How Easy is it to Overmix Bread Dough? Can you do it by Hand? 

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This man mixed his dough into porridge and still made a better looking bread than I probably could 😂

I was seriously always worried about overmixing my dough when I started baking because at school and in books they always told me this. This video proves that overmixing even with a mixer is really hard to do for a regular bread!

Another interesting experiment which debunks yet another old wives tale about baking. The time between being fully mixed and over mixed is so large I think it would be pretty much impossible to over mix unless you are making very high hydration dough with low protein flour. Maybe easier with a large industrial mixer, those things can really pound the dough, but certainly not possible by hand or a with a small kitchen mixer.

Keep baking, Charlie! The more you bake, the more we learn! Thank you!

I love seeing this. Was always unsure of if I overmixed my dough. This does a great job of showing when you've crossed that line.

Thanks for showing how hard it is to overmix, and how obvious it is when it happens. One less thing to worry about! Previous video that showed we can use a mixer on 1&2 speed for the same time as kneading was really useful info, too. As always, thank you thank you.

Thank you for all the time spent making these videos, especially this one, with that 1 hour of hand kneading you did. Most underrated bread channel

I agree with you chain man. Window tests are overrated and dough will always make bread 🍞 regardless how good are skills are. But learning the basics, we can all enjoy good tasting bread. Your channel is the best for learning *Bread 101.* Thank you bread teacher 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

You answer and demonstrate the answers to all the questions I’ve ever had about bread!!

I think it might be easier to overmix enriched doughs. It could come down to mixer speed rather than length, but when I saw the dough you finally were able to overmix it immediately reminded me of the issues I had the firs time I tried your brioche recipe in my stand mixer. It might be interesting to do a side-by-side of a few different types of dough in a stand mixer to examine the differences in kneading speed for enriched, plain, whole wheat or high hydration doughs.

I'm very prone to experimenting to figure out the limits. I so much appreciate your experiments, which save me time and money!

I kneaded a high hydration bread for 2 hours using a hand mixer. The bread had a crusty texture and gave me a hard time to shape. I live in a humid country. Glad I found this channel, I learned a lot. Many thanks

Spectacular demonstration. I learned quickly that my hand kneading doesn't do well with most machine based recipes. Again, I appreciate you kneading by hand. After a bit of experience, I never saw any need for a stand mixer.

Thank you so much for these videos for all of your videos I have learned more from you than any other channel, book or website. I consider your channel the best and invaluable!

This dude completely eased my worries about over mixing. Really appreciate this video

I guess you can mess up making bread but it takes a lot of effort. For me anyways I have made all kinds of timing mistakes, measurement mistakes, and thr bread still turns out great. Personally I believe people put far too much emphasis on perfection, when very little perfection is required. Once I forgot to put Butter in the dough, and only remembered after the dough had risen, I put the dough back in the mixer added the Butter, let the dough rise a second time, it turned out the same as adding Butter initially. Pretty difficult to mess up Bread. Great video as usual.

Oh, My! This is such a great video! A week ago, I followed the recipe for 100% Whole Wheat Tangzhong Milk Bread with a mixer. With speed 2, I mixed 8 minutes when the dough came together, so I started adding room temperature butter little by little for 25 minutes ( rest a few minutes intermittently ). The dough looked like about to almost form a ball several times after the butter being added, yet fell apart (repeated this look several times ). Finally, the dough looked exactly like the very last one, the whole wheat dough in your video that you DESTROYED. I wish I saw this video before I made the bread, so I could still use my own hands to recover it a little. Actually, mine was much more pathetic than yours, that I just dumped it into the baking pan. I let it proof only a few hours, yet it already had very strong yeasty smell (usually whole wheat sourdough takes around 7 hours to bulk proof), with about 5% rise. I mixed this dough so much, for Tangzhong seemed to make any dough stickier, so I thought it might look differently in a mixer. Thank you so much for making this video. Great help!

