Hot take: Hand kneading beats my KitchenAid for bread dough

Been baking bread for about 15 years now. Used to do everything by hand on my grandmother's old wooden table. Got a KitchenAid pro 600 about 5 years ago and thought I'd never look back. But lately I've been noticing something. That machine develops the gluten too fast. My loaves come out denser. More tough. Went back to hand kneading last month for a batch of sourdough at my shop in Portland. Night and day difference. The crumb was open. Airy. Just better texture overall. Anyone else find mixers overwork dough compared to using your hands?

3 comments

3 Comments

adamthompson9d ago

Man yeah, the machine just blasts through gluten development. I pull my dough off the hook a good 3-4 minutes before the recipe says to and finish by hand, solves the toughness problem every time.

ray_miller8410d ago

Well dang, I gotta admit I was Team KitchenAid all the way until last month. I finally tried hand kneading a batch of sourdough (I always thought it was just nostalgia talking) and yeah, the texture was way better. Something about that slower buildup just makes the crumb more open and less tough, you know?

robinf5110d ago

12 years of making bread and I was the same way, @ray_miller84. I used to think people who talked about the "energy" of hand kneaded dough were just being weird about it. Then I did a side by side last spring with two loaves from the same batch of starter. The hand kneaded one had these big irregular holes and that nice chewy crust. The mixer one was good but it was more uniform and a little bit... dense? I don't know if I can go back now either. Something about feeling the dough change in your hands makes you stop earlier than the timer says to.