Proofing dough in a cold kitchen

Nearly every recipe you will read says something like leave for one hour until doubled. That hour is only true in a kitchen at about twenty four degrees. In a flat in February, at fifteen degrees, the same dough will take somewhere between two and three hours, and it has not gone wrong.

The useful rule is that yeast roughly halves its speed for every ten degrees you take away. You do not need to be precise about it. You need to stop watching the clock and start watching the bowl.

Warm the water, not the room

Heating a whole kitchen to suit a bowl of dough is a waste of a morning. The water is the only ingredient you can easily change the temperature of, so use it. In a cold kitchen we mix with water at about thirty five degrees, which feels barely warm on the inside of your wrist and definitely not hot.

If you want to be exact, aim for a finished dough temperature of around twenty six degrees, and work backwards from your flour and room temperature. If you do not, warm water and a bit of patience gets you most of the way there.

Four places that are warmer than your kitchen

• An oven that is switched off with only the light on, which usually sits around twenty six to thirty degrees.
• The same oven with a roasting tin of just boiled water on the shelf below, lid off, door shut.
• A cool box or a large plastic storage box with a mug of hot water in the corner, which holds heat for hours.
• On top of the fridge, at the back, where the motor gives off a slow steady warmth.

Whichever you use, cover the dough properly. A skin forms fast in a dry warm spot and a skinned dough will tear when you shape it. A shower cap over the bowl works better than cling film and you can reuse it forever.

Judge it by poking it

Flour your finger and press about a centimetre into the dough. If the dent springs straight back it needs longer. If it fills in slowly and leaves a shallow mark it is ready. If it does not come back at all and the dough sighs, it has gone too far, which is not a disaster: knock it back, reshape, and give it a short second rise.

Cold is not the enemy

A slow cold rise makes better bread than a fast warm one. Most of our doughs sit in the fridge overnight on purpose, because the flavour improves and the dough is easier to handle cold. If your kitchen is cold, you are not fighting a problem, you are doing the thing we do deliberately.

The one exception is the enriched dough for our filled buns, which has butter in it. Below about sixteen degrees the butter firms up and the dough stops rising almost entirely. That one wants the oven with the light on.