double rising (or not) bread

Hi d,

My interests focus on naturally leavened breads rather than those risen with commercial yeast. Typically, mine rise once.

But, your comment above confuses two (unrelated) issues:

There is no inherent reason that a two rise process must take longer. The speed of the rise (whether one or two) can be controlled with temperature.

Beyond that, as is true for virtually all fermented foods, bread that is made slowly (that is, at cooler temperatures) tastes better than bread that is made quickly.

I am always intrigued by the many posts from people who are delighted to discover that they can make bread more quickly by proofing it "in the oven with the light on." Few seem to be posting with delight when they discover that they can let their bread rise more slowly in the basement producing far better tastes and textures...

All the best,

[..]

At the moment, I am rising at room temperature near the oven. I can't raise the temperature any higher without actually putting the dough in the oven, so in effect, I can't speed up the process of rising. Therefore double rising makes my breadmaking longer than a single rise, since after knocking back the dough, I'm waiting for the second rise.

If I've misunderstood you, then please hammer me over the head with a baking tin and explain what I'm missing :-)

I think you are absolutely right.

The last bread I baked was around 90% wholemeal, 5% torrefied wheat, 5% malted wheat, and it was left for 1st rise overnight in an unelectrified fridge outdoors (something I am using as a makeshift cold room).

Best wholemeal bread I've made.

cheers d

Large-scale, commercially-produced bread is especially formulated to work with a single rise and go from the flour bin to the wrapper in under an hour. You can produce bread at home with a single rise if you wish. However, the crumb texture will be coarser(not just more open-celled) and the bread will taste more strongly of yeast and yeast by-products. It's up to you. If time is an issue, investigate the process of retarding the formed loaves in the refrigerator. You can make your dough, rise in the bowl, shape the loaves and put them in the refrigerator until the next day to bake off. This method gives improved flavor over even the straight

2-rise and bake method. If you want really fast bread, you can make batter or sometimes called casserole breads. They are yeast bread that can be ready in a little over an hour. Slower production of the finished loaf allows the baker to achieve a loaf that tastes more of the grain plus subtle other baking flavors. Janet

This may vary with the type of bread, and what you do to the dough between each rise. I made baguettes today, and folded the dough after an hour. This "fold" helped to strengthen the dough. I then let it raise for another hour, and pre-shaped it, letting it rest a half hour, before final shaping. Then it proofed for yet another hour... Giving it all that time for flavor to develop made a wonderful baguette ;)

Hi everyone, I'm new to this group and forgive me if you have been asked this before, but having just got a breadmaker I am experimenting with all kinds of loaves and doughs! Seeing the word baguette has prompted me to ask how to get the crispy crust, as although the ones I made tasted fine - they lacked that crispy dry, crust - the crust on mine was quite shiny. Just wondered how you made yours. Thanks Joan

At what point do you have to stop 'folding,' 'raising,' 'resting,' 'pre-shaping,' 'proofing,' before all of the yeast is gone for any kind of development at all. Thanks, Dee

Hi again,

I don't have a tin handy, but yes, you have misunderstood me... (or, more likely, I did not communicate clearly.)

The issue is temperature, so, for example:

Two rises at 90ºF might take less time than one rise at

55ºF.

All the best,

Hi Janet,

You lost me here...

What is the difference between "coarser" and "open-celled" when describing the crumb?

Thanks,

I knew when I typed that, I was going to have to explain myself. This is my observation and going by feel. If I were to say to you that one cotton shirt felt more coarse than another, I think you would understand that. To me, when I touch the crumb and run the pads of my fingers over the slice to feel the crumb--the crumb lacks the 'silky' feel of a bread dough that has been allowed lots of time to develop and be baked right. It seems to me, that these breads that are in a hurry to get done in the total fermentation and oven spring just don't put the cell structure together the same way and stretch as smoothly. The dough is too exuberant with all that extra yeast needed to produce a fast rising bread. Gosh, that all sounds like I need the funny farm. . . and anything else I write to explain myself sounds worse. Janet

Hi Janet,

It might be a bit too early for the farm...

