Has the following scenario ever happened to you? After you have
mixed, proofed, and shaped your bread dough, you walk away to do
another task while the dough undergoes its final rise. One thing
leads to another, until a sudden panic strikes: you forgot about
the dough.
You rush back into the kitchen only to see a monster loaf that
towers over the loaf pan, threatening to subsume the entire
countertop. You immediately stick it in the oven, hoping for the
best, only to have those hopes dashed when the dough deflates,
leaving a sunken loaf. It doesn't have to end that way, says PJ
Hamel of King Arthur Flour. She walks us through the steps of how to save over-proofed dough.
Hamel says that if your dough rises too far, you can usually
rescue it by gently deflating the dough, reshaping it, and
returning it to the loaf pan. She notes that most yeasts have
enough oomph for a third rise, with the exception of rapid-rise
yeast (not to be confused with instant yeast, which should be okay
for a third rise).
The third rise will take far less time than the previous one, so
don't walk away from this one. According to Hamel, the rise may
take as little as 20 minutes. She shows side-by-side photos of a
loaf baked using the normal two rises and a loaf that was
over-proofed and rescued. The over-proofed loaf actually ended up
just a tiny bit higher in the end. That's a lot better than the
loaf baked straight from an over-proofed state - it couldn't
sustain the rise and collapsed in the oven.