The Journal · 2026-08-24
Why won't my dough rise in a cold kitchen?
A comment from Denise on the video about overnight dough
Nana Hartley has baked yeast rolls in Florida for over forty years. When dough won't rise, it is almost never dead yeast — it is a cold kitchen. Here is what she does about it every January.
Denise wrote in and asked why her dough sat in the bowl all afternoon and never moved. She thought she'd killed the yeast. She hadn't.
The dough was just cold, and cold dough is slow dough.
Yeast is alive, and like anything alive it does less when it's chilly. Around 75 to 80 degrees it's happy and works fast. Down around 65 it gets sluggish. Below 60 it more or less sits down and quits. Nothing is broken — the clock just got longer.
What Nana does about it
Forty years in Florida and she still has this problem every January, because a Florida house in winter is a cold house — nobody here insulates for it.
The oven light. Put the bowl in the oven, turn the oven light on, shut the door. Don't turn the oven on. That little bulb holds the box around 75 to 80 degrees, which is exactly where you want to be. This is the one she uses most.
One minute of heat, then off. If your oven has no light, turn it on for sixty seconds, then turn it off and put the dough in. Sixty seconds. Any longer and you'll cook the outside of your dough and you'll know because it'll skin over.
A pan of hot water. Boil a kettle, pour it into a pan, set the pan on the bottom rack and the dough on the rack above it. Shut the door. The steam warms the box and keeps the dough from drying out at the same time.
What not to do
Don't add more yeast. This is what everybody does and it doesn't work. You'll get a yeasty, beery taste and the rise won't come any faster, because the problem was never how much yeast you had. It was the temperature.
Don't put it on a heating vent or in the sun. Too hot is worse than too cold. Above about 100 degrees you start killing the yeast for real, and you'll get a dough that rose fast and then collapsed.
Don't go by the clock. Nana has never once set a timer for a rise. The dough is ready when it's doubled and when you can press two fingers into it and the dent stays. In a warm kitchen that's an hour. In a cold one it might be three. Same dough.
The thing Mawmaw said
"If the kitchen's cold, the dough's cold, and you can't rush a cold thing. You can only wait on it or warm it up. Hollering at it has never once worked."