Hello bakers! And welcome back to Breadmaking If this is your first time coming across the column, check out our introductory post here , where you'll get the big picture on what we're working on and meet the four stages of bread-making: mixing , proofing and shaping, baking, and, of course, eating and storing bread.
In our previous post , we talked all about mixing the workhorse loaf , and gave ourselves a primer on the chemistry at work when we take flour, water, salt, and yeast, and combine them to make dough. Today, we're going to delve into what happens when dough is rising, and get to know our soon-to-be good friends—the billions of yeast cells that make our wet blobs of dough into pillowy, airy wonders—a little better.
Along the way, we're going to unpack what it means to divide and shape dough, and figure out how we can confidently and purposefully coax our dough into loaves, hopefully without making too much of a mess of ourselves. When we last left off, we'd just finished mixing our dough and transferred it into an oiled container. This is where our dough will perform its first rise, or bulk fermentation. This can also be called its bulk proof.
But what is fermentation? And what is proofing? And what is a baker to do while all of this is happening? While our dough is rising, and before we perform our folds, let's take a minute to talk about the basics of rising, and the vocabulary to discuss them. Fermentation, at it's core, is all about yeast. Yeast are a kind of fungus, single-celled and ubiquitous. Although there are over 1, distinct species of yeast and many more strains which range from helpful to hurtful , when we bake bread, we are almost always using Saccharomyces cerevisiae , whose name we won't worry about trying to pronounce.
Commercial baking yeast, whether we we're talking about fresh cake yeast, active dry, or instant, are all purified cultures of the same species. Different strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae are also commonly used to brew beer, and specifically ales. When we choose what kind of commercial yeast to use for bread, it's important to remember that they're all the same species and strain.
Whichever variety of yeast you buy, make sure to measure accurately and all will be fine. Sourdoughs and starters are another can of worms, and we'll cover them in later posts. Yeasted breads get bigger. That's why we call them leavened.
For a baker, this is what we call rising. Rising is the most dramatic physical change a dough undergoes on account of yeast activity.
Technically speaking, rising is a product of a process called respiration, which occurs in conjunction with fermentation, that we'll discuss next. You see, S. And flour just so happens to be packed with starches—long chains of simpler, smaller sugars, such as glucose, sucrose, and maltose. When our flour met our water during the autolyse, enzymes called amylases began breaking down the flour's starches into these simpler sugars, which the yeast readily devour.
As the yeast eat sugars released by the starch, they belch out carbon dioxide, and that gas congregates in tiny air bubbles. It's those same air bubbles that we incorporated into our dough during mixing. These bubbles are in turn held inside our dough by the gluten structure we developed during mixing, and which we'll further develop during bulk fermentation. As the yeast respirates, our bread rises. In the simplest of terms, fermentation is what happens when yeast cells eat and poop.
Specifically, it's what happens when yeast cells consume sugars and produce ethanol and other derivative chemicals. The alcohol produced by the yeast during fermentation—along with a multitude of other reactions—are what give great bread its characteristic flavors and aroma. Generally speaking, more fermentation means tastier bread. In the most technical, terms fermentation is an anaerobic reaction meaning it happens in the absence of oxygen that the yeast performs after respiration, which is aerobic and requires oxygen.
In bread baking, the word proofing most commonly refers to the final rise dough undergoes, which takes place after being shaped into a loaf, and before it is baked. In practice, however, the words proof and fermentation are sometimes used interchangeably.
What's important to realize here is that shaping dough affects its physical form, but doesn't impact its internal chemistry—the processes and chemical reactions at work during our bulk and final rises are the same. With that vocabulary in mind, let's take a look at the dough we all just birthed, and, armed with patience, get back to work. The bulk fermentation for any dough is a crucial step in the bread baking process, even if it isn't the most exciting one.
We call it a bulk fermentation because we are letting our dough—the entire batch—ferment as one mass, before dividing and shaping it into loaves. It's during our bulk fermentation that the yeast does the majority of its work, helping our dough gain flavor as ethanol and other byproducts are produced, and gain structure as CO2 inflates our gluten network.
At a comfortable room temperature, our bulk fermentation for the workhorse loaf will take about one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours. As a rule, warmer dough will rise faster than colder dough, so make sure you take stock of the environment in which you're baking.
