Problems With Yeast Doughs
Back in October I discussed some problems with sourdough in a post here, and I wanted to highlight some common problems with yeast doughs. Every week I bake both and my personal preference to work with is sourdough because it’s an incredibly forgiving dough. I don’t understand when people find sourdough difficult because I can neglect it for such a long time and it will still perform, I think of sourdough as a baker’s best friend, reliable and not too demanding. Yeast doughs on the other hand I find incredibly demanding, like my children.
I Followed The Recipe To Letter Except….
hhhmmmm…have you heard this one, “I followed the recipe to the letter except…” ..except when I left it and went to visit my sister-in-law for the day…or…I left it to rise much longer than it said…or…I followed the recipe exactly but I got impatient and put it on the radiator…
Yes, we’ve all done it, not really followed the recipe but excused ourselves that it shouldn’t matter anyway. There are good and bad recipes, I’ve wasted plenty of eggs on bad ones. I’ve also diverted enough from recipes, doughs ones included, to know there’s a good reason why following a good recipe matters. There’s plenty of variables like flour and ovens to make something as simple as a yeast dough differ without further adding to it with our own deviations.
Yeast doesn’t care about one’s social life nor does it take kindly to our restlessness…I should know I’ve killed it a few times.
Better to under-prove than over-prove it.
I don’t know why recipes for yeast doughs obsess with putting them in warm places like airing cupboards, maybe because many recipe methods are a watered-down version of bakeries ones, where provers and warm temperature of the bakery play a large part.
If you’re happy with putting yours in an airing cupboard fine, but the dough will rise at room temperature, the yeast strains are picked to do so. Think about the fridge and if given long enough your dough will still rise in there.
Don’t put it on the radiator, it will kill the yeast, if not all it will kill enough of them and you’ll have a small rise on baking but with a stunted loaf.
In winter if particularly cold and want to speed it up I will put it on my dinning room table as it’s a fairly warm room, cover the bowl with plastic and then a blanket. The dough once mixed and starts to work, it will itself generate heat and keeping cold air out of the bowl I find gives it its own warm micro-climate.
Don’t Get Hung Up On Doubling In Size
It’s not a very useful term, let the dough rise until double in size, sometimes you can’t remember what size it started out as.
As long as you can see it has increased in size, showing the yeast is alive and kicking it’s the sign you’re looking for, the sign that yeast are producing by-products; the gases.
Looking at the top of the dough it’s hard to tell but as soon as you lift that dough you’ll see underneath there’s activity going on..signs of bubbles or the ‘stringy-cheese’ effect.
You’re better off under-proving the first rise and letting it prove longer on last rise.
The more to the maximum you prove on last rise the less oven-spring, and no dramatic rip effect on the slash but you’ll have a very light aerated crumb.
OK so you neglect the dough, who doesn’t?
Depending on the recipe whether it’s a lean dough (roller white flour no added sugar) or doughs with rich flours (wholemeal/rye/stoneground) or doughs with things added, it will make a difference if having left it to prove too long on the first rise how much of an allowance you’ll have for last prove, as richer doughs/flours will be speedier.
The yeast has a limited lifespan which depends on what’s in the recipe and the temperature and hydration of the dough.
If it’s a wetter dough it will speed things ups, cells work with the existence of water and faster if they have access to more water. Microbes also multiply faster at higher temperatures, the warmer the faster, that’s why you can retard a dough for 3 days in the fridge and still not exhaust bacteria nor yeast. Obviously too hot and they die.
Balancing the recipe
The more yeast you add to a recipe the faster it will speed things up, so therefore the opposite is true, little yeast added and a larger window for rising. Sometimes a higher percentages of yeast is added to counterbalance rich doughs with eggs, fats, sugar.
A small amount of sugar will help speed up a dough but if too much is added as in sweet rich doughs it does the opposite, as sugar is hygroscopic.
Eggs and fat inhibit gluten development by stopping the gluten proteins coming into contact with water, they coat flour particles. They’re seen as tenderisers.
The drying starts with the dough
Bread and cakes once baked are the same, they finish as a moist product, and over a course of days they will dry out as the moisture trapped will evaporate slowly…well this is the natural process of things…I’m not going to talk about mass-produced loaves with added enzymes to maintain forever-softness.
