What this is about
The night in the fridge makes your plan convenient and the bread flavorful: you shape in the evening and bake in the morning. The dough keeps ripening slowly in the cold, and this last ripening in the banneton is called the final proof. The yeasts keep making gas and the bacteria keep making acid, only much more slowly than in the warmth. Overnight the shaped dough gains volume, and the bread gains flavor.
How to do it
- 21:00, wrap it up: Your shaped dough is in the banneton, the surface lightly floured. Pull a bag over the banneton, or lay a cloth over it and put on a shower cap. This keeps the skin from drying out. Otherwise it would tear during baking.
- Put it in: Place the banneton in the fridge at 4 °C. It should stand on the coldest shelf. No feeling tells you which one that is: put a thermometer on the shelf once beforehand and read it after a few hours. You do not trust the number on the door. Do not warm up the dough, and do not move the banneton anymore.
- Wait until Sunday 8:00: That is eleven hours, which puts you at the short end of the cold retard. The bread turns out mild, because acid builds up over time and eleven hours give little of it. Up to two hours longer is possible if the poke test in the morning calls for it.
- Sunday 7:00, preheat the oven: Preheat the oven with the Dutch oven inside to 250 °C. How you bake then is in the next chapter. If your dough waits longer, you preheat correspondingly later.
- 8:00, poke test: Take the banneton straight out of the fridge and check the dough without warming it. It goes into the oven cold.
How you know it is right
The poke test is a pressure test: dip a finger in flour and press about one centimeter deep into the dough. There are three outcomes. First, a general point: a properly handled dough feels cold, firm, and taut and releases cleanly from the banneton. If it sticks to the cloth, it was too loose or too wet when you shaped it; you note that for next time, and now only careful loosening with your fingers helps.
The dent comes back slowly and not all the way: the dough is ripe, and you bake. If the dent springs back completely right away, it is not ripe yet. Wait up to two hours then and test again. On cold dough the test is easy to misread, because cold dough always springs back a bit. So look as well: the dough has visibly gained volume in the banneton, and bubbles show under the skin.
If the dent stays completely and the dough is very soft, it has gone past its time. Bake right away. The bread will be flatter, but it still tastes good.
Do not press too often or too hard, and do not bump the banneton. Any jolt makes a ripe dough collapse.
Rules to remember
- Put the dough on the coldest shelf at 4 °C and measure that shelf once with a thermometer.
- Do not warm up the dough in the morning: it goes into the oven cold.
- Decide by the poke test and by the volume, not by the clock alone.
In the Pro edition: the warm final proof, the time window of the cold retard up to 24 hours and longer, the cooling curve and the fridge shelves, the ripeness scale, the rescue of over- and under-proofed doughs, and freezing shaped dough.