Kneading by hand, and when to stop

A machine can wreck a dough in twelve minutes. Two hands almost never can, because you will get tired long before the gluten does. So the honest advice for kneading by hand is to keep going for longer than you want to.

What you are actually doing

Flour and water make gluten on contact. Kneading lines it up into sheets that can stretch and hold gas. That is all. You are not warming it, you are not adding anything, you are organising something that is already there.

Let the dough do half the work first

Mix the flour and water until there is no dry flour left, then walk away for twenty or thirty minutes before you knead at all. The dough hydrates and builds gluten on its own while you do nothing. Ten minutes of kneading after a rest beats twenty minutes without one.

Wet dough, different technique

A slack wet dough will not knead on a bench, it will just stick to it. Pick it up, slap it down, fold it over towards you, turn it a quarter and do it again. It is loud and it looks violent and it is much easier than trying to push a puddle around with a scraper. Resist adding flour for the first five minutes.

Butter goes in last

Fat coats the flour and slows gluten forming, so an enriched dough kneaded with the butter in from the start takes twice as long. Build the gluten with flour, water and salt, then add soft butter in pieces. The dough will fall apart and look ruined for two or three minutes. Keep going, it comes back.

How to tell it is done

• It has gone from rough and torn looking to smooth and slightly shiny.
• It is tacky, sticking to itself but releasing from a clean dry hand.
• Pressed with a finger it springs back slowly rather than instantly or not at all.
• A small piece stretched between your fingers goes thin enough to see light through before it tears.

That last one is the window pane, and it is the only test worth trusting. Eight to ten minutes for a plain dough, twelve to fifteen for an enriched one. Once you are cold proofing overnight, as we do for most of the filled buns, time in the fridge finishes the job for you.