Seasoned Advice is a question and answer site for professional and amateur chefs. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Because bread is basically brick sized and shaped, it'll take a long time to get cooked properly.
Assuming I don't care about the shape, does it make sense to cut the bread dough into small pieces and then place them all separately on the baking sheet?
How much cooking time reduction should I expect? Do I need to take care of anything else in this case?
Smaller breads are usually called rolls or sometimes buns. There are also a lot of names for specific kinds of rolls, beyond obvious things like "sourdough rolls".
You can certainly take an existing recipe and just form in to more, smaller pieces, and reducing baking time. They'll look funny if you just cut it into pieces, though; you should reform them into something rounder.
It's hard to say exactly how much less baking time it'll take, since it depends on exactly how small you make them. It might be anywhere from roughly a quarter to half the original baking time, and especially for smaller rolls with shorter baking times, you'd probably want to increase the temperature so they'll still brown by the time they're done. Very small ones will be on the low end of the time range, and need more increase in temperature; larger ones will take longer and not need as much temperature increase.
Given all that, you might want to just look for a recipe for rolls that suits you. Simpler, less chance of messing up!
The precise time when any (wheat) bread is done is when its center reaches 94℃ (~201℉). That works independently of its size and shape.
The longer a bread needs to be baked depends mainly on its shape: a dough with its center farer from its surface will need more time for the heat to go over that distance. The heat from the oven will need more time to heat the center up to those 94℃.
Baking time also depends on the size, albeit less than on the shape. If you put a 1 kg dough in a hot oven it will need more time to heat it than a 1/2 kg one.
Please don't get offended if I disagree with your statement: "bread is basically brick sized and shaped". But there are really many different sizes and shapes for stuff people understand as bread. Just two examples on French common ones:
Boule
(Source: Wikipedia)
Boule, which means ball in French, are traditional French bread round shaped, and are not strange to weight something between 1/2 and 2 Kg.
Baguette
(Source: Wikipedia)
Baguette, which means little rod in French, is probably the most well known French bread but, surprisingly is not traditional: it was invented less than 100 years ago as a mean of making bread quickly.
A 1 kg boule needs something about 1 hour baking, while 4 baguettes of 250 gr need less than 1/2 hour (despite been the same mass in the oven).
I chose those two because they are extreme examples: a sphere can be proved mathematically to have its center farer from its surface than any other solid of the same volume. Rod shaped or flat breads will have it's center closer to their surface than other shapes. So shape matters more than size.
You can use both variables to bake bread in less time: small (I.E: 100 gr) and not round buns will need least time to be ready. Probably less than 15 minutes. But notice they will also go stale faster once out of the oven, as air will also reach the center sooner, and dry it quicker.
It'll work fine. The only thing is that if you just cut the dough into random chunks, your finished rolls will look irregular; you might want to look up some instructions on how to shape rolls (it's easy enough to do but a bit difficult to explain).
