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The famous No-Knead Bread recipe said:

Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees (21 Celsius degrees).

But I don't have the ideal 21 Celsius degrees room temperature or any device that can keep the dough 21 degrees for 18 hours.

In summer, my room temperature is around 25~30 degrees, in winter, it's 3~10 degrees.

My questions are:

  1. How long should I raise the dough under 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 degrees?
  2. I guess I shouldn't raise the dough for too long, say 48 hours, so how long is too long?

Thanks.


Update:

(sorry for my English) I just tried to raise the dough for 30+ hours under 25~27 Celsius degrees. The volume of the dough was increasing in the first 10+ hours, and the max volume was 2x of the original size. But later, it began to shrink! After 30+ hours, the volume was about 1.3~1.5 times of the original size. I tried to bake it under 250 Celsius degrees for 40 minutes... it tastes like rocks.

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  • 2
    "2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles." (from the article).
    – derobert
    Apr 30, 2011 at 20:33

2 Answers 2

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I was taught to bake bread when the dough is around 2x the original volume or slightly less. Looks like the peak time for you is around 10 - 12 hours.

I'm afraid you missed the peak time and it has to get heavier!

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This is probably not ideal, but you could experiment with letting the dough rise in your refrigerator. The cold will slow down the yeast considerably, but in the very least you will have a consistent temperature to work with throughout the year.

I've made the no-knead dough recipe quite a few times -- and every once in a while I will stash the dough in the refrigerator to slow down the rise to better fit my schedule (I like a 12-14 hour room temperature rise, which is about 70F here in SoCal). I've never let it rise completely in the refrigerator, but I'd say expect it take somewhere around 36-48 hours.

You can generally tell when the dough is properly autolysed by the bubbles on the surface (as mentioned by derobert above).

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  • The series of books 'Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day' specifically use a short rise at room temp + a chill in the fridge ... but I haven't compared the proportions of the recipes to see how much they differ from the one linked to in the question.
    – Joe
    Jan 23, 2013 at 23:31

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