today I was making a bread with tangzhong. I overmixed it, but I didnt know what happened until I watched this video. The first time I made this bread, it was so perfect. The absolute best bread I have ever eaten. I have tried to recreate it for the past week. I now am the proud owner of 4 quart jars of breadcrumbs. Tomorrow I will try one more time. I think I know exactly what my issue was. I allowed my dough to over proof the first rise and then again the 2nd rise. I also overmixed it because on one recipe it said that if the dough is too shaggy or wet to keep kneading. This was bad advice. Tomorrow I am going to stick with my original recipe because I know that it does work....if I dont get it this time I am switching to your recipe. I used regular all purpose flour, active yeast, eggs, milk, butter, sugar and salt. Thanks for all the work you do to create these awesome videos. I am so glad I found you

It was my lucky day when I found your videos, I'm re-thinking almost every notion I had about what I was doing before your instruction.

Good info in the vid, as usual. I've used a Horbart C100 mixer to make bread for decades. I don't recall ever having a problem with overmixing - even in more recent years when I began following the advice of a modern bread baking cookbook (2015) and "developing the gluten" using speed 2 on my mixer for 5 - 6 minutes after ingredients are incorporated at low speed. I've had good results. Not concerned about overmixing... What I'd like to know more about is temperature and why it matters. When I learned to bake from my dad back in the '80's, he would warm everything to about body temperature - including the mixing bowl. Again, he had good results and still makes great bread.

Interesting thoughts on windowpane. I never bothered when I predominantly mixed by hand because I found I usually didn’t get one, but the dough seemed fine to me based on feel.

Brilliant video. Push it all the way to know what it is like overkneaded. I'm so glad to have the fear of over-mixing to be debunked! You do such great work. I love your teaching. Thank you.

Just wondering. So we always talk about building strength, do many folds, how important it is to build gluten structure for the bread to rise up, not to the sides. But as you showed here, even with basically gluten structure being destroyed, you managed to pull off pretty nice loaf of bread. It seems to have the same shape (maybe a little more flat) so why bother? (maybe except for easier handling bread with better structure) Over the time, I've been trying to implement different rules and advices to my bread making, but honestly, the only thing that drastically improved my breads, was using preferment (thanks @ChainBaker !). I don't want to sound ignorant, but other tricks, techniques, order of adding things often felt like art for art's sake.

Great video once again. I learned loads. I only knead by hand as I have broken/worn out 4 mixers! Interesting to see how much mixing it really takes to destroy a dough, I definitely feel safe mixing by hand! Keep up the great content.

I don't think I've ever overmixed my dough. I use a Kitchen Aid 6 quart mixer and nothing but King Arthur flours, all purpose, bread flour and Sir Lancelot super high protein. Excellent results. I do enjoy learning from you. You give a lot of great advice.

Super informative, especially seeing that the window pane test is not a reliable predictor of mixing a white flour loaf, and that extra kneading for a modest amount of time is unlikely to negatively impact it. I'm curious now how this applies to pastry dough

👍👍👍👍👍 You are doing a great job in shedding light on what is fact and what isn't fact when it comes to bread making.

Thank you for teaching us. Its great to know also the mistakes like overmixing.

This is a great video and this demonstration helped me to better understand because I do use the stand mixer. And my strategy for sure will be from now on to slightly under mix it and make sure I get some folds during bulk fermentation. I often do a 90% hydration for ciabatta bread in the stand mixer using the cake paddle and it is necessary to mix it at very high speed and I have destroyed the Dough.

Yes I have over mixed dough, by hand. It was whole grain ( Mostly wheat but I do not remember the other grains) It broke down very fast, under 15 minutes. Somebody told me it was because I used a stone ground whole wheat which contains raw wheat germ and the germ has enzymes that attack gluten. In normal milling the germ is removed before grinding because the heat will oxidize the oils, but stone grinding stays much more cool so the germ can be included. I have not verified this with other sources. But I do have a distant memory of a different dough failure, that had raw wheat germ as an ingredient, that dough could not be saved it was almost a liquid cake batter at the end. 25 years ago though so I may have over-mixed memories, and I did not know anything about dough temperature other than effect of rise time. Sourdough can also be an issue because over fermenting can be similar to over mixing.

