Can i prove bread in the oven

Don't shake the baby—every bit of gas counts. In the event you do squash your dough a bit, don't worry about it too much. Just be extra careful during shaping to treat your dough gently. These things take practice. You will still have delicious bread. Re-re-cover the bowl and have another beer, or two, cause it will be most of an hour before we disturb our dough again.

Check your dough after another 45 minutes or so. Wet your hand and gently push on the dough surface. Feels dense? Go watch the Daily Show, and come back in a half hour. More rising time is just fine so long as we don't just up and forget about it.

Feels really dense? Move it to a warmer part of your kitchen. The dough should feel like a waterbed, pillowy and with some spring, but your finger should leave a slight imprint. Is it there yet? You're ready to divide the dough, which is the first step towards shaping your very own loaves. To divide the dough, lightly flour the top with AP flour, scrape around the sides with your dough spatula to free it from the bowl and quickly flip the bowl upside down.

The dough should flop out in one large blob, and what was at the bottom of the bowl should now be on top. It'll also be really sticky. This is good, like so:. Lightly flour your hands, bench knife, and the counter top on which you will be shaping. With your bench scraper, decisively cut the dough in half, pushing the halves away from each other with the bench knife, making sure to keep the bench knife's blade firmly flush with your counter's surface.

Pre-shaping is all about giving your dough a heads-up about what shape it's going to be later, and giving the gluten a little time to get situated.

Think of it as a dress-rehearsal for the big show. For us, our final shape is going to be round—a boule—and so our pre-shape is going to be round as well.

To pre-shape, we're going to perform a series of folds similar to what we did during the bulk rise. We want to do this in as few motions as possible, making those motions decisive and clean, without being aggressive.

It'll look something like this:. Once you've folded your dough into a neat little package, gently flip it over with your bench knife to let the smooth side face you.

For the moment this is the top of our loaf-to-be. The place where the different sides of the dough meet and meld is our seam, which should end up on the bottom. Like this:. Most important here, is to not over-think this.

Just try to get some tension on the surface of the loaf. If we mess with it too much now we're just going to push our hard-earned gas out of it. Pre-shapes—like rehearsals—aren't meant to be perfect. Lightly flour the tops of the rounds and cover with a towel. Allow the pre-shaped loaves to hang out on the bench for a while—anywhere between fifteen and forty minutes will do the trick. By letting the tension we built during our pre-shape relax, we'll be able to create even more tension during our final shape, all without tearing the surface of the loaf.

This helps make big, beautiful bread. This is our bench rest. While this is happening, we should ready our proofing baskets or bowls, which will help support the structure of our loaves during their final proof. Start by choosing something the right size. These are going to be big loaves of bread, but we don't want to get crazy. The proofing baskets—called bannetons—that I use at home and at The Cleveland are made specifically for 1.

If you don't have bannetons use a medium serving bowl or colander, the size vessel you might use to serve potatoes for four during dinner. Once shaped, our loaves should fill the basket a little more than halfway, which will leave adequate room for the final rise.

To ready your baskets, choose two large kitchen towels made of smooth cloth. Don't use anything fuzzy unless you plan to eat that fuzz—it will stick to the bread.

Using rice flour although plain old AP flour will work fine, just go a little heavier , brush the towels with a light-to-medium coating of flour.

We don't want to go too light or the loaves will stick; too heavy and we'll be eating clumps of burnt flour off our crusts. Place the towels in the proofing baskets or bowls and go about your business. We're making what's called a boule: a big, round loaf. That means that our final shape will be the same as our pre-shape.

We know our loaves are ready for final shaping when giving a gentle tug on the rounds shows some stretch and does not immediately pull back.

Take a look:. Once our dough has shown us that it's ready to be shaped, flip the rounds so the seam side is now facing up again, and once again perform the folds listed above, gently developing tension along the rounds' surface.

Use flour to keep the dough from sticking to you and the bench, but not so much that the dough won't stick to itself. Too much flour will keep our seams from holding, or will show up as clumps of unincorporated flour after baking. It's best to just flour your hands and scrape underneath the loaves with your bench knife to prevent sticking. Once you've folded your dough appropriately, cup your hands together and pull the dough towards you to generate tension along the boule's exterior, rotating the boule a quarter turn between pulls.

