Food and Cooking

Kneading the bread dough will determine the outcome and quality of your bread making skills more than any other step in the process.

1. Start with dough the dough recipe above. Please be careful to not add too much flour. As I said the dough should be soft and silky when you are done mixing and kneading.

2. Turn the dough out on a clean, floured work surface.

3. Flour your hands well.

4. Use the heel of your hands to compress and push the dough away from you, then fold it back over itself. This should be a firm rolling motion, somewhat like a good shoulder massage.

5. Give the dough a little turn and repeat Step four, Put the weight of your body into the motion and get into a rhythm.

6. Keep folding over and compressing the dough until it becomes smooth and slightly shiny, almost satiny. Check your recipe for specifics. The most common test for doneness is to press it with your finger. If the indentation remains, it's ready for rising. You can also try stretching part of the dough into a rectangle. If it can stretch into a thin sheet without breaking, you've kneaded it enough.

Tips:
It's difficult to over-knead dough by hand, but it's actually very easy to do with a machine, so check it fairly often. Kneading one loaf's worth of white-bread dough by hand should take about 10 minutes.

Kneading does three crucial things for bread: it distributes the yeast and other ingredients evenly and thoroughly, it develops the gluten in the dough, and it introduces air. The gluten, or wheat protein, is what enables the dough to stretch instead of collapsing when the yeast grows inside it. If the gluten isn't developed, the dough won't rise well and will produce a heavy loaf - rather like a brick.

Some bread recipes call for a second kneading just before the dough is added to the loaf pans. Professional bakers call this benching and shaping the dough.