I need a "How's it going my bakers" compilation. It brightens my day every time I hear it.

I found that what matters most is how long you proof it and how you handle it after you proof. I am only making bread and bakery productds for like 3 weeks, achieved nice results by making high hydration dough, let my dough rest 2-3 times for 30 minute to 45 minutes, and and between 2-3 I do a few "french fold", and after last 'rest' if I can make a nice shape, it turns out super nice.

I made bagels yesterday and I overmixed it using a stand mixer. It was almost liquidy and super sticky. Don't know the percentages but I used 500 gr bread flour & 297 gr water (plus the yeast etc.) The dough did not look smooth but it proofed nicely. But after boiling & baking them, they were flat. I'd say the thickness was a smidge over 1/2 ". It still tasted fine. This is the first time this has happened to me. I walked away and I think I watched a video while it was mixing.

This is something I hadn’t considered before. Thank you for demonstrating.

Yes this is something i figured out when i was first making dough. Overmixing is very hard to pull off.

Thank you for this interresting video. I've been worrying about over mixing very long time for now and maby undermixed many of my pulla's (sorry, don't know what it is called in english). Thanks to you I try to not worry so much about over mixing.

A very important test! Thank you for going threw this for us all

THANK YOU SO MUCH !!! Because I add various types of flour to basic wheat flour to make bread, I ALWAYS - FOR YEARS - overmixed my dough, lest if I did not mix it enough, necessary gluten would not develop -; thus, my bread dough almost always resulted in a borderline broken-down stage. Although the final bread was still tasty, it was just never light and airy. Now I know why - and can actually work less by 1/3 to 1/2 of the kneading time and achieve a better result ... Ha ha, Irony of Life ! Again, THANK YOU SO MUCH !!!

Yay! I no longer need to stress about over mixing.

Great example of how to avoid mistakes well explained Thanks

So grateful for this complete demonstration! The only time I've been tempted to use the stand mixer, and thus risk over-mixing, is with brioche and a very high-hydration focaccia. The hopeless stickiness of high hydration doughs sometimes tempt me to use extra bench flour. Tossing them in the mixer solves that, though I worry a bit when the motor on my stand mixer heats up. I've watched you hand knead past the sticky stage in enough videos now, to push myself to keep on going, but still get tempted to "solve it" with more flour than the recipe calls for.

I’m glad i discovered your channel today, i like crazy, you remind me of myself when it comes to dough. Every time my wife goes grocery shopping she now say, do you need anything except flour and yeast. I say no 😂 ho, pizza night, bring pepperoni and cheese, ho bagle, bring cream cheese and jelly, ho pita night….. and so on.

Thanks for your work. I don't afraid to overmix my dough anymore :).

Interesting result. I want to try using a mixer for high hydration dough, every time I try to knead it by hand I feel like I get frustrated with the mess it becomes. I don't think I've over mixed dough. But I've suffered a similar result by over fermentation. Since I usually bake pizzas, it becomes a nightmare to stretch out, impossible if it's too far gone. But it actually tastes pretty good if you actually manage to get it into the oven.

I believe I overmixed just recently. I decided to try King Arthur 00 flour. Didn't realize it was only 8.5% protien. Tried to make pizza and at one point, the 70% dough became paste.

Very interesting to see the science of baking.

Great to know. Thanks, Mr. ChainBaker. I think my kitchen would warm the dough too much. Whenever i start cooking or baking it easily gets to 95° and can even exceed 120°(35°c to 50°c). So i don't do much in there

When i was an apprentice in a bakery i overmixed a dough and it mixed less than 15min! Though the machine i used was a machine that could mix over 30kg of dough at once. But the feeling the air inside the machine was very humid and very warm and for the dough, you could not touch it at all, it stuck everywhere.

