Pre-Shape: Two Different Contexts
Pre-shaping has two overall functions that are very different, depending on its use:
1. You're a professional baker making very large batches of dough.
2. You're a home baker making 1 loaf of bread or enough rolls for dinner.
I'm learning how to make utilitarian bread: white and whole wheat sandwich, pita, tortillas, hot dog and hamburger buns, and (hopefully) Italian sub rolls. I'm not all that much into sourdough; we don't eat much pizza; and most artisan bread crusts are too much for these old teeth.
Much of the bread-making problem-solving on the InterWebs involves sourdough, ciabatta, baguettes or pizza crust. So it's a difficult to find solutions for what apparently is "basic" bread, or "everyday" bread. People seem to think it's so easy, there's no need to explain it much.
Additionally; a whole lot of recipes for these breads involve cups and measuring spoons. For a new baker, it's hard to find out why something fails. Experienced home cooks (Uncle Joe, Grandma or Mom) have done all this for so long, they don't even remember having questions.
A standard step in almost any recipe is to "cut the dough into portions, pre-shape it, and let it rest." Okay, I did that. The "final shaping" became very difficult: The dough had risen a little, and pinching edges didn't stay pinched.
When a friend of hers asked The Proximate Lady for suggestions on bread in a bread machine, I did some looking. There was an entire blog post about "Why to Pre-shape Your Bread." Ah Hah!
For the student home baker, it's reasonable to knead and ferment the dough, then mash it into a loaf pan. Smoosh it down a bit, let it proof and then bake it. Right? The problem is the bread ends up with several problems: Uneven shape, disorganized crumb, and even blow-outs along the sides or top. Not to mention fragile crust.
Making 1 loaf, or one batch of a few rolls is a similar problem. A commercial baker has to divide up many pounds of dough into what eventually becomes individual loaves. With the cutting, weighing, and bits and pieces, the smaller pieces have to take time to incorporate again and close off sliced edges.
Pre-shaping for a commercial baker allows large pieces of dough to generally take on a loaf shape, relax for further manipulation, and re-absorb smaller pieces of dough that were added to create a specific weight.
A home baker usually only has the specific amount of dough needed for the single bake. The only cutting involved has to do with how large or small an eventual roll or flat round will be (pita or tortillas). There can be little pieces that are cut off one piece of the original, which get added to other pieces.
Pre-shaping in the home situation has to do with gluten matrix in the dough that will soon be baked. It will end up as standalone rolls, or in a constrained container like a loaf pan.
So for the home baker, pre-shaping IS the final shaping. After the dough has fermented and it's removed from bowl (whatever), the next step is de-gassing (punching down). At that point, the dough is almost ready for the "second rise," or proofing phase.
Instead of just rolling out a log for a hot-dog bun, or smooshing it into a loaf pan to rise, "pre-shaping" and "forming" are the same thing.
It's better to flatten a piece of dough, then roll it if you're making a loaf of sandwich bread or a hot-dog bun. It's better to form a ball and roll/smear the bottom around on the counter, to make a hamburger bun or dinner roll.
This rolling, smearing, flattening, and bashing around "seems to be" very different from videos of quickly pre-shaping a rough log, then letting it sit for a bit. But that's important when working with huge batches of dough. It's not important for a wee bit of dough at home.
Just punch down the dough, cut (and weigh) it if you're making rolls, flatten it with a rolling pin "pre-" rolling it up, then let it rise. "Pre-shaping" in this case means turn each piece into your final shape. The "pre-" only means "organize the gluten matrix before letting it rise the second time: "pre-" second rise.
You are missing something that has been important for me. As you wrote, things are different for a bakery, and I'm only only a home baker. The pre-form stage lets me adjust the elasticity of the dough:
- if it's too elastic I can let the dough rest before final shaping; sometimes it can get too elastic in the middle of shaping and a rest will make it easier to finish shaping the loaf;
- if it's too extensible I can work/stretch the dough more during preform. Sometimes I stretch the heck out of it to get it to the point it will seem able to hold a shape during shaping.
And, yes, if the dough has a good feel and a good balance between extensibility and elasticity, I will go ahead ang skip a preform.
TomP
@Tom - You make a great point about having the time to adjust the dough. I've had trouble rolling something like a hot-dog bun, only to have it slide right on back to where it started from. Yes, a bit of a rest helps. (Or a claw hammer, a small anvil, and numerous words not appropriate in a church setting.)