I can hear you asking, "Why not make my dough really warm so it'll proof faster and I can have bread sooner? Chief among them is that the fermentation that produces good flavor really only takes place in earnest after the yeast have exhausted most of their oxygen supply. If we allow our dough to rise too quickly, we'll get lots of CO2 but less alcohol than we want, meaning our bread won't taste as good.
Furthermore, gluten is less temperature sensitive than yeast. Meaning that if we get our dough too warm, our yeast will inflate the dough faster than its gluten structure can organize itself—the bubbles that make up our dough's internal structure will over-inflate and pop like balloons.
This will hurt our shaping efforts later and give us flatter, less sexy looking bread. I know, two hours feels like a long time. Trust me, it's worth it. Don't rush the bulk rise. So, can the bulk rise be slowed down? A slower bulk rise will encourage more flavor and structural development up to a point. But remember, the yeast has a limited food supply, and we want to make sure to leave it enough food for a successful final proof, and make sure enough sugars are present to allow our crusts to properly caramelize when we bake them.
If you want to let you dough proof for longer, try bulk-fermenting it in a cooler place, but don't allow it to go longer than three hours or structure and flavor may be compromised. For the workhorse loaf, a bulk proof of approximately two hours gives us the optimal balance of flavor and texture. Practically speaking, all this means you shouldn't let the workhorse bulk-ferment anywhere you wouldn't want to hang out.
If you're working in a really hot kitchen, allow your dough to bulk ferment in cool a cabinet close to the floor. If you're working in a very cold kitchen, put your stove on low and set your dough near it.
If you live in a home where you can control the temperature of rooms without needing to beg your superintendant for a favor, set your thermostat to 75 degrees and stop thinking about it. But a watched dough never rises, so don't stare at it the whole time.
Gluten makes the dough elastic enough that it can expand around bubbles without tearing. Proofing, which begins once the dough is shaped and placed in a proofing vessel or on a flat surface, has some effect on flavor and texture, but it is key in determining the shape, volume, crust, and crumb of the bread.
When carbon dioxide exerts more pressure than a fully proofed dough can withstand, the cell membranes tear, releasing the gas and deflating the dough. Overproofed doughs collapse due to a weakened gluten structure and excessive gas production, while underproofed doughs do not yet have quite enough carbon dioxide production to expand the dough significantly.
Calling proof, knowing when the dough has reached its maximum expansion, is one of the more challenging things bakers have to learn to do. It takes practice and learning from a few mistakes. Conventional wisdom holds that overproofed doughs are irretrievably damaged and should be thrown away.
Our experiments found just the opposite. In fact, we were able to resuscitate the same batch of dough up to 10 times before it suffered any serious loss in quality. Our method for saving overproofed dough works for many kinds of dough, including French lean doughs, high-hydration doughs you may see a slight decrease in volume as well as in crumb size for these , and country-style doughs.
Sourdoughs are more problematic; you should attempt to revive a sourdough only if it was made and proofed within a few hours. Sourdoughs that are cold-proofed overnight or longer acidify because of the presence of lactic acid bacteria. This acidification makes the dough very tough; as a result, if you degas and reshape it, the dough is overly tense, and still tough.
While some people including us like that biting flavor, others may find it too sour. Below is our step-by-step guide to saving overproofed dough we call technique dough CPR. After punching down , kneading , folding , and stretching your dough, you will portion out the dough into serving sizes or loaves. You get it ready for its final proof by putting it into its final shape. You can place the shaped dough into baskets, bowls, or bread pans, cover with towels, and perform a shorter second rise at room temperature or in the refrigerator.
During this time, the loaves should nearly double in size. Proofing loaves in the fridge, known as retarding , will slow down the final rise. This can give your loaves more flavor and make them easier to handle and score before baking. Over proofing occurs when a fermenting dough has rested too long, resulting in the bubbles growing so large that they pop.
Dough baked at this point would result in a bread with poor structure. Under proofing can also negatively affect the structure. If you poke the dough and it springs back immediately it is under proofed and needs more time. Some breads are considered fully proofed if the indent left by the poke springs back slowly, while others are considered fully proofed when the indent remains and does not spring back.
While no special equipment is needed to proof bread, you can use items to assist during this important step of bread making:. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.
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