Very educational. Loved it!

I remember when I was learning commercial baking in a bakery/workshop/factory thing that has a dough machine, there's this one time somebody forgot to set the timer for the first batch of dough, it runs for almost an hour more than what's needed. It kinda turned into a bucket of shapeless slop, the instructor gets really mad but said don't waste it,so we proceed with it. And, yeah it still bakes, but the bread is really flat and has a weird texture, it's hard to work with, and just weird in general. But anyway that's the only time I've seen actual over mixed dough, and maybe it's unsuitable for selling but certainly fine for eating. By the way that program teaches how but not why, and what we do then with all the fancy machine is very different from what we do at home. Now that I only bake for my house hold, I realized I really don't know much about bread making at all 😂

Awesome, I’ve been waiting for this one! Thanks for sharing!

After watching this video, I'm starting to realize that overmixing may have been what caused my sourdough catastrophe today, and not over-hydration. Here I am, yet again, watching one of your videos mere hours after something went horribly wrong, and this time I also didn't search for this video. It was just offered up to me by the RU-vid gods. Anyway, today and one other time months ago, I was mixing my sourdough in a mixer, and it just turned into a completely useless mess. Tearing everywhere and super wet and sticky. Completely unworkable. I even tried saving it by giving it some resting time and folding, but the dough was just a complete mess. Definitely wasn't under-mixed, because it had previously been a very beautiful, smooth ball when I first combined the autolyse and the levain. Very strong bread flour with only 1.5% rye and 10% whole wheat. 72% hydration. I MUST be overmixing it and destroying the gluten. I think it fell apart after I added in the salt. The salt must have given the mixer some "grip" on the dough ball and started ripping it apart. I use a 2.5-hour autolyse, so the gluten was probably heavily developed, and I must be mixing more than I needed to. Next time maybe I'll just mix in the mixer until it comes together, and then do the rest by hand, or at the very least watch the dough to see if the surface starts tearing. Glad I saw this video though. This whole time I was thinking that maybe I accidentally measured the hydration wrong and that's what caused it to come apart. But now I know why there was no saving this dough. The gluten was gone and would never be coming back. And this exactly mirrors the other one time that this happened, and that time I also thought it was an over-hydration issue.

Thank you for teaching us!

Always! Excellent videos!!!

I'm still a novice, so I'm still in the learning process.. Sometimes my dough doesn't seem to get that elastic and will end up ripping easily and getting a rough exterior, even when I try to roll it into a ball. I repeatedly question whether it's due improper hydration level, or if I'm not working or folding the dough enough or correctly. But one thing I noticed recently is that I made rolls and I followed the specific volume measurements of a recipe. It came out perfect.. Then about a week later, I tried it the exact same way with a different brand of flour. The dough mixture turned out WAY too wet. I had to add a significant amount of flour into it just to get it to not look like a soup. Once got it to where I could work it, it didn't get as elastic as my previous batch, nor did it seem to rise as much after baking. I was surprised that there was such a huge difference in the amount of water that each flour absorbed. I've heard that you can experience differences, and that different flours have different grades or protein content, which plays into the process of making gluten. Though I checked the nutritional values on the flour, and they both had the same amount of protein listed. Maybe the inconsistencies is partially due to different flour? I feel that I'm over analyzing things when troubleshooting issues that I experience.

We know that the bran in the 100% whole wheat effectively 'cuts' the gluten strands during kneading which always makes it hard to develop gluten when using 100% whole wheat flour. Since you never really 'broke' the white flour, it would suggest the cutting action of the bran is the main cause of that particular dough breaking down. Would be interested to see a 1/2 100%:1/2 bread flour dough handles overmixing. The guess would be that the dough would eventually break down but not sure if the additional bread flour would handle the cutting of the dough by the bran for much longer.