Like with the pre-shape, we want to use as few motions as possible. If the dough surface begins to rip, you're pulling a little too hard. It's not a disaster. Just stop. Remember: We're proofing our boules in round containers.

This works with the help of carbon dioxide, according to Serious Eats. You don't want the bread to rise too quickly, because if it does, the loaf will fill with too much carbon dioxide, and it won't get much alcohol. That will make your bread taste flat. If the proofing environment is too warm, bubbles from the yeast will form too quickly, with too much air, and begin to pop. That will cause your bread to be flatter than bread that proofed in the ideal environment. If you want to proof the dough in an oven without hot water or a light, you can do that, as long as you give the dough more time to rise.

Cooler is better than warmer for proofing, according to Serious Eats. While that works to a point, yeast only has so much food. You should need no more than three hours to get your dough to rise properly, or the quality of the bread's structure and flavor may deteriorate. Instead of your kitchen oven, you can proof bread dough in a microwave oven, according to King Arthur Flour.

Again, you'll need boiling water. Place two or three cups of water in the microwave oven and bring them to a full rolling boil. Keep the door closed and let the hot water steam and warm the microwave. After 45 minutes, replace the water container with your uncovered bowl of bread dough and quickly close the door. The microwave temperature should start in the mids, and drop into the 70s, providing a good warming environment.

If you forget to do this ahead of time, King Arthur Flour suggests you bring a smaller amount of water just to the boiling point and then remove it when you place the dough in the microwave. The temperature won't remain there as long, so this might work better for pizza dough or other dough that doesn't need as long to rise. There are other places to proof your dough, although not as reliable as your oven or even your microwave.

You could try on top of a warm appliance, like your refrigerator or water heater, according to King Arthur Flour. If you have a wood stove or radiators, you could try one of those.

Or you could sit your dough on another heat source, but you may have to watch it closely. If you used the oven method from Cook's Illustrated as described above, you shouldn't have any problem using the oven for the second rise. Just keep the door closed and the heat in until you remove the dough after its first proofing. If it's cooled, you can try refreshing the water and checking the temperature again. When the second rise is finished, remove the loaves, which should be in their bread pans, preheat the oven and put the bread back into the oven to bake.

Or, if you want to preheat your oven, as King Arthur Flour recommends, find another warm spot to do your second rise or try your microwave. The important thing is, you've given your dough the warmth it needs to proof properly, and allowed the yeast time to produce the ethanol that will give the bread its flavor. The baking should just be the icing on the cake.

Nutrition Breads and Breakfasts Bread. Andra Picincu is a certified nutritionist and personal trainer with more than 10 years of experience. It is also much faster than the light method at getting to temp.

However, it does lack the longevity of the light method and the moisture of the water method. This method simply involves putting a cast iron pan over high heat for a few minutes before placing it in an oven. If it starts smoking it is more than hot enough to use, but it is best to stop it before smoking happens.

No worries if it does smoke, just let it cool long enough so that the smoking stops your dough will absorb the smoke otherwise before placing it in the oven. We like to put it on the bottom rack as far away from our dough as our oven allows.

We simply open the oven for a few minutes to let some heat escape down to about degrees, place the dough inside and close the door again. If all goes well, and you have a decent enough size cast iron, you will not need to reheat the cast iron for proofing times around an hour. However, as with the water method above, you might need to reheat the cast iron every 40 minutes to an hour if going longer than an hour proof.

There are just too many variables to give an exact number, unfortunately. Hopefully, though, these ballpark figures will help you with the bigger picture when it comes to planning this out for the first time. It is much smaller which we think actually makes it do a better job at retaining heat.

The major downfall with the microwave, though, is the size. We place a warm damp towel over the top of the proofing bowl and leave it in the microwave. As far as baking supplies go, it is among the more expensive tools out there. With a proofing box you just set your desired temperature and it holds it constant.

This one by Brod and Taylor is collapsible which makes it easier to keep around smaller kitchens like ours. I recently fell in love with the art of the croissant, or more honestly, I fell in love with the taste of the homemade croissant.

I was hooked after our first batch. As good as they were If you've ventured down the lamination trail, as we recently did, you probably need a hug. Bring it in. Don't be shy. It's a long road to mastering the art of the croissant.