[mcaravey]

Yeah, it was an investment for sure. But it has allowed us to save a ton of time every day (e.g. save 30 minute on the autolyse), make tweaks to our recipes to match our processes, change our starters (use stiff levain instead of poolish for certain breads), and a bunch of other details. Not needed for the lay-person. For sourdough I’d opt for the Tartine books.

[eps]

Autolyse probably is not the best example. I have several bread-making books and I don't think a single one advocates for autolyse. Not Tartine, not Forkish's, not Reinhart's. Lots of youtubers and bloggers love it though, no idea why.

[mcaravey]

Maybe not, but they do look at that one because a bunch of books are totally in favor, and a bunch are either against it or ignore it, so coming up with a definitive answer was a reasonable thing to do. Other examples of time savers would be when to add fats and salts in a dough, and proofing and punching times.

I’d need to double check, but I could have sworn that Tartine did have an autolyse where they have you wait a half hour before adding the salt and last bit of water. I don’t have the book handy at the moment though…

[adrian_b]

For normal bread a rest time may be not useful, but there are special purposes when it may be needed.

For example, I make for myself at home a bread that is highly enriched in proteins, by washing the dough before baking, to remove a large part of the starch, up to 75% of it, so that the dough is enriched in gluten (the wheat flour used has a gluten to starch ratio around 1:6, while the bread made thus has a gluten to starch ratio around 2:3).

If a rest time of at least 20 minutes is not inserted between kneading the dough and washing it, the dough is not cohesive enough and the washing detaches not only the starch grains but also gluten fragments, causing a loss of the proteins that are intended to remain in the bread.

It is possible that with a much longer time of kneading the rest time could be omitted, but when the kneading is done manually and you make just one bread for yourself, it is certainly preferable to knead for only a short time, followed by a rest time during which you are free to do other activities.

[jshmrsn]

Maybe you’ve already watched it, but Ragusea has a good 15m video on the topic, which goes over the chemistry and some pros and cons. Basically, it’s a trade off of less work (kneading) in exchange for more waiting. I imagine in an industrial context, it’s more efficient to just toss the dough into a machine.

https://youtu.be/orpTeX_EGXA

[menage]

The Tartine Bread book (as of 2018) explicitly recommends the autolyse/rest period (page 52, with more explanation on page 73).

[NaOH]

Read Calvel on autolyse. He's the person who developed the process. While I can't compare his work (The Taste of Bread) to Modernist Bread (not having read those books), he comes at it from a scientific angle, not just as a baker.

[chb]

Forkish explicitly calls for an autolyze period in most of the bread recipes he presents in “Flour Water Salt Yeast.”