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Divide and weigh dough into regular pieces

When you prepare dough for cupcakes in a pastry shop or bakery, at some point you're going to have to divide it, i.e. cut it into small pieces, which should all have the same weight.

Sounds simple enough, but is it really that simple?

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Last modified on: May 30^th 2023

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Divide and weigh dough into regular pieces

The most natural way to do this is to place the pile of dough in front of you.

Then take enough dough from it to obtain the desired weight.

Then set this small dough piece aside, and repeat the operation until you reach the end of the initial pile of dough.
It's simple, and it works, of course, but without realizing it you're wasting a lot of time, because you'll have to make the right weight from scratch for each dough piece.

Can you do better?

Yes, and to do that you have to work like bakers do, i.e. cut the dough into squares.
To do this, you first need to roll out the dough roughly on your work surface, pressing it down with your hands, and at the same time giving it a vague square or roughly flat rectangle shape, about 1 to 3 cm thick.

Using a pastry cutter, cut out "columns" from the rectangle...

... which you can then cut into pieces.

Weigh each piece to check its weight, adjust if necessary by removing or adding a small piece of dough, then set it aside before moving on to the next.

You'll find that, at first, the pieces you cut won't be the right weight, but as time goes by, your eye will adjust to the desired weight, and you'll need to adjust the weight less and less.
This way of working (in "columns" and "rows") will enable you to divide the dough more quickly and easily.
It's not essential, but once you've got a piece at the right weight, lay it out in rows and columns too (as in the photo), so you'll know how much you've got at a glance.

To sum up: to divide a dough into several small pieces of the same weight, it's much easier and quicker to form it into a rectangle or square, and cut rows and columns from this rectangle.

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