Every once in a while, we forget we have a dough rising in the kitchen, especially after the beginner-baker stage of hyper focus. Maybe you fall asleep or leave the house without refrigerating your dough, or you lose track of time, or the summer heat catches you by surprise. Regardless of the how, now you have a blown up dough, possibly with crusty dry edges.
Do you toss the dough in despair and start over? Heck no. You’re looking at a dough that will make perfectly nice smaller loaves, rolls, focaccia, flatbread, or pizza…also breadsticks, crackers, and likely more. The only caveat is that you should deal with the dough ASAP, especially for the options with vertical structure: smaller loaves, rolls, and focaccia.
The more exhausted the dough, the flatter your solution should be. If the dough is mildly overfermented e.g. between doubled and tripled, you might pick two small loaves instead of one big loaf or reshape it into focaccia. (Note that baking soon is a priority, so don’t choose to make two small loaves if you don’t have the equipment to bake them at the same time.) If the dough has more than tripled, like the dough in these photos, you can make decent rolls and excellent flatbreads.
You also want to think about how deep you want to dive into a new recipe process. For example, focaccia just involves oiling a pan, oiling the dough, dimpling it. Crackers require a lot of babysitting the oven and multiple batches. Also when you redirect your dough from being a sandwich loaf to being rolls, for example, it may need a different bake time and temperature. You can type “rolls” or “focaccia” or “flatbreads” into the search bar of the Breadtopia Blog and scan recipe instructions for this info, keeping in mind that your dough may be a little larger or smaller.
Why deal with the dough right away? For the dough to keep rising, both after shaping and when it hits the oven, it has to have some oomph left in it: microbes and sugar. The longer you wait, the more compromised the microbial population, meaning less CO2 production. Also the dough is becoming more acidic, causing gluten to break down so the dough is less able to maintain its existing structure of air pockets.
What if you really need to deal with it later? The almost-pause button of cold temperature is an option if you really can’t process the dough right away. Kneading the dough for just a minute i.e. “punching it down” will give it a fighting chance, but it’s not guaranteed to rise again. In this situation it is best to use the dough for pizza, flatbreads, or crackers.
Can you also rescue overproofed dough that you’ve already shaped? Yes. With mild overproofing — the dough hasn’t begun to overflow the basket or collapse — you can bake the bread as is and cross your fingers that the structure holds. When the oven heat forces the existing bubbles to expand even more, the structure may get a bit compromised but the bread probably won’t pancake. With more dramatically overproofed dough, you should re-shaped it into something else. Use the same guideline as above: the more exhausted the dough, the flatter the bread you choose to shape it into.
What about dry bits of the dough? Dough starts to dry out when it is exposed to air e.g. the dough popped the lid off or escaped a plastic cover. Slightly dry edges can be incorporated into the center of the dough when you’re shaping it, but if the dry areas are thick or large, you you should trim them off. You can toss the bits or let them dry out completely to keep as back-up, lightly salted sourdough starter stored in a Ziploc bag.
See: How Dough Shape and Size Influence Crumb for more information on how dough shape influences crumb structure through gravity and the speed with which heat reaches the center of the dough when it bakes.
If you’d like to see the ingredients in this dough and how it looks as a sandwich bread, check out: Einkorn Sourdough Sandwich Bread.
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