Baking With Yeasted Doughs

I started baking with yeasted dough recipes a few months ago. I’ve avoided yeasted doughs all my life and they’ve always been a mystery to me. Now that I’ve taken the plunge and baked a couple times, I’ve had a chance to reflect back on what misconceptions I had and which fears were true.

Difference Between Yeasted and Non-Yeasted Recipes

Chemical Leavening

Chemically-leavened bakes have predictable and straightforward recipes. Commonly, this is done with the addition of baking powder. Baking powder is self-contained and independent component, comprised of a base and acid in powder form. When they come in contact with water, the neutralization reaction begins. They reduce the variance as they don’t rely on the interplay and ratio between multiple ingredients. Many baking powders are double-acting, meaning they will activate in the presence of water (single acting) as well as when heated (double-acting). These are two processes always happen in baking.

Some recipes use only baking soda. If this is the case, you can bet there’s an acidic ingredient in the recipe to react with the baking soda. The reaction produces carbon dioxide to leaven the dough. Some examples are:

• lemon juice
• buttermilk
• vinegar
• cocoa
• sourdough starter

Baking soda is single-acting, so recipes developed with baking soda usually involve quickly mixing the ingredients and getting the bake into the oven before all gases escape.

Mechanical Leavening

You can also mechanically leaven, such as creaming butter and sugar. Or foaming, which is mixing eggs and sugar. This works on the principal of beating and trapping air, a form of emulsification.

This can be tricky because it relies on the baker’s experience and knowledge to determine if the mixture is sufficiently creamed or foamed enough.

Yeast

Yeasted doughs are a different beast. You add yeast to dough, which provides it feed. Then you sit back and let it do its job. How quickly it can do this depends on many factors that are not practical to control:

• Kitchen temperature. It’s common to hear stories of multiple batched bakes coming out with wildly different results. The prolonged baking slowly heats up the entire kitchen.
• Hydration. Higher hydration doughs allow for higher yeast activity.
• Sugar content. Although it’s not necessary (yeast can feed on flour), yeast becomes very active when fed sugar.
• Activating or hindering the yeast. This can be done with warm water and sugar or hindered with too much salt.

I had difficulties because there wasn’t a source of information that explained what signs to watch out for and how to rectify if encountered. In fact, I would say that people overcomplicated this with lots of old-wives tales and incorrect understanding of chemistry. But enough banter, let’s get to my learnings of yeasted dough, shall we?

When is the Dough Kneaded Enough

Dough should be kneaded until it forms a smooth surface. Why? A smooth surface indicates that the dough has developed gluten throughout and is capable of forming a skin. This is a necessary, otherwise there will not be enough structure to capture the gases produced during proofing. The result will end up similarly to an overproofed dough.

Depending on the recipe, you’ll be told if it needs to be kneaded well or just until smooth. While it’ possible to overknead if using a stand mixer, over-kneading by hand is less likely because it’s very tiring. Overworked dough will break down the gluten matrix formation, resulting in a thin liquid. The more you knead, the more it seems to weep and get stickier.

How Long to Proof For

Doubling in Size

Double in size
- every recipe ever

I don’t like this instruction. It’s the worst kind of recipe faux pas because the outcome criteria is a highly subjective metric. You’ll see this often in forums that troubleshoot recipes:

1. OP doesn’t know why the recipe failed and lists the recipe used.
2. No one gives a clear diagnosis because the situation details are ambiguous and depend on OP’s ability to assess the situation
3. They try to cover all situations, in hopes that the OP can self-diagnose. OP is in no better of a position than before. It’s a catch-22: if they knew how to tell what was wrong, they would know.

I’m terrible at estimating size. What does doubling in size even mean?

• Double in volume?
• Double in radius (resulting in volume increase of 8x)?
• Or doubling in mass? (most definitely not, that would be a lot of capture air…)

Poke Test

The poke test is my go-to. It’s still a subjective test but there’s clearer success criteria. Poke the dough with your index finger, about 1/2 inch into the dough. Poke hard enough to leave a visible indentation. Don’t worry, it’ll pop right back out with oven spring and gas expansion during baking.

Watch the reaction of the indentation:

• if it immediately bounces back like a tight balloon, it’s under-proofed.
• if the indentation remains like a deflated ball, it’s over-proofed
• The sweet spot is when the indentation partially bounces back.

The purpose of this test is to test the state of the gluten and how relaxed it is. Gluten breaks down over time, which is why recipes don’t have you proofing indefinitely, for maximal rise.

• An overproofed dough will be too relaxed and not able to provide structure during oven spring. The resulting bake will be dense and gummy as the dough will collapse, once removed from heat.
• An underproofed dough will not have enough rise. It’s also indicative that the fermentation by-products are produced to a large degree, resulting in less flavour.

This is a general rule of thumb, not a hard-fast rule.

For artisan loaves, you are aiming for more flavour development. Too much gluten development will force the dough to burst during oven spring, and tunnel all the steam out. Too little and you’ll lack the structure to take advantage of the oven spring, which contributes to a thin instead of thick dense crust.

Instant Yeast vs. Active Dry Yeast

After reading SeriousEats article on yeast, I looked to buy instant dry yeast. I accidentally bought instant yeast instead. I haven’t had troubles baking with instant yeast. But when I freeze the shaped dough, it doesn’t proof at all when thawed. This happened to cinnamon rolls as well as croissants. They wouldn’t rise as they thawed and, if you didn’t pay attention, would end up over-proofed.

I think that instant yeast is designed to rise quickly (<2 hours) and then it dies out. Where as active dry yeast will keep going for as long as it is fed. I’m going to keep experimenting but I think I’m going to stick with active dry yeast from now on.