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Stopped by a small bakery in Asheville last month and watched them shape 200 rolls by hand
I was in Asheville for a wedding and popped into a place off Haywood Road just to grab coffee. They had two bakers at a big wooden table doing nothing but rolling dough balls, and one of them told me they do it by feel because a scale slows them down once they get going. Watching them work made me realize how much of this job is muscle memory, not recipes. Does anyone else find that hand shaping gets faster than weighing once you have done it a few thousand times?
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riverp377d ago
by feel because a scale slows them down" is spot on. Once your hands know what 2 ounces feels like, stopping to weigh every single one is just wasted motion. I worked in a pizza shop for years and after a while I could portion dough balls without even looking, my hands just knew. The tricky part is when you get a new dough recipe or the hydration changes, because your feel is calibrated to the old one. Then you gotta weigh again for a bit until your hands catch up. It's wild how fast that muscle memory comes back though.
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