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A baker at the Tacoma farmers market told me to stop kneading so much and my bread finally stopped coming out dense
I was complaining about my sandwich loaves being like bricks and she said I was overworking the gluten in my 8 minute mix. Cut it to 4 minutes last Saturday and the crumb opened up like crazy. Anybody else get wrecked by doing too much instead of too little?
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wyatt_green6d ago
That "crumb opened up like crazy" part is the real tell here. Most folks blame their flour or their yeast when a loaf comes out dense, but the fix is often just doing less work, not more. There's a thing called autolyse where you mix flour and water and walk away for 30 minutes before you even touch it, and the gluten basically builds itself while you do nothing. So the baker was right, but the even weirder part is you can skip a bunch of kneading time altogether if you just let the dough sit. Kind of wild that the answer to better bread is being lazy.
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