Baking – bread you can mix in the evening, leave overnight, and bake in morning

bakingbreadretarding-bread

I'm afraid I know little about breadmaking.

Is there a bread where you could:

— mix it and I guess knead it in the evening (say around 9pm),

— leaving it out overnight (perhaps to rise (?) etc.?)

— then about 8? hours later (say around 7am?) you could put it in an oven

— and indeed then bake the loaf (or perhaps rolls) at 7am (I assume that takes roughly 1/2 hour? but I know nothing).

Thanks for your expertise.

Thanks to all for the amazing answers here!

With thanks to JSM below. This link was hugely useful – merry Christmas!

http://www.simplysogood.com/2013/03/artisan-no-knead-bread.html

Best Answer

It seems the main thing you're trying to do is avoid any work in the morning before bake. As suggested in comments, the easiest way to do that is to get a mechanical bread-maker. Since you say you're inexperienced in bread-making, you can dump everything in the night before, program it with a time, and voila -- fresh bread in the morning. (I don't tend to like the loaf quality that comes out of most home bread-makers, though; but if you find one that makes good bread, this is the best solution.)

That said, if you actually want to make the bread yourself, you can do what you want. It's just going to require a lot of work the evening before. Many recipes can be adapted to do this, though it tends to work best with sourdough loaves. Basically, the technique works like this:

  1. Mix dough
  2. Knead
  3. First fermentation (1-3 hours, depending on yeast quantity and bread type)
  4. Shape tightly, preferably with a pre-shaping and bench rest (another 15 minutes)
  5. Second fermentation, generally takes place entirely in fridge
  6. Place in fridge overnight
  7. Remove and bake immediately

Jeffrey Hamelman suggests this for a number of sourdough recipes in his book Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes. He also notes that it's not necessary to let the dough come to room temperature before baking: assuming it has risen enough, you can remove it directly from the fridge and bake with little consequence.

(Also, just to reply to one notion in comments -- it is possible to bake bread starting from a cold oven. Many people prefer to do it that way, though the results tend to be a little less consistent and oven spring is generally a little less. If you do so, it might be easier to bake in a pot. But it would be possible to get up in the morning, turn your oven on, throw the bread in immediately, and have it baked maybe 30-45 minutes later, depending on the size of the loaf. For those who don't believe me, here's someone who did a comparison of cold oven start vs. preheated and found little difference.)

My experience trying shaping before overnight retarding long ago is that it can work well for sourdough (see method #2 here for more details), since the yeast tends to rise much more slowly in the fridge. The danger with normal baker's yeast is that most recipes use too much yeast to make this method work -- what will happen is that your bread won't cool fast enough in the fridge, then the dough will overproof and collapse a bit in the oven, often with poor crust formation.

Normally, when professional bakers retard pre-shaped dough in the fridge, they do so for only a couple hours, which tends to add flavor. For detailed instructions with illustrations and a recipe showing this, see here.

Basically, what you want to do is a similar thing to that recipe, but with less yeast, so you can refrigerate overnight. Unfortunately, that will tend to make your bulk rise go slower, which means a longer wait in the evening between steps.

For more information and recipes online, I'd try instead searching for something like "retarding after shaping," which is the kind of recipe you're looking for. You just need to find one that allows retarding for 8 hours or more, rather than just a couple hours.

The other option is obtain sourdough cultures and try those recipes. Usually with them the pace of the yeast rise is appropriate for an overnight final proof in the fridge. Still, the results will be a little more finicky (i.e., harder to get a "perfect" loaf every time) than using a more standard method.

Also, I just noticed you mentioned rolls in your question. Those would be a lot easier than trying to do this with an entire loaf, and it's pretty standard to refrigerate overnight before baking. If the recipe is one that depends on removing from the oven for a while before baking, then just delay putting the dough in the fridge for maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of that time (varies by recipe) the night before. Then you should be able to bake straight from the fridge to the oven the next morning. Again, it may take a bit of experimentation with a specific recipe to get this perfect.

Related Topic