Monthly Archives: May 2021

Bathing Your Dough – Bassinage

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It’s funny how we sometimes stumble upon a technique, not really knowing it was a technique in the first place! One of the things that I started to do a few months ago to fine tune the hydration and temperature of my dough was to hold back a small amount of the total water in my formula (about 50g – 100g, depending on the bread I was making), then add it in during folding. I had no idea that this was technique called bassinage.

When I started doing this, my thinking was that with high-hydration dough, gluten development was challenging when the dough was really wet. So I’d hold back some of the water and let bulk fermentation start with the lower amount of water to promote the formation of gluten as I had read somewhere that a drier environment helps gluten form much more easily.

Now as I write this, I’m laughing because it never even occurred to me to include this in the formulas I share. And I didn’t think anything of it because formulas I’d learn from prominent bakers such as Jeffrey Hamelman never even mention this in their formulas! But it’s an actual technique that the French call eau de bassinage, or bathing water.

I looked up the term in Hamelman’s “Bread” book and as he explains:

It is often difficult to mix wetter doughs to adequate gluten development when using a planetary mixer (such as a Hobart or KitchenAid). One tactic that is effective is the following: When mixing the final dough, hold back a portion of the liquid (hold back more or less liquid depening upon the total hydration of the dough). This technique (called bassinage in French) can also be used with spiral mixers for wet doughs. The gluten will develop more readily in this drier environment. When the dough has attained the degree of strength you seek, turn off the mixer. Make an opening the place where the dough hook enters the both of the dough. Pour the rest of the liqui into this hold, turn the mixer back on, and mix just until the liquid is incorporated. I find this to be an effective technique when I mix at home, not just for notoriously we doughs like ciabatta, but for many other doughs as wel, especially those whose hydration is abouve about 70 percent.

Hamelman does this during mixing, but when I started researching this technique for this article, I found that different people do it at different stages. For instance, one baker I found does it to incorporate the salt and yeast after autolyse. Another does it as I do during the first fold, adding a little water at a time to the bottom of the container and folding the dough over it. No matter what stage bassinage is performed, one thing is common: Gluten formation takes place beforehand.

I have to do a bit more research into this as I’m interested in the food science behind the technique. But from what I’ve been able to gather thus far, as the gluten has already formed, the added water acts as a lube of sorts to help the dough become more extensible as the water molecules penetrate the dough and get in between the gluten strands. Pretty cool.

All that said, I don’t do this will all my bread – not even all the high-hydration bread I make. But if I know I’m coil folding a dough, I usually fold in water during the first folding session, or when I feel that sufficient gluten development has taken place.

Wrapping Your Head Around Baker’s Percentages

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When I first started baking bread 40 years ago, I riffed on a recipe that listed the exact amounts I’d need for each ingredient, like 4 cups of bread flour, etc.. Then when I started getting into artisan bread, recipes became formulas, showing the relative amounts of the ingredients expressed as percentages. For instance:

Flour100.00%
Water76.00%
Salt1.80%
Yeast0.75%
Total178.55%

The first time I saw that, my immediate reaction was, “WTF?” And my heart raced with anxiety. Nowadays, when I’m either recalling a recipe/formula, or even developing a new one, the percentages are all I think about.

As was explained to me, the percentages in a formula represent the ingredient amounts relative to the flour, which is always at 100%. So if we take the formula above, if I have 1000g of flour, then the amount of water I’ll need is 76% of that or, 760g. Easy, right?

But what about that “Total” item?

To be honest, I really didn’t pay too much attention to that figure until I started thinking about actual dough production and yields. At the time, I was starting to make bread to fulfill orders for luncheons and such. For instance, to feed a 200-person luncheon, I’d have to make 8 loaves scaled out to 1200g apiece, which mean that I needed to produce 9.6kg of dough.

The way I’d calculate how much I’d need was kind of a crapshoot. I’d start out with 5 kilos flour, then I’d apply the bakers percentages to get a weight. If we use that formula above, this would get me close to 9kg. So I’d go to 5.5kg and recalculate… It was tedious to say the least.

Thinking that there had to be a better way, I started doing some research and discovered that the total percentage in a formula is probably the most important number. This is because it is a representation of the total dough. Here’s a simple way to visualize what that means:

If you take the total percentage from the formula above, as Jeffrey Hamelman puts it in his book, “Bread,” (paraphrasing) that no matter what weight of dough we’re producing, there are 178.55 units that make up the dough. 100 of those units are flour, 76 of those units are the water, etc.

Without getting too technical about it, with that number, we can easily calculate the ingredient amounts we need for any given amount of dough we want to produce. In “Bread,” Hamelman talks about the conversion factor and using it to finding the amount for each ingredient.

Conversion Factor = Target Dough Weight / Total Percentage

So if I want to create a dough that weighs 1200g, given the formula above, the conversion factor would be:

Conversion Factor = 1200 / 178.55 which would be about 6.72

Multiplying each item percentage as a whole number by the conversion factor would give me the needed weight. For example, my flour weight would be 6.72 X 100 or 672g.

I have a simpler approach which basically accomplishes the same thing, but it’s more direct as I calculate the flour directly. Instead of coming up with the conversion factor, I just divide my target dough weight by the percentage, but expressed as a regular number. In this case,

Flour Weight = 1200 / 1.7855 = 672

From there, I just multiply the formula percentage relative to the flour weight. So the water I need would be:

Water = 672 X 76% = 511

Both methods will get you to the same place, but I like to shortcut my calculations as much as possible.

Let’s calculate the amounts we’ll need:

Target Dough Weight 1200g

PercentagesAmounts
Flour100.00%672
Water76.00%511
Salt1.80%12
Yeast0.75%5
Total178.55%1200

With this method in hand, I now completely focus on how much dough I will need for a given bake, be it a single loaf or several. As long as I have an accurate formula, I will always be able to get the exact amount of ingredients I’ll need.

But that said, I usually add about a 0.5%-1% fudge factor to my total dough weight because weight will always be lost during processing, so if I need 1200 grams to make 4 X 300 gram loaves, I’ll usually calculate my dough weight to 1210 grams. You’ll have loss due to evaporation or dough sticking to tools, etc. With this fudge factor, you can be guaranteed that you’ll get the exact dough weights you’ll need for each loaf.