I’ve made a lot of dough by hand. Often, it’s just one or two loaves for the home kitchen, but sometimes it’s enough dough to make hundreds of loaves for a commercial bake.

For those who have come across this website for the first time, my background is primarily as a professional baker, so you could say I make my dough by making dough.

Hand mixing vs using a mixer for home made bread

When you make a loaf or two at home, hand mixing is usually adequate. Besides, most domestic mixers struggle to make more than a loaf or two. There are exceptions, for example the Ankarsrum mixer, which is rated to 3.4 kg, but mixers like Kitchen Aids and the like are mostly out of their depth when it comes to dough larger than a kilo.

To be honest, when you go to the trouble of making some home made bread, it seems like a bit of a waste of time to make a kilo or so of dough. You want to make at least a few kilos for it to be in any way an efficient use of time. My thoughts on making small volumes of dough can be seen here.

Making bigger amounts of dough - by hand or using a mixer?

Over the years, there have been extended periods when, for one reason or another, I have been without a mixer in various bakeries. It’s not that I don’t like mixers. They are wonderful tools, and if you have the correct capacity for the amount of dough you wish to make, they are a time saver.

For the past eight or nine years, I have done most of my doughmaking in a 20kg ‘spiral’ mixer, which has been a great little workhorse. It has enabled me to build enough dough for up to 300 loaves in a session, working the machine for up to eight hours straight.

To make enough dough for a few hundred loaves using a 20kg mixer involves making one dough after another. When compared to a large capacity 3 phase machine though (one which requires 415 volts and a triple ‘phase’ of power rather than a single one), the amount of time to do the job is pretty slow. For example, an 80kg capacity machine could have done the same job in a couple of hours without me or the machine breaking a sweat. However, if you don’t happen to have 3 phase power, this size of mixer isn’t an option.

These days. my typical bake involves building somewhere between 30 and 80kg of dough in a session. This will be enough dough to make between 40 and 100 or so loaves, and from chatting with other bakers, a lot of micro bakeries are making a similar amount. Having tackled this task both by hand and using a mixer, I have often wondered whether a small mixer is the best way to go about the job. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to make one big dough rather than half a dozen small ones?

I began to look into how bakeries did it before the invention of the mixer. Like everything else in the bakery world, I discovered it has been done before, and it was done with a degree of refinement.

As a result, I have come to appreciate the techniques for making dough completely by hand. I also like the different character of the bread it creates. Hand made bread is slightly moister, and you could say a bit heavier, though not in a bad way. Getting adequate development by hand is a challenge, and has to be tackled with a bit of strategy, otherwise it will involve more than a little energy. It’s way more detailed than you might think, especially when you have to make twenty or thirty loaves, as opposed to two or three.

Tools to make dough by hand

Over the centuries, humans have had to learn about mechanical advantage, as we are relatively weak. In addition, we can only do the same repetitive motion for a limited period. Eventually we will tire out. Nowadays we almost always use machines to do heavy and repetitive work for us. A mixer is one such machine, as it allows the baker’s body some time off. It amplifies what can be done by hand, and speeds everything up. It provides a huge mechanical advantage.

However, they use large amounts of power to get this mechanical advantage, and are complex machines which eventually require regular servicing. When you live outside the main cities, servicing a mixer can cost a small fortune.

In my never ending quest to become simpler and more off the grid, I keep returning to the old fashioned ‘time dough’ principles to get good dough development, with or without a mixer. And I’ve discovered a few new things about mechanical advantage as practiced by bakers a century ago, before we had access to mixing machines.

Most of the dough I’ve made by hand has been using bakery size plastic tubs - and of course the home baker can make dough very successfully in a small tub or bowl. There is a way to do it involving a lot of turning and folding, and also lots of rest. But when I had an extensive trip across the country a few years back, I made volumes of dough using a dough box, which I made from plywood. I found that using wood actually sped up the kneading process.

I think the added friction of the timber seems to accelerate gluten development on an almost micro level. So doughs which I once made doing about eight or nine ‘turns’ (baker’s jargon for a way of kneading dough) in a plastic tub would only take two or three turns in a wooden box. I put this increase in efficiency down to a kind of mechanical advantage provided by the micro porous surface of the wood creating friction in the dough.

