Yeast Unit

Our Baking and Pastry class recently completed our yeast unit where we learned how to make King Arthur “No-Knead” bread, pizza dough, soft pretzels, and monkey bread.

            During this unit, we learned about yeast- how it must be given time to “bloom” in certain recipes by putting it in warm water for a few minutes and how if it is added to water that is too hot, you risk killing the yeast.  Yeast is a living organism, so you must be careful with it.  Putting it in water that is too hot will kill it, making it unable to help your bread rise.

When we made the King Arthur bread, we made two batches of the same dough then baked one during that same class and put the other in a covered bowl and stored it in the refrigerator.  After tasting both the rolls made from the dough with the yeast that wasn’t given much time to rise (dough/rolls made during the same class) and the rolls made from the dough that had been given 3 days to rise, we noticed the differences between the two.  I found the second batch of rolls was less dense and had a much different flavor than the first batch.  Personally, I liked the second batch better.

Also, when my group was in the process of making the sweet dough that would later be used for our monkey bread; we learned how to modify a recipe when a mistake is made.  In this case, we added 2 tablespoons and ¼ teaspoon of yeast when just 2 ¼ teaspoons were supposed to be added to the dough.  In other words, we put 2.78 times as much yeast into the mixture than we were supposed to.  In order to fix this problem, we multiplied each of the other ingredients by 2.78 so that the ratios all remained the same.  In the end, our dough rose and tasted exactly like it was supposed to.  It was a success and our monkey bread was delicious!

The process of making the pizza dough and soft pretzels taught us how to knead the dough properly.  We learned that if the dough is really sticky, flour can be added to reduce the stickiness.  We also learned how to fold the dough in order to form the pretzel shape and how to grill the pizza dough with olive oil. (Marissa T)