Sweet Treats and Savoury Snacks
Spraying bread dough with water before baking promotes the formation of steam in the oven. Baking in a moist and steamy environment improves the texture and quality of the bread in multiple ways: • Moisture helps the rise of bread in the oven by keeping the surface of the dough moist and delaying the forming … Read more
When baking homemade bread, achieving a soft and airy texture is the priority. The purpose of my article is to explain if it is possible to get softer bread by adding more yeast. Yeast is an essential ingredient in bread dough and influences the appearance and taste of the final product. Although yeast is a … Read more
When you sift the flour to make the dough, you introduce air. Then, with mixing and later during folding, more air is incorporated into the dough. However, is oxygen essential for the dough to ferment, or can it rise in an airtight space? In the first stage of dough preparation, incorporated air helps the gluten … Read more
Dough recipes often call for two rising periods, but what happens if you leave it to rise only once? Important and complex processes take place during the mixing of the leavened dough: the flour and yeast hydrate, the gluten develops, and the enzymes in the flour convert the starch into sugar. This is when the … Read more
Many of us who had made baked goods had probably worked with dough that kept springing back to its original size when we wanted to roll it out. My article aims to explain what makes a dough challenging to stretch and shape, and how to solve this issue. The dough may spring back while rolling … Read more
Punching down the dough sounds quite aggressive and should not be taken literally. Punching down, or knocking back the dough really just means gently degassing it. Yeast produces carbon dioxide during the fermentation process. It is sufficient to gently squeeze some of the gas out of the dough with your fingertips, then stretch it a … Read more
There are several phases in the production of dough, each of which has an equally important role in producing high-quality bakery products. Resting the dough after kneading is one of these phases, but why is it necessary? We need to let the dough rest after kneading so that the gluten developed during mixing relaxes, which … Read more
Anyone who has ever baked bread at home knows that it is a lengthy process that requires planning and patience. Can we spoil the bread by not waiting for the rather time-consuming dough fermentation process to finish before baking? Insufficiently proofed bread dough will go through too much growth in the oven. As a result, … Read more
I know from experience how frustrating it can be when your homemade bread doesn’t turn out the way you expected. The taste of bread is determined by the interaction of multiple factors, which include the type and quality of the ingredients, how long and at what temperature it is fermented, and the baking process. Your … Read more
When making sourdough bread, it may happen that the dough smells like vinegar, even though it was not among the ingredients you used. My goal with this post is to explain what causes this exciting phenomenon. In addition to wild yeasts, sourdough contains lactic acid bacteria. These bacteria also feed on sugars, producing lactic acid … Read more