Trying Out The Mixer
Posted by mapgirl under Articles I Like, Dining, Spending, Uncategorized
[4] Comments
I tried the Alton Brown Pizza Dough recipe this weekend. I did my usual 1/2 and 1/2 with whole wheat flour. (FWIW, I use King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour so my brain doesn’t think I’m eating ‘whole wheat’.)
Before buying the mixer, I would spend 30 minutes hand-kneading the dough and wearing myself out. Now I can set it in the mixer for 15-20 minutes and spend another 10 just cleaning up the parts. Pretty easy.
A long time ago, my blogpal, Johno, told me that over-kneading is only a problem with machine kneading. I think that machine kneading with the mixer’s dough hook is great for developing gluten in a pizza dough, but I might stick to hand-kneading for actual bread. I kind of like the tender crumb that comes with hand-kneading. (Bread actually requires only about 10 minutes of kneading so it makes me a lot less tired.)
I think as a novice with the mixer, I took some of the directions a little too conservatively and ended having to put in a lot more flour to tighten up the dough into a ball. It ended up taking 30 minutes anyway. Plus I didn’t quite activate the yeast with hot water. (Recipe says ‘warm’, perhaps some temperatures would have helped, thank you.) The dough was flat and not springy.
Que sera sera. There will be other attempts I am sure.
