Alveograph: Measuring Dough Strength and Elasticity in Sourdough Baking

The alveograph is a tool used to test the strength and stretch of dough. It helps bakers and millers understand how flour behaves when mixed, fermented, and baked. This is especially helpful when baking sourdough, where flour performance greatly affects the end result.

What Does an Alveograph Do?

The alveograph inflates a disc of dough with air until it bursts. The tool records how much the dough resists stretching and how far it stretches before tearing. These results show how the dough is likely to behave during proofing and baking.

The test gives four key values:

P – how strong the dough is
L – how far the dough can stretch
W – total dough strength
P/L ratio – the balance between strength and stretch

These results are often used to match the right flour to a specific recipe or baking style.

Why It Matters for Sourdough

Sourdough often uses high-hydration dough and long fermentation. These methods demand strong but flexible dough. At The Sourdough School, we use alveograph data to test our botanical blend flours, making sure they perform well in both structure and flavour.

This is especially important in our 3-day BALM workshops, where we teach how to work with natural flours and wild yeasts. Understanding dough strength helps students adjust hydration, kneading, and proofing times for better results.

Practical Help for Home Bakers

While home bakers don’t use alveographs, we use their results to guide our flour blends and recipes. Our bread kits and starter kits are designed to perform well across a range of hydration and fermentation times.

You can also enjoy the results of this testing through the Proven Bread subscription. This unique service delivers sourdough bread by post, with 24 slices per tin and 6g of fibre per slice. Each loaf is backed by science and comes with a 12-week lesson plan on how to eat bread to support your health.

If you’re exploring flour selection and fermentation at a deeper level, we cover this in our advanced retreats and consultations.

All reasonable care is taken when writing about health aspects of bread, but the information it contains is not intended to take the place of treatment by a qualified medical practitioner. You must seek professional advice if you are in any doubt about any medical condition. Any application of the ideas and information contained on this website is at the reader's sole discretion and risk.