Broad and flat wooden boxes with low sides are commonplace in European regional bakeries, so that’s how I made my first one. I found the shape was quite workable. I used two of them to make my weekly production run of 50 or so loaves recently for a few months, and was pretty happy with the result, but found it was quite time consuming to make them this way.

The dough trough

I began to look into other shapes of dough devices, and pretty quickly arrived at the dough trough. A dough trough is also made from wood, but it has sloped sides, like a laundry trough. They are usually wider than long, so the dough can be accessed laterally by the baker.

I decided to make one out of plywood as a prototype. It holds about 40 kg of dough, and changes the whole equation of making dough. Mine has a lid which fits snugly, so that you can season the dough in the tub without it ‘crusting’ in the air. As a result, my ‘dough day’ each week involves making one or two big doughs now, rather than lots of little ones. The large doughs are divided, and various things are then added to each of the portioned off amounts to create different types of bread. In the bakery world, this is known as the ‘split dough’ method.

The trough shape helps the baker to get more of a mechanical advantage from the actual weight and volume of dough. The more dough there is, the more the trough amplifies its own effect. As the dough rests, the sloped sides help the dough to settle flat more quickly. When you are working the dough, you work from side to side, and the sloped sides help with this too.

Making ‘time dough’ by hand involves the use of time, strangely enough. We use a repetitive dough rolling action which doesn’t involve much muscle at all. It’s hard to lift 40 kg of dough, so you don’t. You move it around by rolling it into a cylinder. That’s why anyone can do it. The baker simply rolls each layer of dough from one side to the other in the trough. They then swivel it through 90 degrees, and push it down flat. Then the dough gets a rest, anywhere from five minutes to an hour. After it has rested, the baker repeats the process. After four or five repetitions of this rolling and resting, the dough is fully developed.

In this way, the baker can get really good development without doing much work. The only part of the process which may involve a bit of muscle is the part where they swivel the dough - but even that is done using simple plastic spatula to help with leverage.

When I made all my dough (say 80kg on average) in the 20kg mixer, it would take me about 5 hours from start to finish. I’m including the time it takes to give each dough a good mixing, and then adding various bits and pieces to each dough. This was a very focused process - any baker will tell you that you can’t just throw your dough in the mixer and get great bread. You have to tend the process constantly, while measuring and cleaning and so forth.

Now I’m using the dough trough, the process takes about the same amount of time from start to finish, but it’s much more relaxed. You have to do a ‘turn’ every fifteen minutes or so, and each ‘turn’ takes about five minutes to do. Then you let the dough rest until it relaxes. This resting process makes it easy to turn, and allows the dough to ripen just a little each time.

By the time the dough is done after 4 or 5 turns, it is also partially ripe, meaning that the overall time to do the process of making bread is actually shortened. In between turns, I carry on with other jobs around the bakery, whether that’s operating the oven. or washing up, or doing the orders, or forming other pre made dough. It doesn’t matter if I forget about the dough in the trough for a while - I know it is doing its thing quietly in the background and I don’t need to be paying attention to it constantly, as I do when I’m using the mixer. I can actually manage a few jobs at the same time now, in a very relaxed way, which is nice. In the scheme of things, using a large dough trough actually saves me time!

For those of you at home who might be interested in trying out a dough trough, I’ve seen them on Etsy, or you can make your own if you are a bit handy. You will probably want to use proper timber rather than plywood, but despite the karens who will undoubtedly pay out on me for using plywood, I’ve been using it for quite a while now, and as long as it has been finished correctly (sanded very smooth and finished with food grade oil such as pale boiled linseed) you won’t have any issues.

A dough trough is a great way to improve your hand made dough routine!

If you would like to see how I make dough using the trough, why not come along to one of my 3 day intensives? These are held on any Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on any week at my semi off grid bakery in beautiful Gloucester on the mid North coast of NSW. You’ll learn all about pre fermentation too, as well as advanced shaping, oven techniques and much more. You’ll see a typical small scale, wood fired micro bakery in action, and participate in making bread for 50 people! Follow the link below if you are interested in taking the next step in your baking journey.

Sourdough Pro 3 Day intensive workshop

By the way, I can recommend numerous accommodation options locally, so while you are here you or your significant others can check out the region!

Ring me on 0409 480 750 and I’ll be happy to provide more information.