I don’t take towels or bathrobes from hotels, but I do make a point to grab up all of the crappy disposable shower caps. Although they will never see the inside of my bathroom, they’re guaranteed to be put to use in my kitchen. You see, I use them for bread baking. The humble plastic shower cap is surprisingly helpful for proofing dough.
Like so many important life skills, I learned this trick from The Great British Bake Off. During a bread baking challenge, one of the contestants unpacks a tiny envelope and comments on how they steal shower caps from hotels for proofing bread. They popped the plastic cap on the bowl with freshly kneaded dough and moved on.
After that episode, I was both angry that I hadn’t been doing this already, and excited that I had a hotel stay coming up. Although only a single step in the bread making process, a solid rise during proofing can make a huge difference in your finished loaf. Streamlining this step would be huge.
Proofing is when you leave raw dough in a warm area for an extended period of time, usually a couple hours, so the yeast can release gas and the dough can rise. Normally, bread recipes will indicate covering the bowl of dough with plastic wrap, or a tea towel. Those have always been OK methods for me, but there are pitfalls. Plastic wrap doesn’t adhere to metal, plastic, or wooden bowls very well and can slip off the bowl or into it. Tea towels are okay, but they’re porous and can be drafty. Either scenario might make for longer wait times, or worse, a dried-out skin developing on your dough which can mess up the texture and impede the rise.
The way hotel shower caps are designed to hang onto your cranium happens to be perfect for looping over the edges of bowls, too. It’s essentially a plastic bag with an elastic ring around the opening. The elastic can stretch easily to hook around bowls 12 inches in diameter and smaller, and once it tightens in place it doesn’t budge.
The plastic bouffant locks in the warmth and creates a bit of extra head room in case your dough rises surprisingly high. This keeps your dough from getting stuck to the plastic, keeping your shower cap clean so you can reuse it indefinitely (or until it falls apart).
If you're baking once or twice this winter, then you might not give a hoot about longer proofing times, but if you’re churning out loaves more frequently this winter, or baking for friends and family, snapping on a shower cap makes proofing much less fussy. So the next time you stay at a hotel, make sure to check the bathroom for your next kitchen tool.
