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Experiments with Laminating Lean Dough
Laminating is one of many tools for developing gluten in dough. It shares its name with the technique for layering butter and dough in croissants, but here I’ll be discussing lean dough lamination for gluten development. Lean dough has flour, water and salt as its base and is in contrast to enriched dough, which may have large quantities of butter, eggs and milk, for example.
What is lamination?
To laminate your dough, at some point during the bulk fermentation you turn the dough out onto a wet counter and gently but extremely stretch it out to a thin sheet and then fold it back upon itself, creating several layers (laminations) of dough. Here is a video demonstration of laminating a whole grain dough:
Why Laminate?
Laminating is a method of gluten development, like stretching and folding, coil folding, hand-kneading, slapping and folding, Rubaud mixing, and stand-mixer mixing. The goal of all of these techniques is to generate elasticity in your dough which results in a relatively open, airy crumb and good oven spring and bloom to the dough score. Dough hydration and texture, as well as schedule, help determine which technique I might apply to a particular dough and at what stage, and I sometimes use lamination in lean doughs along with stretching and folding or coil folding.
Lately, I’ve been laminating dough when I’m in a rush — as a substitute for hand-kneading to windowpane (pizza), or instead of two or more rounds of stretching and folding — and I’ve had great results. Here is a sprouted spelt and bread flour ciabatta that had a lamination and two rounds of stretching and folding, instead of my usual Rubaud or stand-mixer mixing to windowpane and four rounds of stretching and folding.
Open crumb ciabatta
When to Laminate?
This is the question I’m trying to answer with this latest round of baking experiments!
When I’m not rushed and substituting lamination for more time-consuming gluten development maneuvers, my burning question has been when is it best to laminate? I could just copy the strategy of one or another successful baker, but without testing different timing, I would never know if when they laminated was actually important to their final product.
The best way to find out when to laminate and if timing even matters is to do a two-dough experiment, laminating one dough early in the bulk fermentation and the other later, with all else equal. Okay, a three dough experiment, with a middle-timing lamination, would have been better, but I’m constrained by my ability to bake two loaves at once, and not staggering the baking is crucial to having a valid outcome.
Hint: Timing does matter
I did my lamination timing experiment twice, checking dough temperatures, making sure the coil/stretching and folding rounds had as many and similar motions, and using the same shaping style, scoring, and baking vessels.
In round one, I learned that the small amount of water added during lamination cools the dough and ups the hydration. These were unwanted variables. So in the second round of testing, I made sure the water I spread on my table was the same as the dough temp, so I wasn’t accidentally cooling down the Early Lamination (EL) dough earlier in the fermentation process than the Late Lamination (LL) dough. I wasn’t able to correct for increasing the hydration of EL earlier than I increased the hydration for LL.
In both experiments, EL happened at 1.5-2 hours into the bulk fermentation, and Late Lamination (LL) at 4-4.5 hours into the bulk fermentation. The bulk fermentations were 7-8 hours in total.
Process and Conclusion
My results revealed that Early Lamination (EL) is better for oven spring and bloom, but timing did not significantly affect the openness of the crumb. In this photo, the EL boules are on the right and they are a little taller and their score more open.
Early lamination on the right. There is much more whole grain in the loaves on top.
While oven spring and bloom were impacted by lamination timing, the crumb was about the same regardless of timing. Depicted below are the first and second rounds of testing.
LL on left; EL on right / similar (underproofed) crumb
LL on left; EL on right / similar crumb
Prior to doing these experiments, I had noticed that a dough can appear more fermented than it really is, especially if I laminate late, because large bubbles are introduced into the dough and not reincorporated by more rounds of stretching and folding. This had caused me to mistakenly end the bulk fermentation a few times, resulting in a crumb with tight areas and some larger holes.
Below is a photo gallery of the process, and under that, the recipe used for this test. You can see that laminating dough early is more difficult (a tear or two), as the gluten is less developed at that point. You can also see that LL looks bubblier at the end of the bulk fermentation because large bubbles from laminating were added more recently. However, in the end, the EL tears are not a problem, and the LL bubbles are not a benefit.
*A note about flour type and changing variables*
Round one was 75% bread flour and 25% whole grain sprouted spelt. The starter was 20% of the flour weight, and the flour and water were autolysed for 1.5 hours.
Round two was 75% home-milled whole grain warthog hard red winter wheat and 25% bread flour. The starter was 12.5% of the flour weight and there was no autolyse.
With these two formulas, I’ve learned about lamination in relation to two doughs: one with more gluten development potential and one with less, as well as typical percentage of starter and low percentage of starter. I haven’t yet tried an all bread flour dough, nor have I experimented with a longer autolysis. Quite possibly, changing the formula or process could result in a different conclusion about when it’s best to laminate, and I’d love it if people did this experiment with different variables and shared their results.
EXPERIMENT AND PROCESS PHOTOS
Experiments with Laminating Lean Dough
Ingredients
Instructions
Shopping List
Experiments with Laminating Lean Dough