Making bread and baking are ancient traditions that people can relate to cross-culturally. Whether professional or first-time bakers, most have tried to make the perfect dough. Every baker has their preference: hand rolling or using dough sheeter machines. Determining whether hand rolling is outdated or dough sheeter machines produce bread with less character is the age-old question. So, in this blog, we will consider rolling the dough: hand rolling vs. dough sheeter machine to determine the best practice.

Understanding Dough

To understand how to make any sort of dough and how its machines work, you must learn to understand the dough. Flour is the main component in almost all doughs: the ground grain produces baked goods. Yeast makes it rise, and yeast cannot effectively work without sugar because sugar fuels it to give off its gases within the grain while proofing.

When adding water, salt, yeast, and sugar, you will have all the ingredients needed to create a dough. Now, measurement is key to formulating the proper dough. A pinch of salt, at least two tablespoons of sugar, a cup of water, and two cups of flour give the dough its flavor.

Knead the dough by hand to incorporate the fat, allowing it to bond with the molecules beyond what the water provides. Once you have made a few by hand, you will notice just how quickly it forms together—often in less than a minute. People who do this professionally are highly skilled and surpass any commercialized press.

What We Are Making

What you make determines the best method to achieve the process the quickest. Most doughs made by hand are something that professional bakers have spent lifetimes perfecting, often passing the knowledge down from generation to generation. Knowing optimal bread consistencies and how different recipes change the doughs for the products are also important factors in their creation.

So, whether you are creating a flatbread, pie crust, pastry, or pizza, having that background will help you understand that regardless of method, the experience typically triumphs. For instance, the baker could throw the ingredients together in a matter of seconds and have the dough made in half the time. Based on that experience, they will also know how long to form and shape the dough.

Then, they can stretch it in less time than that. Only a machine can match the same level of uniformity.

Sheeter Machines

Sheeter machines are a new-age invention that takes the dough and presses it into a desired, uniform thickness every time. Unfortunately, every dough is unique, and uniformity may change when the dough rises. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, a commercial dough sheeter machine doesn’t provide a perfect crust every time because no dough is perfect. They all have inconsistencies since the yeast helps them rise in different places.

Another problem is that some people tend to believe that doughs used in conjunction with sheeter machines are overworked. Because this machine creates such a processed pressing method, compression acts to speed up the proofing process; thus, they release the gases built up in the dough. Those gases are important in expanding the dough and getting it to rise. Without them, the bread is left dense and lifeless. Perhaps some people prefer that; however, this method turns the dough into something different.

Hand Rolling the Dough

Hand rolling straddles the fence with how you make the dough, and you don’t have to roll all doughs. But again, having the proper knowledge and training regarding how to roll the dough without releasing all those gasses and killing off yeast’s properties are key to producing a decent baked product. An experienced baker will know how many times to roll the dough and how to handle the dough to properly perform while baking.

Hand Tossing the Dough

Hand tossing the dough is like hand rolling; while it might seem unorganized, proper stretching can continue after most of the rolling has taken place. To make this happen, you will need to use minimal effort to stretch it by hand. Then, the dough is spiraled through the air, allowing physics to pull and stretch it apart as it twists and falls to the ground. This results in making dough with a perfectly designed thickness and diameter every time.

Hot Pressing the Dough

Like a sheeter machine, the hot press can be compared to a waffle iron for baked goods. The difference here is that the hot press will press the dough out into a perfect shape at a certain degree temperature. This keeps it from cooking all the way through rather than speeding up the proofing process. However, this process often causes uneven charring.

Cold Pressing the Dough

Cold pressing dough is a similar process to hot pressing, only with a cold application that aims to press out the dough in its present state. Usually, this takes multiple tries to get the desired thickness and texture. This method is the closest to the commercial dough sheeter machine.

Thus, it is easy to see why having a dough sheeter machine is pertinent to businesses from a commercial standpoint. However, this still does not answer the mystery behind the purists who still prefer the artisan style of hand rolling over the commercial. It also cannot explain the human ability to master the art so effortlessly while keeping up with machines and surpassing their capabilities in some cases.

The consistency is seemingly there through the mechanized system; however, because we understand that dough is like a living thing, each end result is unique. So, why not make efforts to preserve this uniqueness through both systems? As a process in rolling the dough by hand rolling versus dough sheeter machines, you come out with a unique product every time. There is no one answer to this debate: every baker has their preference and has used it to craft their perfect dough. Maybe they are superior to one another in differing ways, or maybe they are not; but regardless, they are both loved all the same.