Web Extra Click here for additional photos of the Bread bakers Guild of America’s Advanced Mixing Methods class.

A capacity class of rain-soaked bakers dodged thunderstorms and floods to get to Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts outside of Atlanta one Saturday in September. The occasion was a Bread Bakers Guild of America Master Class focusing on advanced mixing methods. Lionel Vatinet, a French master baker who coached the gold medal-winning Bread Bakers Guild Team USA 1999 and now owns La Farm Bakery in Cary, N.C., instructed the class.

“It was an excellent experience,” Vatinet says. “It was a good mix of people, and we were able to address both professionals and experienced home bakers. Some knew some of the mixing techniques, and they were able to learn new shaping techniques or hand skills. It was a very positive thing to see the different levels of bakers as they learned different things, even some things that weren't necessarily part of the lesson plan.”

The class focused on three modern bread-mixing techniques — the short mix, the intensive mix and the improved mix. Each method has a unique suite of characteristics, benefits and deficiencies. But ultimately, each technique is judged against the traditional hand mixing technique that bakers relied upon before the advent of the electric mixer.

Traditional hand mix

“Hand mixing is kind of a lost art, and that's unfortunate. As a baker, your hand is your memory, your hand remembers how dough should feel, how tacky it is, how well developed. It's your hand's memory that checks the consistency of dough and makes a change if you need to make a change,” Vatinet says. “Hand mixing teaches a baker about his dough and connects him to his dough.”

Vatinet also stressed that bakers need to be versatile and think on their feet. Equipment sometimes breaks down, so it's dangerous to be entirely reliant on one piece of equipment. “A baker has to put out a product no matter what. We can't blame the equipment when something goes wrong, we can't blame the ingredients. Sometimes the conditions are less than ideal, but customers still want bread,” he adds. “Hand mixing is a necessary skill for bakers, even though electric mixers are now available.”

The class was structured to include a section on hand mixing not only to encourage bakers to practice the skill, but also to provide a control to which the products of other mixing methods could be compared. Vatinet demonstrated a traditional dough kneading technique in which bakers use their thumbs and index fingers as scissors to continually slice and shear through the unfinished dough, thereby arranging glutens and developing the dough structure.

Hand mixing is a slow process. The speed is limited to the speed of a baker's hand, and not a lot of extra heat is created from friction. So, to attain the ideal final dough temperature of 72°F to 80°F, warmer water needs to be added at the outset, as water temperature controls the temperature of the final dough.

Gluten development of the dough in the bowl can be approximated by feel, provided a baker has had enough hand experience with dough.

“The more water you use in a hand-mixed formula, the less yeast you need. This is because the dough is fermented for a long time to develop flavors and aromas,” Vatinet says. “The more yeast added to the dough to begin with, the shorter the necessary fermentation, so less water is needed. This is more or less the rule of thumb.”

The reason for this lies in dough strength. A baker's hand cannot possibly impart the 120 to 160 rotations per minute mixing power of an electric mixer, so much of the dough strength and gluten development occurs during fermentation instead of in the mixing bowl. And because of the length of this process — often three hours — a comparatively small amount of yeast can yield quite a bit of flavor.

Hand-mixed dough uses a high hydration formula of 75 percent; bakers can go as high as 80 percent with less yeast and a longer fermentation. “The flavor of the end product really is decided in the first fermentation,” Vatinet says. “That's where you get the flavor profile, and all the aroma is developed by the first fermentation.”