “rise until it doubles.” This is far from universal truth. Some dough doubles completely as it rises, but many do not, and what “doubles in size” looks like can vary from person to person. The good news is, you don’t have to be precise; you are simply looking for a noticeable and sustained increase in volume . That’s all. Check the dough after the first hour and then every 30 minutes. If you don’t see immediately noticeable changes since the last check, it’s time to move on.
Volume determines the height of your loaf, but stability is what makes it possible. You can think of it as elasticity or rebound: Has gluten evolved to the point where it can support expanding gas bubbles without collapsing? If so, you will end up with a well-structured bread with a great texture.
In steep, kneaded dough, it is easy to measure elasticity: Gently poke a surface with your finger and watch it bounce. The unfortified dough (just flour, water, salt and yeast) is done when it bounces almost completely and you can no longer see your fingerprint. Fortified dough (anything with butter, eggs, butter, or milk) almost never completely recovers, but will do so faster and fuller as the gluten web develops. As for the wetter dough without kneading, its elasticity can be determined by the size of the bubbles: the larger the bubbles, the more elastic the dough. Again, as with volume, you are looking for the moment when the elasticity of the dough stops increasing noticeably.
Bulk fermentation: mostly voluminous, but very little.
Merely reading the words “fermenting in the mass” can, like me, cause an incredible amount of anxiety associated with the leaven. But while this phrase is usually associated with long and complex folding curves, it applies to the part of any recipe where the dough rises in a covered bowl. This is the phase where the dough gains most of its volume – you basically want it to rise as much as possible – but as the volume increases, so does the stability. Make sure you keep an eye on both. Not only should your dough puff up a lot, you should see signs of increased stretchiness such as large bubbles, a smoother surface, and increased rebound.
Formation and second or third climb: mostly resilience
No matter how simple or complex its final shape is, each dough takes some time to take its final shape before it goes to the oven. During this rest period, several very important things happen. First, the gluten network is rebuilding itself to keep it in shape. The outer surface of the dough dries up a little, forming a crust, which then turns into a crust in the oven. Finally, the bread gets the last part of the extra volume, so it swells up as much as possible when baking.
Knowing when to put a rested loaf in the oven is his own skill, and admittedly a lot honed by time and experience. But even if you’ve never baked bread in your life, you will succeed if you know what to look for. In short, this is “puffiness”: the shape should remain well-defined, but become plump and slightly larger as it remains. For plain bread, the “plump” looks like a smooth, rounded, bulging top, but I think the complex shapes are the best illustrations. Take these rolled burgers for example:
They all have the same shape, but look how curvier the two large front buns are than any of the others? This is what you are looking for.
If there is one piece of advice I could give to aspiring bakers, it is to look for recipes that detail visual cues. This is the sign of a recipe that wants you to succeed. Be patient, trust your instincts and do not be afraid of failure – this is the best teacher in the world. Plus, any real doodles can always be turned into breadcrumbs.