Hi Melissa! I have enjoyed your articles through the years, but never took the time to register so I could post a reply. After yet another outstanding article, I had to sign up.
You and your articles are an absolute gift to artisan bakers the world over. I am thrilled to learn the “dough rolling” technique. The entire article was so good, it really needed to be posted to TheFreshLoaf forum.
It is a joy to watch you demonstrate your techniques and also the way you so skillfully handle the dough. It is obvious that your breads are a labor of love.
Thank you so much! I’m honored you’d make an account to express your appreciation for my articles, and that you shared the gluten development one on The Fresh Loaf with a praise-filled intro too. Thank you
A neat coincidence – I just finished writing a recipe where rolling felt like the best approach for the dough. Two rounds of rolling, one lamination, and one round of coil folding (to clean up the wild bubbles from the lamination).
Hope to see you posting here again now that you have an account. Have a great weekend!
This corresponds with my understanding also: it does a lot of stretches fast to “incorporate a lot of air” (i.e. oxygenate). I think the violence is just the inevitable consequence of doing it fast.
@Fermentada I’d be interested to hear the reasoning behind why these various techniques might be more appropriate for different stages of the process. The idea of the later, the gentler makes sense to me, and so a few stretch and folds followed by a few coil folds is something I understand (and often do). But rubaud seems very gentle and yet was placed first in this list, while the violent slap and fold was placed last. And while laminating is not exactly violent, it seems to me to have greater risk of dough tearing than most other methods, and yet again it is listed late in this list.
Good points. Thanks for pointing that out. I need to edit out that sentence or move slap and fold up to about even with Rubaud mixing. Likewise, my preference with laminating is to do it in the first half of gluten development (because of the big air bubbles it creates that I want to even out with later folds, and also the risk of tearing) – unless I’m using it to add inclusions right before the bench rest…then it’s late in the process.
It also occurs to me that there are multiple things going on that perhaps push in different directions…and how those two things are best balanced may be different for different doughs and what you want from the end result: on the one hand, the later you are in the process, the less you may want to disturb the bubbles that have formed in the gluten structure, but on the other hand the more the dough may have developed resilience to tearing (though that may depend on how tight vs how extensible it is).
Really, I think the way gluten development and behavior works is more complicated than anybody completely has a grip on, and while these notions we use to talk about it may have some truth to them, I’m not convinced any of them are quite right, even if they are helpful to us. So I’m less inclined to say that the ordering you have them is wrong, than that there simply may not be a right way to order them that can be completely rationalized.
I agree. We’d have to account for a lot of “except in this case” and “but this can work also” if we try to set up an order of methods. I edited that paragraph according, speaking about experience and reading the dough – not necessarily what beginners want to hear – so I added a couple of tips too.