Your comments made sense to me (hmmmm, perhaps we are both ready for the farm) but, as you probably know, in baking lingo, "coarse" and "open-celled" mean the same thing.

All the best,

What is a good word to use instead? Rough? Can you visualize the texture difference I mean? Or doesn't anyone else examine their bread results as closely as I do? Janet

Isn't it the food that the yeast "eats" that gets used up, not the yeast itself? Maybe that's what you meant.

But it is an interesting question. How much rising is enough, not enough, or too much? And how can I tell where it is?

-- Hitachi HB-A101 bread machine, 1 pound Email: Usenet-20031220 at spamex.com (01/10/05)

You are right, my question is as you put it -- when does the food/flour/dough get used up by those yeasties (because there is only so much flour you can add to a formed dough ball.)

IT doesn't.

Eventually, the dough sours, and theoretically, the yeast may die.

Looking thru my notes: I don't want to quote verbatim what someone told me about the timing of this yeast 'going sour and dying,' so I will paraphrase:

That my bread had been overproofed because the yeast activity had ceased and that after about 2 hours, my yeast is dead and releasing foul gasses.

So basically my interpretation of the paraphrase agrees with what you are saying? Thanks so much. Dee

It's not for lack of food.=20

Any microorganism, given enough food and the right environment, will breed and consume until it renders it's environment unlivable.=20

Yeast produces alcohol and CO2 but like anything else it can't live in concentration of it's own waste products.=20

Yeast eats sugars, including sugars that are polymerized into starches. Technically, it's easier for yeast to eat starch than sucrose (what you call 'sugar'), but i digress.=20

By the time it's soured your dough and died, it's consumed only a tiny fraction of the available sugars and starches.=20

Technically, some of it is still alive but dormant, and a small fraction of it is alive and still producing, but you're getting to the thin edge of the bell curve. The party is over and there's paper plates and beer bottles everywhere.=20

Nothing wrong with soured dough. It's like cheese - cheese never really goes off, it just turns into some other kind of cheese. Whether or not it's something you want to eat and how exactly you're going to go about preparing it for consumption is another question.=20

I typically let half a batch of pizza dough go sour. Sourdough pizza crust is great with a nice sharp jack cheese and some saut=E9ed mushrooms a= nd garlic.=20

There's a lesson there for all of us!

Dave

Here's a related tid-bit I picked up. An optimal way of proofing dough(quickly) is to put the dough in a cool oven with about a quart of boiling water (not directly over the water pan). It provides a nice humid temperature controlled environment for the yeast. I've also heard about microwaving the dough, though it only works with very low powered or specific models of microwave.

Aaron

Longer rise tends to deliver better taste, I suspect because the fermentation products that deliver the taste distribute more evenly throughout and because metabolic processes in the yeast are different with a slower metabolic rate, resulting in different proportions of metabolic products. If you use less yeast in order to slow the process down, there may also be additional effects because there's less local competition for resources and each yeast colony grows more or less independently.

It also delivers generally a more uniform texture with better grain because the slower rise means more even release of gases.

Double or even triple rising improves the texture in several ways. It allows the gluten to stretch not one but multiple times, increasing its resiliency. It also gets rid of large, nonuniform gas bubbles, allowing for an even crumb. It also gives more expansion capacity for oven spring (because once you've punched the dough down, you recompress the gluten strands, giving them room to grow without breaking).

Bakeries that s>I am always intrigued by the many posts from people who are

It does seem curious. The net effect is that people searching the newsgroup as to how to bake *quality* bread can be easily misled and will probably end up taking longer than they otherwise might have had to to learn - when they'll be forced to learn most of the crucial principles on their own from the ground up by experimentation. All the rationalisations I can think of as to why this pattern in the types of post might exist are prejudicial. I wonder why this posting pattern seems to prevail?