How long knead bread

Whole wheat flour soaks up more water and other liquids compared to white flours. The mixer will need to run longer to get a soft and somewhat sticky dough that will rise.

Click here to try an easy and popular recipe from King Arthur Baking. Similar to whole wheat flour, rye flour uses the entire grain. Using rye flour in a dough recipe will result in a denser loaf of bread. There is less gluten in rye flour versus other flours, including whole wheat. Just about any flour will make a delicious loaf of sourdough bread.

The key ingredient in this dough is the sourdough starter. Using all-purpose flour will result in less kneading time for the dough. The ingredients come together in minutes as gluten forms quickly. A recipe that uses whole wheat flour will require more mixing time as the liquids are absorbed and benefit from a longer kneading time.

Cornmeal and all-purpose flour are the main ingredients in cornbread. Overmixing cornbread dough will lead to tough cornbread. Since cornbread should be light and fluffy, extra mixing time will develop unwanted glutens. In most pita bread recipes, the main ingredient is all-purpose flour.

This type of flour mixes quickly in recipes. If you decide to use whole wheat flour, then mixing time will need to be increased.

Once the dough pulls together, shut off the mixer. Click here to try this yummy recipe for pita bread. A successfully mixed dough will be elastic. With time, the gluten might relax and soften. Your KitchenAid mixer will knead the dough for you in minutes. Here are five easy steps to get started:. This attraction causes individual glutenin molecules to unravel, or denature, and become long, slightly curly strings.

Once denatured, these long, strand-like molecules begin bonding with each other both at their ends and along their middles, forming a three dimensional, net-like structure. This structure is what allows dough to stretch and hold the large amounts of water and gas which we'll be needing for our dough to rise.

The glutenin net also tends to stretch like a spring, pulling back on itself once pressure is released. This is what we call a dough's elastic property. If all we had was glutenin, though, we would never be able to shape our dough into loaves—any shaping and stretching we do would immediately snap back into place.

A baker cannot live on spandex alone! This is where gliadin comes in. Unlike glutenin, gliadin is hydrophobic. This means that in the presence of water, gliadin remains tightly curled up in its native state. While you might think this would inhibit dough development, it's actually really important: the gliadins act like ball bearings, disrupting enough of the glutenin-glutenin bonds to allow them to slide past each other. It allows our dough to cast a wider net—holding more water and more gas—and make bigger bread.

This is good. Without this quality in dough, forming shaped loaves of bread would be nearly impossible. Gliadin gives dough its plastic quality. Together, these proteins form gluten, which provides the structure that makes leavened bread possible. Gluten is the house that bread lives in. During our autolyse, gluten formation is allowed to happen passively, and giving our gluten structure this sort of head-start means that our dough will require much less mixing and kneading further down the line.

This means less work for us, the bakers. So what's happening with the starch during our autolyse? The answer is twofold. When water is added and our proteins are getting tickled into formation, globules of starch molecules are absorbing water and swelling. This is important, because dehydrated starch is virtually inedible.

Hydrating our flour is the first step toward making it into food, and since flour is made up mostly of starch, making it edible is a really good thing.

The second part of our answer has to do with enzymes. See, starches are long-chain molecules too, much like our proteins. But rather than being chains of amino acids, starches are made up of lots and lots of simple sugars, bonded tightly together. But our yeast—which is on standby—can't eat big starches. It needs simpler sugars to feed on. Lucky for us, flour just so happens to contain the enzymes necessary to break down starches into simpler sugars. These enzymes are called amylases , and they are the same enzymes our bodies will use later on to digest the bread.

During the autolyse, these amylases are given a chance to start breaking down starches into yeast-food. This will help our bread rise happily. Note: these processes are just given a head-start during the autolyse. They will continue up until the moment we bake. Many bread recipes don't call for an autolyse, and that's ok. When it gets down to it, this step is optional. However, for most hearth breads, an autolyse will greatly increase the consistency and quality of the bread.

Moreover, it will give us a better idea of when to stop mixing our dough and set it to rise. As this series moves into working with wetter doughs, the autolyse will become even more essential. After the autolyse, your dough will seem looser than when you left it. Probably much looser. Don't worry—it's your bread's way of telling you that the gluten has started to organize itself and relax.

