Bread – Can you slow down the time it takes for dough to rise

There are some previous questions with good answers like this one, or this that go into much more detail than I'm about to.

You said your bread didn't rise with the first rise, if you don't have a first rise you can't go onto the next step. If your yeast was old, or the temperature was cold in your kitchen or you used cold water in the dough, or the yeast came in contact with salt then its action could have been slowed down drastically and it would take much longer to get a rise. I've had a first rise take up to 4 hours in the past because of these factors. The times given in recipes are just guidelines, you have to be result-driven. Active dry yeast also takes longer than quick yeast to activate. When using active dry instead of quick yeast you would get better results by mixing it with the water before mixing in. I'd recommend using quick yeast as it's milled into smaller grains and you can mix it directly into the flour.

Of course your yeast may have simply been dead, or killed by salt or heat. Get some good fresh yeast and store it in the fridge to keep it fresh long-term.

Also, using all whole wheat flour isn't going to produce anything like a baguette. Whole wheat flour is very heavy compared to white flour and will take longer to rise. A half and half mix would work better. I'd recommend sticking to the recipe first, then gradually modifying it over time until you get your desired result.

What to do

A dough should be generally risen by size anyway, not by time. But it is also very forgiving, so it will probably still give you decent edible bread if you do it by time.

The best way is to wait until it has doubled, no matter what the clock shows. But you insist on going by the clock, don't change the time, wait the 30 minutes. It may be underproofed (with such a short time given by the recipe, there is virtually no chance of overproofing it), but the same would have happened if you were using the original amounts and going by the clock.

Dough proofing and time

The rising time for dough at room temperature is not affected by recipe scaling, the time it takes a specific dough to double will be the same regardless of the size of your batch. If the temperature in your proofing container is significantly different from the dough temperature, you will see some effect on rising times with different batch sizes and dough shapes, as the center of the dough will need some time to get to the same temperature as the proofing container, and warmer dough rises quicker than cold dough. This is unlikely to have a measurable effect at dough amounts used by home bakers, especially considering that the possible proofing temperature window is rather narrow.