This is a continuation of my prior post title Experimenting with Bread Dough Process. Apparently, when my updated posts become too long, with too many words, there are times when text gets lost on an update, so I’ll have to come up with a different titling scheme and give up on the idea of continuing to add content to existing posts. For now, this will be Part Two. As with the prior post in this series, the dates below were snipped from the prior post, and is why they are earlier than the date of this post.

2009.Aug.14

I feel like I found the mother load of information about enzymes, and as I was reading through the commercial report from an apparent enzyme manufacturer (PDF), I found these two paragraphs that may explain the increased stickiness (I may have gone overboard with my chosen emphasis):

Glutenin can be classed as a heterogenous mixture of proteins. It has a molecular weight of 100,000 to several million. It is a multiple chain protein with crosslinked intermolecular disulfide bonds. It has moderate adhesiveness and high elasticity….

Gliadin is considered a heterogeneous mixture of prolamines with a molecular weight of 25- 60,000. It is a single chain protein containing intramolecular disulfide bonds. It has high adhesiveness and low elasticity.

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This is a continuation of my prior post titled Experimenting With Bread Dough Moisture, Sandwich Slices, and Oven Spring. I kept adding text to that post at the bottom, but due to some errors of unknown origin, the frequently re-saved post started losing large sections of text. At some point while investigating the issue, I found that shorter posts worked fine as a workaround.

The continuation here was of text snipped from the bottom of that post, and is why the date of this post is later than some of the entries.

2009.Jul.27

Massive volume increase! Wow! This was the first dough I’ve made that passed the windowpane test without tearing before light was visible through the stretched dough.

I diverged from the scientific process of making only one change at a time, so some of the results cannot easily be traced to particular changes made. The following batch used a strictly-defined autolyse rest, and the fermentation was similar to a sponge as well as a biga, but it uses 100% of the formula’s flour, thus cannot be called either.

The major change made in this batch was one of process, or the order in which various ingredients were added. The following ingredient list or formula is not reflective of that order.

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A long time ago I posted one of my bread recipes, honey wheat berry bread, a clone of a bread I sometimes like. That was a time of increased interest and study regarding bread dough, and I posted much of what I learned in the comment section of that post. The Internet really opened up the information available to average folks! Much gratitude to the computer and Internet architects, and to all the folks who’ve added their knowledge!

Unfortunately, study and reading can take one only so far, sometimes you have to actually do it to learn more. So, after getting a scale to weigh ingredients, a vast improvement in the consistency of batch-to-batch results occurred, but then more questions arose.

I decided to increase the moisture of the white bread recipe that I use for toast and sandwich slices from 51% to 53%, where the water weight is expressed as percentage of flour weight, and further, this percentage doesn’t include all the water, as vinegar presumably is mostly water. Some may prefer to conceive of this 51–53% change as a 53.35–55.35%, or imprecisely by rounding to zero decimals, 53–55% change. The recipe is given below for further analysis. For a number of years I have put some amount of vinegar in my breads because I’ve noted the bread takes longer to stale when it has this ingredient added, or restating, gives it a longer shelf life, and I’ve never been able to taste it, so I see no downside to doing so.

As it happens, I ended up rising and baking this batch on a rainy and somewhat colder day, the rise took longer (around 5 hours) than it typically does on a warmer day (3.5-4 hours). I’m not sure how much of this change is related to the dough’s moisture change. (We get so little rain in Southern California, I decided to take an umbrella for a walk while I waited the extra time. Thank you Gaia, I love your rain!)

I prefer the french-bread taste of sandwich-style white bread made from dough that has aged in the refrigerator overnight, this isn’t done so much for the yeast to have a slower rise (though that is an effect), it is said to break down some of the carbohydrates differently, and the results are both tasted in an altered flavor, and seen as a slightly different color of crust in the baked product.

I rise the refrigerator-temperature dough in the pans it will be baked in, in the same room temperature oven in which it will later be baked. Because the oven is not humidified without the addition of heat, the weighed and pre-shaped dough pieces, before they’re put in the pans, are smeared with oil, and so too are the pans. This prevents a skin from forming during the rise in the absence of a humidified and temperature-controlled rising chamber, as well as providing a release agent for easing the removal of the baked loaves from their pans.

