A place to proof your dough

My new oven has a dough proof button, that was not always the case. In my old oven I used the oven light.

Pop the dough bowl in the oven, shut the door and turn on the light. This worked great when proofing no

knead dough overnight.

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Cool oven feature! I’ve been yearning for a delayed or timed start feature so I can begin a preheat before my alarm goes off.

That would be a real plus.

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My wife and I both like to bake and often it is the same day for a party or gathering . I like slow fermentation as in no knead bread. So, I mix my dough, and put it in a cardboard box with a heated bottle of water in the winter.

I will sometime slow the fermentation by using cool water and flour in the dough and in a cardboard box.

Hope this helps

Here’s what I used to do before I got my new oven with its Proof setting. I bought one of those long plastic storage bins from the Container Store (the bin with a snap-on lid that you can fill with sweaters). Whenever I wanted to proof dough, I would put a towel in the bin, place a saucepan of boiling water in one corner, put my sheet pan in, and snap the lid shut. Perfect proofing box.

I only discovered yesterday–and by accident–that our Bosch oven, which is about four years old, has a proofing setting (100 degrees, basically). I used it for about an hour during final proof of a loaf that turned out great.

I’ve seen dough proofing functions on several ovens lately including some high end countertop toaster-ovens. I’ve also noticed that their stated temperatures are around 100 degrees, as yours is, susanmcc99. Most sourdough instructions that I’ve seen call for proofing at a considerably lower temperatures, almost all below 80 degrees. I wonder what effect higher temperature proofing has? Any thoughts, anyone?

Maybe we could talk Melissa, Breadtopia’s intrepid tester, into doing a hot/cold proofing test?

Lol I’m coming off a bunch of tests. One (it was three rounds really) will be a blog post here soon, and and the other was just for kicks and went superbly until what you see in the photo below. Weep with me lol.

It happened to one of two doughs at same temp but different wheats, different proofing speeds, and I can say that warm ambient proofing was implicated in the tragedy. Not the sole cause, since the other dough was fine, but warm does increase sticking risk.

It would be neat to see what other impact warm vs cold has. Very hard to sync degree of proofing and make sure temp is the only variable, because gasses compress in cold temps so a smaller dough could be just as fermented as a puffier one…

Oh, that is so sad, I do weep with you, although it looks intentional, like a Dali take on bread. I hope you baked it anyway.

What would interest me most in a warm/cold test would be the effect, if any, on texture and taste. I really liked one of your more recent posts about the necessity of baking an unanticipated loaf in a short time. And if I remember correctly, it turned out to be a very good bread. Always fun to test conventional wisdom.

Yes, I agree that there’s a lot of dogma, and it’s neat to try things that show sourdough bakingto be very flexible.

Here is an all whole grain formula that I learned about recently…haven’t tried it but saw someone’s great results. I’m not sure what the process details are.

Like that last-minute bread of mine you mentioned, and also my ciabatta recipe here, it uses a huge amount of starter…and it works. And so does a teaspoon of starter. It’s all pretty amazing to me.

I did bake the Dali bread - good description :slight_smile: I haven’t cut it, but would love if it somehow had the best whole grain crumb ever and then I could extol the technique of dough basket wrestling for bread perfection hehehe (I’m not holding my breath on this scenario)

It’s taken several years of baking for me to realize that starter, preferment, and final dough ingredients are not separate things but all the same thing, just at different points in time. I know I’m not describing this well, but something that I don’t think I got in the beginning was that time is as much an ingredient as flour, water, salt and yeast.

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Yes! I agree!!

On a related note, in the fruit yeastwater world, it shocks people when I tell them I use the water directly into a dough as @titanpilot2004 taught me. Most people believe you have to do a flour + yeastwater preferment.

Most people don’t understand that starter is just a medium in which a microbial ecosystem that happens to be beneficial for baking bread is living and that it doesn’t really matter how that microbial ecosystem gets introduced (inoculated) into your bread dough. If your yeast water has the right little beasties living in it and it gets into your dough somehow, you’re good to go.