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For both bagels and pretzels, dunking them in the water bath is very important for their appearance and flavour. Many experts will say that it is the process of dunking in boiling water that is the making of a good bagel. Industrial baking pursues convenience, and corner cutting is defended as “cost cutting”, so nowadays the boiling is replaced by steam injection in modern rack ovens.
In my years as a baker, and more particularly as a sourdough man, I have found that there is a great significance to 20 degree temperature thresehold when regarding the ambient temperature of your bakery or kitchen. Below 20 C there is a steady development of sponges and leavens and you can plan how much yeast to use for the given number of hours that you want sponges and leavens to sit maturing.
Autolyse (preferred by British bakers) or autolysis (the more widely used scientific term that refers to the self-digestion of a cell by its own enzymes) was a discovery by Professor Raymond Calvel in the early ’70’s. He was the great French baker who, seeing how badly French bread needed rescuing from mediocrity, went off to study sciences and ended up as an academic bread consultant and author. His most famous book, The Taste of Bread, is like a manual for bakers, and was translated into English by James MacGuire, who is a chef and baker in Montreal, Canada. Sadly, Prof. Calvel did not include autolyse as a topic in his book, but MacGuire added a short summary of it as an adjunct to the chapter on dough mixing.
Kneading dough does not mean mixing. Mixing would be an appropriate term for simply gathering together the components of a dough or, appropriately for this treatise on kneading, for making a dough with rye flour, or barley flour, where there is virtually no gluten present. The point about “kneading” is that it is a purpose verb, which refers to the process of development of dough, in particular, dough made with wheat flour. Proper development means initially the formation of gluten, to be followed by the process of teasing and manipulating that gluten until it is a well-formed and stretchy entity. That process is done by the task of kneading.
