Simply enjoy food

I rarely knead dough anymore. It's not because I'm lazy, but because I have found a better method. This method is known as "stretch and fold" and gently develops the gluten in the dough.

I start off by mixing my ingredients with a spoon in a bowl or container. I let it sit for a short while, between 5 and 30 minutes.

Then, I lightly dust the counter suface with a little flour so that the dough doesn't stick.

With very wet hands, I pat down the dough to form a rough rectangle. If I feel any dry spots or clumps of flour, I gently press them down with wet hands. That all you need to do. The dry spots will disappear after the next stretch and fold or two.

Again with wet hands, I lift the undersides of the edges and stretch them out a bit, making the rectangle a little bigger.

I fold over the top and bottom edges like folding a letter:

I then pat it down again and fold over like a letter in the other axis.

Then, I put the dough back into the container and wait 20-45 minutes. You can tuck in the edges of the dough before dropping it into the container to make the ball of dough a little easier to manipulate.

I repeat the stretch and fold two more times with 20 to 45 minute pauses in between.

After the final stretch and fold, the dough looks a lot more smooth.

The dough doesn't need any more work. If it wasn't made with a preferment, it will go into the fridge for at least 8 hours to develop flavor. If it was made with a preferment, or has already been prefermented, it is ready to be pre-shaped.

Any dough can be made using this method. It doesn't matter if it's a lean dough or an enriched dough, a whole-wheat dough, multigrain or white flour dough. I find bread made with this dough has a better texture and more open crumb.

It's also very easy to manage. Although the process can take 60 to 90 minutes in total, the actual amount of time to do the work is minimal. Each stretch-and-fold only takes a minute or two to do. That's three minutes' work over one hour.

You can mix the ingredients with a spoon and let them preferment overnight. An hour before you are ready to pre-shape (two hours before you want to bake), you can stretch-and-fold to finish the dough. The gluten will also withstand the dough being mixed, stretch-and-folded, and then being put into the refrigerator for up to about 5 days. Take the dough out and pre-shape right away. Do final shaping an hour later.

With such a flexible schedule, you can plan ahead and make bread without very much hands-on time at all.

I don't follow a recipe when making french bread.

That is to say, I don't measure predetermined numbers of cups of ingredients to make one batch of dough. I use a percentage.

French baguettes (or demi-baguettes, as shown above) are made from lean dough, which means they are made from only four ingredients:
- Flour
- Water
- Salt
- Yeast

To work out what quantities of these ingredients to use, you use what's called the baker's percentage. It's all about the flour.

Everything is expressed as a percentage of the four.

This baguette was made with a 75 per cent hydration lean dough. So for every 100 grams of flour that is used, 75 grams of water is used. I also use 2 percent salt and 1 percent yeast. So that turns out to be 2 grams of salt and 1 gram of granular yeast per 100 grams of flour.

To make this bread, I poured a glass of water in my bowl and weighed it. I divided that weight by 0.75 and added that many grams of flour. I multiplied that weight by 0.02 and added that many grams of salt and divided that number by two to know the quantity of yeast.

So, in this case, the dough was made with
533 grams of flour (100 %)
400 grams of water (75 %)
11 grams of salt (2 %)
5 grams of yeast (1%)

I usually stretch and fold the dough to develop it.