How much moisture in a loaf will be as a result of different things, the recipe and the absorption of the flour, high gluten flour (those with gluten performing proteins) will absorb more water.
The longer you leave your dough to rise the more moisture will also evaporate, it may be too small to worry about the result of it but it’s nevertheless a contributing factor. Give you an example, my sourdough loaf left to rise once shaped for 10-12 hours at room temperature will bake quicker than one made the same but left for last rise for only 3-6 hours.
Oven
And then the biggest drying factor of them all…the baking.
I see an oven as a dryer, both in baking cakes, cookies or bread. For a cracker or crisp biscuit (cookie) the temperature needs to be long enough to dry out the moisture but low enough not to burn the individual cracker. For crackers and crisp cookies I often double bake, it produces super-crisp results.
Back to bread, ovens vary and tapping loaves on the bottom to see if they sound hollow is not a good indication of bread being done, they can sound hollow from an early stage.
The baker Paul Merry showed me how to feel for differences in vibrations when tapping bottoms of loaves, this method does give differences when the loaf is ready or not, but it’s not easy to explain, it’s easier to feel. If you want to practice this please use damp tea towel to protect your hand and rest the corner of the loaf standing on its end on the palm of your hand to feel the vibration as you tap the bottom of the loaf.
Sugar
Having some form of sugar, sucrose, glucose, fructose in the dough will make it ferment rapidly. Maltose will be slower, and lactose not fermented at all.
There are yeast strains that grow well and tolerate high sugared doughs, osmotolerant yeast, I haven’t come across these here but in the States there’s two brands, SAF Gold label and Fermipan Brown. Normal yeast strains will survive this environment but they’ll take much longer to start producing carbon dioxide and alcohol.
A small amount of sugar will also contribute to a beautiful colour crust like the loaves below.
Spices with Caution
Spices can have an antimicrobial element to them and slow fermentation, this is why cinnamon is not recommended to be added directly to the dough.
Fresh Yeast
Difficult for the homebaker to get hold of and then using it in small quantities while still fresh and active.
Dried Yeast
They fall into two categories, Active Dry Yeast and Instant Yeast. I use the instant yeast and have noticed recently this type is the one on offer in the supermarkets.
Active dry yeast – the one that needs to be activated in water prior to adding to dough, is spray dried and this being quite a harsh way of processing the yeast will have a fair amount of dead yeast cells. According to How Baking Works there’s a quarter pound of dead yeast for every pound. If there’s too many damaged and dead yeast they release glutathione, this will cause problems with the dough, can produce slack, sticky dense loaves, especially if the yeast is dissolved in cool water, it’s at this temperature glutathione leaks more. The advantage of this effect is producing pizza and tortilla dough where you want extensible dough.
Instant yeast – the one you add straight to the dough, is dried quicker than active dry yeast in a gentler process “fluidised bed”, producing far less dead and damaged yeast. Instant yeast has a porous form taking up water quicker. The strain used in instant yeast is more vigorous than either the fresh or active variety and can easily over-prove doughs.
Potato In Bread
Potato in bread deserves a post on its own but wanted to make a point here that adding potato in any form to yeast or sourdough, speeds up the process and aerates in a way that’s quite remarkable.
Photos above are three different yeast doughs made the same just using variations of hydration. Photo below is a yeast dough with small amount of potato flour.
In flour there’s enzymes such as protease, lipase and amylase. Amylase breaks down the starch in flour into sugars as well as other molecules, providing food for yeast during fermentation as well as increasing browning when baking, softens the crumb and slowing staling. Well, potato is starch.
But for the same reason as rye or commercially added amylase to wheat flour, you don’t want too much starch broken down or the loaf will suffer from that gumminess I’ve spoken of before in the rye flour post here, and added enzymes here. Cooked or processed potato like flour/flakes are already gelatinised making the breakdown by the enzymes even faster. That’s why the amount of potato added is important.
Above, sourdough with roasted potatoes. Potato added gives a beautiful tasting crust.
Yeast doughs are great and I love working with them for the variety of crumb texture they give you if treated differently. You can manipulate a yeast dough to have a chewy, waxy, open aerated texture crumb mimicking that of a sourdough crumb or produce the lightest fluffiest crumb imaginable and anything in-between, but keep in mind about simple things that will affect it, temperature, over-proving, timings, added ingredients, amount of yeast.