Watch the dough, not the clock, and double so up here
This is the lesson I probably should have taught first. But you needed dough in your hands a few times before it would mean anything.
Every recipe you find hands you times. Bulk ferment 4 to 6 hours. Fold every 30 minutes. Bake at 450 for 25 minutes. Those numbers came out of somebody's kitchen, somewhere, and that kitchen is not yours.
We're at about 4,600 feet up here, which changes things. Dough rises faster at elevation, not slower the way people sometimes assume. Less air pressure, and it just moves. Add air that's dry as anything most of the year, worse in winter, and you've got two forces working on your dough that whoever wrote the recipe never had to consider.
So the times in a recipe are a starting guess. Not a rule. That's the lesson, more or less.
What "watch the dough" actually looks like
I'm not being vague for effect. Here's what I mean, concretely.
During bulk ferment, stop checking the clock and start checking the dough itself.
- It should look noticeably puffier than when you started. Not doubled necessarily, but changed.
- Poke it gently with a wet finger. It should slowly spring back — not shoot back fast, and not just sit there with a dent in it.
- You'll start to see bubbles on the surface and sides if your bowl is clear enough to see through. A good sign things are moving.
If your recipe says 5 hours and the dough looks done at three and a half, it's done at three and a half. I mean that. I've overproofed more loaves than I care to admit by trusting a number over my own eyes. Early on I followed a sea-level baker's rise times to the letter and kept ending up with slack, gassy dough that fell flat when I shaped it. Not her recipe's fault. It just wasn't written for up here.
Same with your folds. A recipe might say fold every 30 minutes for the first two hours. Fine as a starting point, but if your dough feels loose and extensible after 20 minutes, you can fold. If it's still tight and resistant at 30, give it more time. You're reading the dough, not the timer.
The dry air problem, and how I found out the hard way
Here's a dumb one. For a long stretch, my dough kept getting a dry, almost leathery skin on top during bulk rise. Winter especially. I assumed something was wrong with my starter, or my flour, or me. It was the house. It's dry in here, canyon-dry, and an uncovered bowl of dough sitting out for a few hours is basically inviting the surface to crust over.
The fix was stupidly simple. A damp towel over the bowl, or just a lid, and the skinning stopped completely. Took me embarrassingly long to land on it. I kept troubleshooting the wrong thing.
So: cover your dough. Always, but especially if your kitchen runs dry, which up here it usually does. A shower cap works if you've got one you don't mind dedicating to bread. Plastic wrap works. A plate on top of the bowl works. It doesn't need to be fancy.
A caution worth saying plainly
If you're doing this near a warm spot — on top of the fridge, near a heating vent, in direct sun through a window — that dough is going to move faster than you expect, sometimes a lot faster. I've had dough double in under two hours sitting somewhere warm in summer. Check it more often than you think you need to, especially the first few times you try a new recipe or a new spot in your kitchen. Overproofed dough isn't dangerous, it just won't hold its shape and you'll end up with a flatter, gummier loaf. Annoying, not harmful. And avoidable, if you're actually looking at the dough instead of setting a timer and walking away.
Boiled all the way down: the recipe is a guess written by someone else, in someone else's kitchen. Your job is to learn what your dough looks like when it's ready, and to trust that over the number on the page. True everywhere, double up here, because we're working against elevation and dry air both.
It won't click the first time. It took me a solid year of paying attention before I could look at a bowl of dough and just know. You'll get there faster than I did, if only because somebody's telling you to look.
Before next time
Next time you mix a batch, try ignoring the clock for one whole bulk ferment and just checking the dough by look and feel every 45 minutes or so. Write down what you saw at each check, not just the final time. It'll teach you more than any timer will.
- J