Desired Dough Temperature

One of the most important skills a baker must learn is the ability to accurately control dough temperature. The benefits are clear and immediate: more consistency in fermentation and in bread flavor, and more predictability in the overall production schedule. If a dough is coming off the machine at 65°F one day and 80°F the next, there will not be uniformity in the results. For the professional baker who is filling the oven over and over, accurate dough temperatures mean there will be no long gaps when the oven is burning fuel but empty; neither will there be times when more bread is risen and ready to bake than can fit into the oven. Because the home baker is always at a disadvantage—not able to mix doughs to the level of strength that the professional can, and lacking good steam—it is particularly important to do absolutely everything possible to benefit the doughs. By mixing doughs that are in the temperature zone that most favors both fermentation and flavor development, the home baker is well on the way to making consistently high-quality bread. After all, with something so emphatically alive as bread dough, we must do all we can to keep the billions of toiling microorganisms happy. And we do so by providing them a temperature that encourages good gas production from the yeast (for loaf volume), and at the same time good flavor development from the lactobacilli. For the most part, the temperature zone that works best, particularly for wheat-based breads, is 75° to 78°F.