Another awesome video thanks for sharing

Amazing video. You killed a few birds with one stone. Especially the video you planned to make with a mixer and high hydration dough. I found from my experience with making pizza dough and higher hydration that when you undermix a bit and then let it sit for 20 minutes and then do a few more stretch and folds works out really well. Its a bit sticky and not perfect mixed but when you make the balls and put them in the fridge for 15 minutes as we learned from you, doing that second ball from the fringe makes the balls really smooth and evenly distributed temperature and strength which then works great for longer fermentation. I have adapted that technique to making the balls. I really like this video because I stopped using a mixer since I discovered your channel but the other day I mixed for 6 pizza doughs and I wish I had used the mixer. It took longer to mix the dough by stretch and fold and my arms where in pain. I think the moral of the story with this video is, over mixing is a waste of energy and time, however undermixing and using autolyse can be your best friend and I also found with Pizza is you don't need a super spring like bread, so even if undermix a bit, and what I mean by that is not having a perfect smooth dough in the end but some stickier surface as you would get with higher hydration. You can get a great pizza! You showed us that over mixing has many drawbacks especially with final temp and we all know temp can be our enemy. Thanks for this video really helped me out with the mixer for higher hydration. I was always afraid to run the mixer for to long but as I saw 20 minutes at higher speeds did the trick. I usually do 8 - 15 minutes stretch and fold depending how big the dough is and how much hydration but using a mixer can have its benefits. :) I can't wait to see the high hydration and mixer video coming soon I hope :)

Great video very informational

Thank you very much for this, very interesting and helps us all worry a lot less when kneading and trying to find what we all thought was the "perfect amount of time". :-)

That whole wheat loaf baked and came out remarkably well considering that it looked like wet tissue paper after that brutal mixing.

I have undermixed my dough a few times ( I was just tired and hungry) and I have kneaded a pie (butter) dough a bit much once or twice but my results were always edible even if not beautiful. And because I do not bake for visuals it wasn't a big deal. :-)

From the thumbnail image, I thought this was gonna be about chicken. Forgive me, I haven't eaten breakfast yet, and my brain is slow. haha

'Maybe if I kneed it for a couple days it will turn back to flour' lol good one

Once I overmixed a dough (at least I think I did) by hand kneading. I was making bread rolls, and I wanted to achieve great volume like industrial bakeries (other people tell me they do it with black magic dough conditioners). I used AP flour (10-11% protein I think), because textbooks said here they are made from AP flour. I heard that vitamin C is a dough conditioner, somehow helps the gluten structure, so I added some, because I thought the more/stronger the gluten, the bigger volume I get. About 60% hydration (again, from the textbook), added some vitamin C (aka ascorbic acid), and kneaded on the counter, by hand, as hard as I could. About 20 minutes I think. At some point the surface of the dough started tearing, it wasn't smooth anymore, it was rather like little trenches or grooves and when I baked it, it was inedibly tough, like a breadstone.

Looking good! Would love to taste :) thank you again for sharing… I am subscribed 🥰

i overmixed once a 70% hydration dough. Basically i just mixed the flour, yeast and water without properly kneading, left it in the fridge overnight and started to knead it the next day. As soon as i started to knead it, the gluten instantly started to tear apart and it ended up being a flour soup in just 3 minutes. I guess i found the most effective way to overmix a dough :D

If I remember correctly, I've seen recipes for Chinese hand-stretched noodles that calls for 1 hour of mixing in a mixer.

Something to keep in mind, our hands are warm but the mixer bowl is metal which should act as a heatsink to neutralize the temperature increase from the mixing.

It happened to me with a mix of spelt and whole rye at 70% hydration. The ezymatic activity of the warm rye even made it faster. I just mixed 10min in my kenwood at speed 1. Now i only mix rye with wheat. Spelt is just too weak.

I found it confusing, that you said "autolysation weakens gluten". Everything i've learned so far points to the contrary.