It seems one trick is to be patient with the rise, however, with this 53% moisture dough, I was quite surprised with how much it rose during the initial portion of baking, sometimes referred to as oven spring.

For each loaf, the dough weighed approximately 1300-1400 grams (which is 1.3-1.4 kilograms), this provides a nicely-sized sandwich slice that really is larger than a typical soda cracker! It takes 1 hour, 35 minutes of baking to reach 199F internal temperature, in a thermostat-reported 300F degree oven, and this includes our oven’s warm-up time. Higher baking temperatures seem to result in a crust that is too dark and thick for my sandwich-slice preferences, at least when baking these rather large loaves. (more…)

I’m not a huge fan of popcorn, but once in awhile I make it to satisfy a curious craving. I’ve tried for years to duplicate the taste of popcorn sold in movie theatres and was disappointed in the results.

I’ve tried popping it on the stove with oil, in hot-air machines, in ready-to-pop prepackaged microwave bags, and in a reusable microwave cooker specifically designed to pop dried corn kernels. This latter method is how I make popcorn now, and I don’t use any oil in the container during popping, though the container’s instructions indicated it was permissible to add oil if desired.

I’ve tried various oil toppings, including butter-flavored oils said to be specifically for popcorn, and still was disappointed, it never tasted like what they sold at the theatre. Popping the kernals using an oilless method led to the problem of getting salt to stick to the popcorn, and clearly, the theatre popcorn seemed to have a butter flavor. Cooking popcorn in butter never worked for me, the temperatures involved burned the butter. So, after using the oilless microwave method, I’d drizzle a small amount of gently melted butter on the popcorn after it was popped and stir it thoroughly. After this I’d sprinkle it with table salt to taste, stirring the pocorn several more times. It didn’t taste like theatre-quality popcorn, but it was the closest I’d found.

The other day, browsing one market’s eclectic products, I happened across some Flavacol. At first I was confused as to what precisely was in the carton, but after reading the label and noting the price, I purchased some to satisfy my decades long quest of homemade theatre-grade popcorn.

An Internet search lead me to various popcorn supplies, caramel, kettle, and cheese corn, various flavors of glaze pop, and some savory shake flavors. Finding a retailer that stocks them at a reasonable price is the challenge, the store where I bought the above-pictured product sold only this one type of flavored salt on the popcorn aisle. After making a batch of popcorn and sprinkling some Flavocol on as a final step, then tasting it, I believe it’s likely one secret of movie theatres’ popcorn! It seems to need less butter for a butter flavor when using Flavocol: ‘artificial butter flavoring’ and ‘real butter’ don’t have quite the same flavor.

I also learned from the Internet search that it’s not much of a secret anymore. Hydrogenated coconut oil with artificial butter flavoring is typically used to pop the kernals, and there’s an artificial-butter-flavored topping available that is composed largely of hydrogenated soybean oil, both of which include beta-carotene for coloring, according to their respective ingredient labels.

A search for the label ingredient “artificial butter flavoring” is revealing, it seems one should not deliberately concentrate and inhale it, some workers in popcorn production plants appear to have had lung problems.

Added on 2/16/06:

For my future reference, I’m adding a link or two regarding various cooking oils’ critical temperatures, otherwise known as the ‘smoke point:’ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/article.php?id=50 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Smoke_Point

Coconut oil is high in saturated fat, and so is butter. For those of us who try to improve the health of our diets, any type of hydrogenated oil should probably be avoided.

It might be interesting to try popping corn using an extra light and highly refined olive oil, or some other less flavorful oil (with a high smoke point) as a method of further reducing the real butter added. Avocado oil would be interesting to try because it seems to have the highest smoke point, but I wonder about its cost and availability. Peanut oil might be good to try except for the people who are allergic to it. Fully refined soybean oil (the non-hydrogenated variety) is another.

edited on 2/22/2008

The following recipe I cloned from a particular brand I grew up with and now have trouble finding in the stores near me. It’s similar to some other recipes on the Internet, but there are a few subtle differences. According to my records, this recipe went through 11 iterations before I was happy with it.
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