But I wouldn't say it's a missed point. The "light-bulb moment" for me was the ambiguity of a term that had two quite different meanings in context. Pre-shaping cut down pieces from a large bucket of dough, versus pre-shaping a single loaf of dough prior to the final proof in the pan.
Pre- meaning Before, is easy to understand. But connected with "shaping" was making me nuts. If I'm making a basic sandwich loaf, one day in the week, and that's all, then when the dough has finished the first rise (bulk ferment) it's pretty much done. It goes into the pan for the second rise (proofing).
Do I just cram the punched down dough in there? Or do some artistic finagling for some obscure reason. That "finagling" is the "shape it before laying it to rest in its final resting place."
The only time elasticity or extensibility has an impact for me is during the "shaping before laying it in the pan instead of cramming a wad of dough in there." But realistically, the bigger problem at that point for me is that the dough has formed enough of a "skin," if you will, that unless it's tightly rolled, pinched, and paid attention to, there can be air pockets in the final bread.
I'm pretty sure a more flexible dough wouldn't matter here. Probably hydration, but I'm working on that.
I almost never bake a free-form loaf of any kind. Even the hot-dog buns use a pan I made, and hamburger buns use rings. However; for sourdough, baguettes, and other loaves that are often free-form, I can see that "shaping before letting it proof" does offer a lot more flexibility, as you're pointing out.
Ultimately, I'm just tired as all get-out of the damn "mysteries" surrounding the "lingo" and "argot" in the baking world. I spent way too much time in the corporate business and financial world, listening to their "secret language" to have much patience anymore. Language should be straightforward, in my opinion, particularly when used to assist people who are just starting out in a career, hobby, adventure, or endeavor. :-)
I'm puzzled by that skin. If the dough is kept covered while not being worked on, it shouldn't form a skin. I cover with a sheet of plastic wrap while my dough rests. Don't you?
Otherwise I only have a problem with the dough not wanting to merge is with fairly dry doughs. Sometimes wetting the seam area before pressing it together can help.
The way the dough is shaped can affect the crumb, both its evenness and its openness. With very high-hydration doughs you may have to simply pour it into a loaf pan without shaping, though.
@Tom: Bit of a lapse here on the forum, as I'm learning boatloads in my ongoing quest for moistness (as opposed to "moisture"). Regarding this "skin" I'm referring to: Yes, I do cover the dough during rising and so forth. However, and as you know, when you've kneaded the dough to that silky, tacky point, you also shape it into a boule (or ball) for rising. At that time, many bakers speak of the advantage of doing some nominal stretching on the upper surface to create some tension.
What they're doing is making a sturdy surface that will help form a nice crust, right? I'm supposing you do something similar when forming sourdough? That surface that's somewhat sturdy is what I'm referring to.
It's not a bad thing, but simply means the dough has correctly formed and has become integrated. The problem is making rolls like sub rolls or hot-dog buns. The bulk dough gets weighed after initial (bulk) ferment. That means cutting bits and pieces, then reincorporating them into the small ball that will become the roll or bun. Then let it rest, for the dough to relax.
I cover those smaller balls with plastic, but they'll have that "tension surface" I suppose it could also be called. I'll keep that on the bottom, with the pinched gathered dough facing up. After relaxing, I'll flatten it out.
At that point, for a well-formed shape, and also to reduce large air pockets, the square-ish bit of flattened dough gets rolled. And that's where it can get tricky.
What I've learned is that what looks like a gentle pinching on a video, actually involves a significant amount of pressure.
Like you, the drier the dough, the bigger the issue. I've decided that increasing hydration has so many benefits, I'm being more critical of the hydration levels in these kinds of utilitarian bread. One that actually requires a close attention to hydration is corn tortillas.
Those don't get rolled, but there are a couple of visual cues as to when the dough reaches the proper hydration. It's often WAY more than what's recommended "to start." When I switched over to pita bread, I began to see wildly disparate recipes, regarding hydration. Once again, aside from almost no extensibility and extreme elasticity, there also was the outer tension surface.
I had a laugh, because as I was re-making a pita recipe a couple of times, contemplating the lack of extensibility, I thought back to your comment on when to add salt: to the autolyze or not. You'd said you found that by putting the salt in later, during kneading, you got better extensibility. So...I did that! :-D See? No comment goes unnoticed!
