The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [156]
Lengthening the Rising Period
FLOUR
For longer-fermented breads in particular, we like to use a rough stone-ground flour. It is not just that the larger bran particles, softened in the fermenting dough, make ideal dietary fiber that is especially beneficial (which they do), but the coarser flour makes a particularly delectable texture, too, and the full wheatey flavor seems to sing out most appealingly. If the dough is made into freestanding hearth loaves, coarse flour seems to hold up better than finer flours do.
The recipes in this book and the suggestions in this section are based on the high-gluten whole wheat bread flour that is standard in the United States. In most of Europe and Australia, and other parts of the world, too, flour is often lower in gluten. Doughs made from these lower-gluten flours can make delicious bread—classic French Bread is an outstanding example—but they do not tolerate either very fast or very long fermentation periods as well as doughs made with high-gluten flour.
SWEETENER
In a long dough, the yeast may consume a considerable amount of the available dough sugars. To compensate, add a small amount of extra sweetener. Don’t use diastatic malt in longer fermentations; some of its enzymes weaken the gluten and soften the dough, making these breads dense and wet. (Also, see next paragraph.)
OTHER INGREDIENTS
Any ingredient that would normally reduce the size of the loaf will have an exaggerated effect as the fermentation time increases. (Raw honey, for example, which ordinarily reduces the rise of bread very slightly may do so considerably if the dough is a slow-rising one.) When the culprit is an active enzyme or a competing organism, as it may be with honey or cultured milk products, or with fruits, you can minimize the effect by steaming or scalding the ingredient beforehand. Be sure to cool it before adding to the dough—you don’t want to warm the dough if it is going to rise a long time.
TEMPERATURE
The most critical variable of all is temperature. If you can keep your dough within five degrees of what you intend, you can time it very closely to be ready when you want. Suggestions for making these calculations are given here, but you will quickly learn to make the adjustments necessary for your own flour and room temperatures, even without the mathematics. In this respect, cooler doughs are more tolerant, fast ones very demanding.
SOME CALCULATIONS FOR CLOSE TIMINGS
Breadmaking need not be a matter of guesswork. You can control the timing of your dough’s risings very accurately by controlling its temperature. Of course, even if it starts out warmer or cooler, dough will eventually come to the temperature of its surroundings, but in the meantime it will be rising too quickly or too slowly for the best fermentation at your selected timing. With one or two loaves, following normal timings, this is not crucial because the dough changes temperature in a relatively short time; but when you have a large dough (many loaves) or are planning on a very fast rise, the mixing temperature makes a bigger difference.
Here’s a way to figure how to get the right dough temperature:
multiply the dough temperature you want by 2 subtract the temperature of your flour result: the temperature your liquids need to be
For example,
80°Fx2=160
160–65=95°F
DOUGH KNEADED BY MACHINE
Using an electric dough hook or a food processor to do the kneading will raise the temperature of the dough. For this reason, you will have to use cooler liquids in the recipe itself (but of course not to dissolve the yeast). In fact, though this is important, you have to be finicky only with recipes like French Bread where the dough must be really cool.
Calculations have been devised to compensate for the warming effect of the machines, but they are exceedingly cumbersome. Just measure the temperature