Stardate: -299540.7
Perth Ontario: temp 25.5 C humidity 87%
Basic Kneads Bakery: temp 29.3 humidity 72%
Hot and humid. It’s summer in the Ottawa valley. What does this mean for kneads bakery? And why do our posts start with a weather report? Well I’m glad you asked fellow bread enthusiast. It’s important to remember that bread is alive, or was alive before it became bread to be more exact. In dough form, prior to baking, it was a living organism, eating, breathing, growing and getting hungry as all living things do in one form or another. Bread is an amazing example of the cycle of life. The flour was once wheat, growing in a field, hungry for sunlight and thirsty for water and nutrients from the soil. Then it was harvested and died(1d6 slashing damage). Ground into flour it then sat, lifeless until it became food for another life form: Yeast.
For Yoshi and I yeast is an extremely important component of our business. It is a living thing, but it needs to be controlled, nurtured and even manipulated to meet our needs. (Missed pun opportunity) Yoshi already introduced you to both types of yeast we put to work at Basic Kneads, they are lovingly: Carl jr.(sourdough starter)and DAY (Active Dry Yeast) And much like other organisms, particularly bacteria,(the good kind) they are always hungry, until the food supply runs out. Yeast is a lazy beast, oh sure it will eat the flour, breaking down the carbon molecules in each and every carbohydrate to release the strings of sugar locked within. The same way our stomachs do when we eat carbs, giving us a slower release of sugars than if we were to eat a piece of candy. But yeast always wants its dessert first, and will be lazy about its hunger, gobbling up sugar like low hanging fruit before moving on the harder nuts to crack like carbohydrates. This is why a pinch of sugar helps when activating yeast in warm water. Warm water you say? And with that I return to the weather forcast, or more accurately the present weather and its effect on our bread…
Heat and humidity. In humans it tends to slow us down and make us tired, but in yeast it accelerates that eating process, creating ideal conditions for multiplying. As the yeast goes to work breaking down the carbon and eating up the sugar, it releases gases, and those gases become trapped within the gluten that began forming when the dough was mixed. Gluten is a topic for another day so I will stick to the topic of yeast for the moment. The gases created by the yeast are the most essential part of having bread that springs in the oven, because as the gas heats up it expands, pushing out against the gluten strands, making the dough expand and expand until the moment of crust formation, creating a hardened exterior to the loaf and those gases then create the airy crumb of the loaf’s interior.
All that to say that heat can accelerate the process of yeast and that humidity affects the hydration of the dough. The wetter the dough the harder it becomes to manipulate when forming it into loaves. A high hydration dough such as for ciabatta bread is extremely hard to form and it slips and slides out of your hands, off the table and onto the floor, leaving a rather unpleasant mess to clean up. High hydration dough is also very sticky to the touch, whereas low hydration dough will keep its form easier but will result in a denser bread .remember that all that water turns to gas inside an oven over 100 degrees, and that gas expands, giving us a lighter airier bread. The secret is finding the perfect balance to get the desired result for your bread.
And what does all this mean on a practical level? It means both that the ratios in our recipes need to change when humidity levels are high and that the fermentation process, or first rise of the dough, will be much faster. This is good if you are at home, short on time but want to bake bread for dinner. Not so good if you run a bakery that relies on a 16 hour fermentation process so the Yoshi can go home to his cats, dinner with his wife and a decent night sleep. This problem can be solved by reducing the water in the recipe or increasing the flour. For us it is better to increase the flour as the result will be more dough, and more dough means more bread and more bread means more happy customers. But the perfect balance can be hard to find, and it is often not achieved without constant vigilance and a watchful eye on the mixer, adding just enough flour for the dough to reach the desired texture and density for forming.
The fermentation process is slowed down by the dough being in the fridge overnight but the increased time in the mixer and the increased friction of mixing longer and sometimes at faster speeds is increasing the temperature still, accelerating that process and we may arrive in the morning with overflowing bins of over fermented and dried out dough. It’s a game we play, and every night we hope we got it just right.
So as the sun rises tomorrow, out dough will be rising into its final proof before going to its death in our ovens at temperatures over 550 F (2d12 fire damage) where it will transform from dough to bread and feed our bodies as the cycle of life continues.
Until next time, thanks for being on this journey with us and stay cool and hydrated out there.
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