For sourdough a higher temp means more lactic acid bacteria and the pH will destroy your dough.

another very interesting video! i love that you are teaching people how to think for themselves about bread recipes, as opposed to blind following of instructions. keep up the good work

Hello, watching the last dough it reminds me 1 time i did a pizza dough by hand but at that moment i didn't had normal flour so picked 1 with baking powder that was already open, and after mixing and kneading the dough, it looked just like the last one of the video, i was pretty surprised and to trying to fix it i let it rest and kneading again like 3 more times, but in the end there was no change. it was pretty weird. I think i didn't overmixed it since i wasn't 1 hour kneading it, so i always have though the flour was expired(or the baking powder on it). coz on other occasions i have used the same kind of flour and it mix pretty fine.

I think spelt flour can be "ruined", due how it works. It will probably look fine until oven time, but then it just either collapses or refuse to get oven spring at all, rather it goes flat (unless you bake in container). Regular flour, dont think I ever managed to ruin bread flour and I did almost everything wrong at the start of my baking attempts. I think our modern bread flour is really durable. From my experience with rye and spelt, especially later, those are definitely not durable at all.

Really thank you 💓☺️

"maybe if I kneed it for a couple of days it would turn back into flour" hahaha brilliant

How to control the temperature if there is 30 celsius in my kitchen?

Thank you

Thanks!

Did you compare the taste? I would think that the overmixed dough might taste more fermented, since it loses all the CO², which should make it breathe more quickly (?) On the other hand, you would need to compare it to a properly made full grain dough, it will obviously be different from white bread ^^

I split my time between france and US. I notice European flour needs to be mixed a lot longer to get strength so I use a machine, but when I’m in US I use King Arthur flour and I do it by hand and fold-no machine. Strange, no?

You said autolyzation destroy gluten, I got the opposite impression from the autolyse video where you have shown that with this method the dough is stronger from the start

Yeah I dunno why it caught on but the window pane thing can bugger off. Never been reliable for me either.

Wow so its really almost impossible to overmix a dough unless you go completely nuts. I dont have to be too afraid of that anymore when using my stand mixer.

I don't knead. I stretch and fold. Tall rustic open crumb breads are the result. No worries about overworked doughs.

Hey. Great video. You mentioned that temp control is more important. Why is that?

What I learned from this video, it seems it would take effort to not make a delicious homemade bread.

This was an awesome video nice to see what it takes to destroy your dough puts the rest paranoia

Nice. you could contact jack, from Bake with Jack yt, he did a video abou over-kneading some time ago. He has a totally different look at temps (no measruring but getting the dough at same temp as room/rising room. Both work, you two ought to do a colab one time, both interesting techincal bakers, different way of starting. Would love to see the two of you in one/two vids :) found his vid ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-owaU_9F0BJo.html

Perfect, i lreaned a lot from u Did u have a video about the relation between the water n flour?

Great experiment...I have a question please, I hardly find bread flour in my town, can i substitute it by mixing all purpose flour with fine semolina? To get high protien content and better rising bakes....I use a sourdough starter usually .

you're so good at baking by now you fail at trying to make a bad loaf

Buddy where are you from? Your english accent sounds pretty nice

Welll done!

Sooo ummm..... can you overfold a dough ? :D Very welcome cool video though. It's always really helpful to understand how dough really reacts, instead of just blindly following common advice.

Next, maybe you can tell us/me how to fix an over hydrated dough ?

Thank you for this experiment! Seeing the dough in your mixer and how it handles while you are trying to break it brings me to a question. I am using a strong white bread flour - it says it has 13% protein content. Hydration is about 63% (if my scale works properly). I am mixing it for about 3-4 minutes on lowest speed (1 of 7) and then another 3-4 minutes on medium high speed (4 of 7). During mixing my doughs never lift up fully from the bowl - there is always some looser dough sticking to the sides. Does it mean that: a) I am not mixing it enough or b) the flour is not truly 13% protein or c) the flour is not capable of 63% hydration and I should go lower? I am always able to tighten the dough with folds but I would love to see my dough come properly mixed from the bowl already. Thank you for your opinion!

I think you can easily overmix spelt dough. Thanks