Baking tips! Make your best bread with help from Abigail’s Oven’s own Martha Levie.

Hello. This is Martha Levi. You can tell I’ve been working with my dough here.

I’m going to talk about how you can tell if you’re gluten has been processed enough to bake.

You want to do your long, or bulk ferment long enough that all of the gluten gets processed, but yet they’re not all of it. The gluten gets processed enough to be digestible but not so much that you don’t have enough tension in there. You need the stretchiness to trap the bubbles and still raise.

When you have done your bulk ferment and you dump the dough out onto the counter, one of the ways that you can see if it’s ready to use is if you pick it up and you test the stretchiness of it.

This dough is good, but it actually probably needs to be baked pretty quickly. We’re on the lower side of having enough gluten. Because as you can see it’s really easy to stretch and floppy.

If I had done this and it wasn’t ready, there was too much gluten in it. Then I would pick it up and it would be really stiff. It would have so much tension that I wouldn’t be able to pull it apart. It needs to fall easily and flap easily. It would just be tense and really tight. Then, you know, you need a few more hours of fermentation before it’s ready to shape.

So there you go.

Have a happy day.