How To Bake Bread From Frozen Dough

If you're not a seasoned baker, you might be deterred from experimenting with making a homemade loaf of bread because of all the kneading, rising, and proofing that's required on a single day. However, there's a simple way to split all that work into manageable stages by freezing your dough after its first rise. This convenient technique means you can prepare, knock back, and shape your dough up to a month in advance until you're ready to bake it. You just have to remember to defrost it properly and allow it to rise again before placing it in a preheated oven.

Begin by spreading your frozen, shaped dough out on a lined baking sheet before placing the whole lot in the fridge to defrost (if thawing a loaf, simply put the pan you froze it in directly on the shelf). In bakery lingo, the process of defrosting frozen dough slowly in a controlled environment is called retarding. This trick give you a little more flexibility to bake your bread at a time that suits you and improves the flavor of the final bake. Once defrosted, remove your dough from the fridge and let it come up to room temperature so it can benefit from a final rise, known as the proofing stage. This step is vital because it gives the gluten in the bread dough time to relax, resulting in a loaf or boule with a tender crumb and light, open texture. Then bake your bread as normal.

While you may have come across frozen baguettes that can be popped straight into the oven directly from the freezer, these types of bread are partially baked before they're packaged. If you put frozen homemade bread dough into the oven without allowing it to defrost first, you'll end up with a hard, burnt crust and a cold middle that's stodgy and unappetizing. The dough needs to warm up first so its texture can become soft again before it meets the heat of the oven. 

You can freeze bread dough after it's already risen once because the active yeast in your bread recipe won't die; it will simply lay dormant until your dough comes back up to room temperature and reawaken. Moreover, it's okay to refrigerate bread dough, because it slows down the fermentation process, which deepens it flavors and results in a final product that has heaps of character and inviting texture. Chilling the dough also helps it to develop a very thin skin on the surface, which makes it easier to handle. This is a real boon if you want to score the surface of your bread dough with a blade and create an intricate design on top. This dough scorer on Amazon comes with 15 blades and is useful for making precise cuts that are sharp and neat.