How to Let Braided Bread Rise when Cooking

How to Let Braided Bread Rise when Cooking
Hi. My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make a braided wreath of bread. Alright so here's our bowl. All we're going to do. We're just going to take a little bit of olive oil here. Just a tiny bit and we're just going to kind of swirl that around. Now what you can do also, if you don't want to get your hands dirty? You can just as easily stick your hand in here and mix it around. You can just take a paper towel and all this is for is to keep the bread from sticking to the bowl when it's in here. So get a nice layer. I go all the way to the top edge because as it rises it'll rise all the way to the top. Some people use a spray on, non stick spray. Some people use butter. I just usually use whatever oil I'm using that's appropriate. Olive oil works just fine. You don't want like a huge amount. We just want just the thinnest layer we can get in there. Make sure you don't miss any spots because if you miss a spot the dough will stick in that one spot. Alrighty, and that is how you oil up a bowl. Easy stuff. Alright so we've got our bowl there. We just take our dough which should fall right out. There we go. Drop that right in there and it's best to always kind of smoosh it down a little bit just to make sure that we don't have any air underneath it. So there's our dough and now what we're going to do is we're going to take one of our towels and we're going to get it wet. And the reason we want to get it wet is that we want to keep some moisture in the dough Because what will happen is it'll start to form a crust on the outside if there's no moisture in contact with it. So you want to make sure. I just kind of didn't really evenly wet my towel here so let's get it nice and evenly wet. Wring it out. You don't want it dripping wet. And then we're going to take and lay our damp towel right across the top of the bowl just like this and kind of push it down. It doesn't have to come in contact with the bread. We just want it to stay close enough to where it retains that moisture. Kind of locking in there. Now this is going to, you want to keep it somewhere warm until it doubles in size. Which should take about an hour to an hour and a 1/2. So if you're doing this in the winter and it's kind of chilly you can actually turn your oven on and set it on top of your oven. Turn your oven to like 200 degrees and just set it on top. If you're doing it in the summer you shouldn't have any problems at all. So we're letting it double in size. It should come up to the top of this bowl when it's ready to go so I'll see you in about an hour to an hour and a half. Okay, so it's been about an hour and a half. So let's pull our towel back and we'll see that we've pretty much doubled in size and you'll see that also it's a little oily on a couple spots here on the top.