This will make an elastic dough, capable of holding lots of gas. Now it's time to add our salt and yeast. But why couldn't we add them during our autolyse? Thanks for asking! Although salt strengthens our gluten network overall, it's also very water-hungry.

If we added salt to our autolyse, it would compete with our proteins and starches for water, causing them to take longer to hydrate.

While this wouldn't be a disaster, we've already committed ourselves to a five-hour project here, so why make it harder on ourselves? And as for the yeast, its job is to ferment our flour, causing the bread to rise and develop flavor. But on a chemical level, mixing—and autolysing, in particular—isn't about flavor.

It's about structure. Were we to put our yeast in during our autolyse, it would start belching out gas. When we begin our kneading steps later, we would just end up pounding this gas back out. In short, the yeast just doesn't have a job to do during the autolyse. To make things easier to follow, I'm first going to explain how to accomplish this in a mixer, and then explain the quirks and tricks of doing it by hand.

If kneading with a stand-mixer, add the salt and yeast to your autolysing dough, and then set it to a nice, slow speed until you can't feel any graininess in the dough—just a few minutes should do it. If you're using active yeast, and have bloomed it, the water it's bloomed in goes in, too.

Beware: some of the water might splash out and hit you in the face if you stand over it being nosy. Should this happen, estimate back in the amount of water you think was lost—likely no more than a tablespoon or two. Once everything is incorporated, we now have what's called a complete dough, meaning we have flour, water, salt, and yeast all getting busy with each other. It's time to develop our gluten. This means we're going to organize our gluten into a coherent, three-dimensional structure.

Here we are taking our threads and ropes, and weaving them into a gas-trapping net. To develop gluten, set your mixer to medium high speed, and let it go for a few minutes.

It's important not to set your mixer speed too high, or the gluten structure will start to rip, keeping our loaves from rising to their full potential and making a denser bread than we want to eat. This is bread baking, not a mosh pit—we're aiming to discipline our gluten here, not raise havoc. When the dough just starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl, it's time to stop.

Give it a tug. It should stick to you just a bit, but be able to give you a gentle, decisive handshake. You should see the dough curling around the hook a little, and if you get in close, the curls should look almost like little muscles, like this:. Using a dough spatula, transfer your dough into a lightly oiled bowl large enough to let the dough at least double in volume. The oil will keep our dough from sticking to the bowl, and allow it to rise unhindered.

The only exceptions in this category are extremely wet doughs with a hydration level of more than 75 percent, doughs with very large yields. Use metal blades. Many food processors come with dull plastic blades meant to mimic the kneading action of a stand mixer. But we found they tend to drag the dough or leave it stuck to the sides of the bowl, out of reach of the stubby blades.

A sharp slicing action is essential to forming dough quickly, as the longer you process, the more you risk overheating the dough. Use ice water. The forceful action of a food processor creates friction, pumping a lot of heat into dough. Lower temperatures mean the dough will take longer to ferment; higher temperatures can kill yeast. Bread Illustrated—our first cookbook devoted solely to bread baking—is a fully illustrated handbook with more than meticulously tested recipes that will enable you to bake artisan bakery—quality bread at home.

Planetary action is vital. Mixers with a stationary bowl and a single mixing arm that uses planetary action work much better than those with a rotating bowl and two stationary beaters because they are much less likely to get clogged up when mixing stiff doughs. Large, squat bowls are best. A wide, shallow bowl is ideal. Consider a bowl lift. Tilt-head mixers are fine, but the prolonged running of the motor can cause the latch locking down the tilt head on some mixers to stop working over time.

This powerful, smartly designed machine handles batches of stiff dough without flinching. We like the bowl-lift design and large vertical bowl handle that aids pouring.

Thanks to its power, heft, simple operation, and relatively wallet-friendly price, the smaller sibling, the KitchenAid Classic Plus Series 4. These six recipes are among our all-time favorites. Start a free trial to access all these, plus our other home kitchen—tested, foolproof recipes.

Cooking Skills. A step-by-step guide to kneading bread dough by hand and in a stand mixer. What Does Kneading Do? Kneading Dough in a Stand Mixer. Knead the dough by hand for 30 seconds to form a smooth, round ball.

Kneading Dough by Hand.