Ooooooh, now this would be a cool class. I have only made sushi once, but I have some friends with more practice, I could definitely pick their brains...


Now you're ready to add sugar. While flour provides a complex food for the yeast, sugar provides a simple, easy-to-digest food that will really boost yeast growth. Kick up your yeast activity by adding your sugar.

Knead in the same way, cover, and let rest 10 minutes again. less

AIREN! I haven't heard from you in so long!
And Property of Potter, and Sneakers and Pearls! Welcome!

Should I slow down so everyone can catch up, or keep on?

Salt works in the opposite way as sugar. Salt is detrimental to yeast growth. Since our yeast will be sitting overnight, even though the temperature is cool, the salt in this recipe is important to keep them from growing faster than we want.

Add salt, knead again, cover again, and let rest 10 more minutes. My dough is holding a shape here because of the kneading technique I used, which I will describe in the next post.
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After the addition of the salt, your bread has everything it needs except time to develop. I'll mention here, if you keep your house cold, you might want to put a muscle-heating-pad (the little electric kind) on, at the lowest setting while your dough develops. Yeast do well between 75 and 80F, so your dough should be cooler than your hands, but warmer than my poor self gets to keep my room temperature!

So, every 20 minutes, you will be stretching your bread. Partly this is to release trapped gases (you eventually want small bubbles evenly dispersed, not large ones all uneven). Also partly it is to develop the gluten network---you do this by slowly stretching the gluten molecules. They develop well if you treat them in an organized way (though lots of other things will work all right too), so I use the "stretch and fold" method for kneading. Basically, every 20 minutes, uncover your dough.

Get your hands wet (warm water) and don't dry them off, so the dough won't stick to you.

Pull it lengthwise.


Fold it up in thirds,


like a letter you will put in an envelope.


After it's folded, pull it again


so you can fold it up in the other direction.


Cover and let sit 20 more minutes. less

Huh. I've never seen bread being stretched instead of kneaded. That's really cool! I don't know that it would work for the type of bread I normally make, as it starts out a lot more gooshy than yours does, and I end up kneading for a good 20 minutes. I may be squishy everywhere else, but by gods I have great arms from making bread. less