Ultimately, I realized that unless the pita dough was a particular level of hydration, it wouldn't "puff." People who started with a very wet dough, ended up putting shovels-full of flour all over the place during kneading. I'd prefer a recipe that has close the complete amount of flour from the start.
One recipe had that -- the exact amounts -- but the dough was low hydration. And, using warm water and long kneading, it rose to "double" in less than 15 minutes! I punched it down three times, one time, just for flavor and longer for the yeast to develop. Very hard to roll out. I just went with the 15 minute rise the second time, and zero change to the extensibility problem.
When I increased the hydration and chilled the dough, I got something vaguely resembling a dough that would stay where I put it prior to frying. It still shrunk quite a bit, but not as fast and not as far.
I've begun making the hot-dog buns with a much higher level of liquid, and then allowing it to "mix," then "knead" for longer to get the windowpane test. The result is a better-tasting bread, but also a much easier time of it when rolling the dough into shape.
See, that's one place we differ. I hardly ever knead the dough to that point. I rely on time and stretching sessions. I'm referring to sourdough breads and I think you are talking about yeasted doughs. They develop faster so there is less time to work with. Even with yeasted doughs I will do less kneading and more stretching if I expect the dough to rise for longer times
And when I'm working with yeasted dough that I expect to rise fairly quickly, I knead until the dough gets so elastic that it's hard to work. I don't force it beyond that point. I have read that using a mixer the dough may get more extensible again if you mix for a long enough time. I hardly ever use a mixer and so I haven't experienced that.
I think you are mixing up two different ideas: forming a ball at the start of bulk fermentation; and tensioning a ball or preform as part of shaping. I don't think the shape at the start of bulk fermentation is important. No matter what you start with, the dough is going to relax and tend to even out in the container. A ball looks neat and will lose less water by evaporation that other shapes, that's all.
During bulk my thinking about doing S&F sessions is that I want to counteract the dough's tendency to lose its elasticity in favor of extensibility. Both need to develop but you want to end up with a good balance. If you are going to stretch or roll out the dough, as for those pitas you talk about, you want more extensibility and less elasticity. If you want a dough that will hold a log shape during a three-hour proof, you want to favor elasticity over extensibility. Yet for the best rise in the oven too much elasticity will constrain the final volume of the loaf. So it's always a balancing act that depends on your goal and also the behavior of the flours involved.
Tensioning of the final shape is important for the shaped loaf to hold a good shape during proof. Think of a water balloon. All the structural strength comes from the surface tension of the rubber envelope. The volume comes from the amount of water. In the same way, the structural strength of a shaped loaf comes mostly from its outer skin or layers, and the rigidity and volume come from the internal gas pressure. The gluten network lets you get that tensioned skin, and the gluten network holds gels (made from starches, I suppose but don't actually know) that trap the gas.
OTOH, if you have some other way to constrain the shape then you don't need all that tensioned skin. An example is a batter-like dough that you scrape into a loaf pan. The most open crumbs I've gotten have been with that kind of bread.
@Tom, that's a cool name! I've just lumped all doughs kind of together, and hadn't really thought about sourdough being a different type of yeast. Okay, so that's what I'm making, almost always, other than tortillas -- yeast dough. I'm making utilitarian bread to replace the ever-more-expensive commercial bread (which tastes more and more horrible).
The pita bread won't have a form, like a pan or tray. So the elasticity is a major problem. However, the recipes I worked with had lots of problems. I took a decent recipe, but then added a fair amount more water. That helped, but wasn't The Solution. Still working on that.
Also; one way or another, the dough is going to have some sort of "cover." Whether or not there's tension, just the exposure to the air in general will make a skin. The issue is how thick or how delicate. Covering with elastic is my go-to, but I'll still have enough of that "skin" to make it more difficult to stick together when rolling a hot-dog bun.
I have seen that when the hydration is right for the dough, the dough is beautifully manageable. That's when it will stick together during rolling a "log," or bun. On the other hand, more often than not, that hydration will also call for a lot longer mix/knead.
I do use the mixer because I'm making the bread as part of the weekly groceries. I totally understand the stretch-and-fold, and tried it just to see how it worked. Very cool method! I just don't have that kind of time. It's enough planning ahead to make a poolish (going to try a biga soon).
All in all, I've learned the basics, and am setting "in stone" the main recipes I want. But I'm also running across all sorts of information, tips, tricks, and explanations that simply haven't shown up in the past. That just aggravates me; to the point where I did some deep diving into why the various search engines are so horrible.
