A creepy and beautiful hand at the same time✨ I personally love so much doing lamination of the dough. It's such a fun, such a magical and beautiful process. When I saw the video of dough lamination at the first time, I was fascinated: how the dough can be so silky, so strong, so extensible and thin! It's a real magic of gluten✨🔮
Why to do it?
📌 first of all it's a good way to train the gluten in our bread dough, which is very important for a good structure and crumb
📌secondly it's a good gentle way to incorporate all the addings into the dough: nuts, dry fruits, coloured powders, cheese, herbs and etc., without using a mixer and without breaking gluten strains.
📌lamination works great when we need to develop gluten in the dough and to skip mixing at the same time, or to handle the dough with a lazy method (just mixing all the ingredients together and then performing a series of stretch&folds and etc.). That's a good method, when we don't want to use mixer, or don't want the dough to be overheated during mixing in a regular standard mixer, or don't want to mix it by hands💪😓
📌lamination is also a good method of combining several parts of dough together: when we want to combine different colours together to make a swirl loaf.
When to do it?
📍not later than 2 hours after the start of proofing time (when the salt is already in the dough). When 2 hours pass, the dough starts proofing actively, the gluten is being processed actively, so the lamination can easily brake gluten strains and degas the dough too much, and we don't need it at all. I prefer to perform lamination after 30 min - 1 hour after adding the salt to the dough.
How to do it?
📎 the dough should be relaxed and untouched for at least 30-40 min before the lamination. Then we should wet a little bit the working surface and gently, little by little, start to stretch it with wet hands. Step by step stretching the dough to different directions, not tearing it, but taking it gently from the down side, from the very middle (not from the edges, otherwise the dough can tear easily).
Is it really necessary? Sure it's not:
📎when we just have no time for it
📎when we don't want to clean the counter, we can skip this step
📎maybe the dough's already had a good autolyse or been mixed properly and gluten there is already strong enough
📎when the hydration of the dough is not high and it will be hard to stretch it - we skip lamination.
Some bakers think that it's no use to do lamination at all, that anything that you can't perform in a bakery with a big amount of dough - is not necessary.
To my point of view it’s not fully true, because I see that lamination always does it’s work perfectly. It's a good way of training dough’s gluten, especially when we use hand mixing or lazy dough handling. For sure it’s impossible to laminate bread dough in a bakery when there are kilos of dough. But it's easy to be done at home and it works perfectly. By the way, it’s a good way to relax and meditate while stretching the dough in such a magical way✨. Because to my point of view, baking and working with dough should always bring joy and relaxation😊
And for sure, if you want to impress your family and your friends with your baking skills, show them how you magically laminate the dough and you will definitely become a god of dough for them😎😂 You and everyone will definitely enjoy it🙌
So... do you already laminate or not?😉 The process of lamination you can see here