Side note: Google apparently has decided to prioritize Reddit in their results. Great: I'm looking for professional information, and getting mostly people's opinions! I'm using Mojeek more and more, and also Brave.
Finally figured out that yudane (you-DAH'nee) is the boiling water over the flour, versus the tangzhong heating water and flour to a paste. I'm not sure if one or the other has the advantage, but they come from different cultures so I can see it's multiple people solving the same problem in different ways. Like poolish v biga v levain.
All this to say that shaping, whether after cutting/weighing portions, or just prior to putting in a pan for final rise (proofing) has its own difficulties. The "pre-" part was giving me lots of trouble until I figured out the syntax. Now for the elasticity vs extensibility problem! Yeesh! Why can't we just eat hay and grass?
It's interesting that you seem to find a lot of difficulties where I don't. I think that many of them fall into the same category - how much leeway is there before a given recipe or technique doesn't work well any more? I almost always find there is a lot of leeway and that it's usually easy to make adjustments as I go. You write as if you find almost no leeway most of the time.
One example is cutting pieces of dough get make the weights come out right. The only time I have a problem is when I go to join the ends of a bagel. The dough is so dry that it doesn't want to join. Otherwise I merrily chop off pieces and plop them onto other chunks of dough. They always seem to merge by baking time. Once in a while I can see a bit of an extra seam in the finished product, but usually not.
What I called "yeasted" bread is sometimes called "straight" bread. I don't like that term so well because I'm never sure if it is intended to include enriched doughs made with commercial yeast. Of course, sourdough contains yeast; my phrase "yeasted" bread is just a shorthand for "commercially yeasted" bread, meaning you buy the yeast in a store, usually some form of instant or dry yeast..
About search engines, I usually use Duck Duck Go, and Startpage. They all suffer from having to use results from the larger search engines and there is only so much they can do to improve things. It's a sad situation and doesn't seem to be getting better.
TomP
@Tom: I'm taking the "yeasted dough," or "yeasted bread" term because, like you, I think it's quite nicely descriptive. I knew right away that it meant commercial yeast, or purchased yeast, and that it distinguished the category of "breads that are not sourdough." I'm also fascinated with words and their history, so I'm very specific about definitions and such. I like words to mean something, usually quite specific. :-)
As for my finding problems, it's because I can't leave well enough alone, and because I'm still learning all sorts of new things as I research solutions to one or another problem. For example; reading about Japanese milk bread, I ran into a video about tangzhong. That fascinated me, and I'd never heard of it at all. Well, of course I had to try it in my one and only recipe: the Japanese milk bread. That caused problems. :-)
I run into all these problems because I create most of them. I'm a piano player, too, and never learned to read much music. Instead, I did it all by ear and had a decent career around the Chicago area until I left for other things. Like Indian music, most of what I did (and do) is improvisation. Sometimes it even comes up with something new and different. Mostly, it's just fun exploring.
I weigh the dough because I'm usually counting on a specific amount of bread to handle meals I've planned for the next week or so. The classic example is when I make hot dog buns, I want eight. To ensure I get that, I need a recipe that makes enough dough (65 g/bun x 8). Then when I get that dough, there's not a whole lot of room for over/under. Could I do it with extra dough? Sure. Could I have large or small buns? Sure. :-) But with my OCD and all, I wouldn't sleep well. LOL!
I had to make some flour tortillas tonight, and previously had that extensibility problem with them as well. There's no yeast, but still an issue with the gluten. The KA recipe calls for a rest (after pre-shaping the small balls) for anywhere from 1 hour to several. I was busy, so I made the dough, put it aside, and it ended up "resting" for probably around 5 hours. Sort of Rip Van Winkle dough.
There was zero problem whatsoever with the elastic snap back! This dough not only rolled out beautifully (with the tortilla press), but it also cooked nicely, and even puffed! I'm making a "fold-over," having gotten the idea from Stromboli. It will be a Subway Hot Melt sandwich on a large tortilla (with some baking powder for "fluff"), folded over like a soft taco. We'll see: In my mind's eye, it looks like it would be quite tasty.
But the lesson learned was that extra-long resting seems to lead to better extensibility. Being me, that means...I'm kind of forced to make pita bread again, right? The Law of New Information requires it, I think, from what I've read elsewhere. :-)