Understanding Yeast | Bake It Up a Notch with Erin McDowell

let's talk about yeast baby [Music] hi I'm Aaron gene McDowell recipe developer and author of the fearless Baker and the upcoming the book on pie and today we're gonna be talking all things yeast we're gonna get to the bottom of yeast and figure out every answer every single question that you have about it and I'm gonna show you how to make an easier bread recipe and a more complicated one and show you all kinds of troubleshooting tips along the way so first of all how do you decide which kind of yeast to use and what are the differences between them there are three main kinds of yeast there's active dry yeast instant yeast and fresh yeast so active dry is my favorite yeast and it's the one that most of my recipes call for the one we're gonna be using in the recipes that we make in this video and they have small granules that dissolve very easily however it's a bit of a myth that these have to be dissolved in water that is not true these can actually go right in with the dry ingredients so I love active dry yeast it's the most common that I use now you also have instant yeast which looks and acts a lot like active dry yeast but it just works a little bit faster and you need a little bit less of it that has some serious advantages because it rises and works a little bit faster that means you can make a recipe like a weeknight pizza dough a little bit quicker than you might otherwise but it also has some negative things as well mostly that you get you lose a little bit of flavor that yeasty flavor and also a little bit of the strength that happens when the bread is rising because when it rises faster it doesn't have as much time to get some of that strength and some of that flavor so that's really the only con about using instant yeast and also it's important to remember that you do need to use a little bit less of it so usually you only use about a teaspoon of instant yeast for every teaspoon and a quarter you would use of active drive it is actually a little bit finer so you can see that when I hold them side by just a smidge but it's almost indiscernible finally we have fresh yeast fresh yeast is really special and it just has a really delicious flavor it has a little bit of a floral miss I think and it's really really fun to work with the downsides of fresh yeast are that it doesn't have as long of a shelf life these other two yeasts can live in your refrigerator or freezer for a long time several months and be a okay fresh yeast on the other hand has a much shorter shelf life and you know it'll depend on how large the package is usually if it's sealed really tightly it can last still for several weeks but it could be even shorter so it's important to keep an eye on the expiration date with that and it has this like kind of crazy cakey texture it just crumbles like this and you kind of crumble it into the recipe often dissolving it in a little bit of water or just however the recipe does say to use it and again you need a lot less of this than you do of the active dry but it may seem like more because of the volume of what you're dealing with so for every single teaspoon of active dry you need about a half an ounce of fresh yeast then you'll crumble it into your recipe alright so there's one final kind of yeast that you don't see pictured here and it's my favorite east to talk about because it's everywhere it's in the air it's wild yeast it's all around us and that is one of the things that I think is so cool about making bread is that it's alive we're making something that's living and a lot of the reason why people struggle with making bread is that they don't understand those things that are operating to keep the yeast alive and to make the dough living the wild East is particularly important to understand because you can use it in pre ferments and we're gonna talk about that with the ciabatta recipe but wild East is all around us and you can use it to make pre ferments like sourdough Pat from Auntie biga really any kind of pre ferment that you can put into a dough that will give it tons of eesti flavor but just using wild East which is very cool to understand pre ferments and bread-baking in general you need to understand something called bakers percentage and here's what you need to know bakers percentage is a series of percentages based around the weight of flour in a recipe the base amount of flour in any dough recipe is always 100% then the percentage of other ingredients is calculated in relation to the weight of the flour to get the percentage of another ingredient all you have to do is divide the weight of the other ingredient by the weight of the flour to determine the baker's percent for example if yeast is a half an ounce you would divide it by the flour at 25 ounces which would yield 2 percent I [Music] first learned about Baker's percentage when I worked in a bread bakery which is still one of my favorite jobs that I ever did it was when I was studying in pastry school and I baked the bread with two other girls early early on Saturday mornings so when all my friends were going out on Friday nights I was turning in early so that I could wake up at midnight and go bake bread and one of my favorite breads to make was ciabatta and that's the first bread that we're gonna start with today so one of the things I like about ciabatta is that it can be mixed by hand it's very easy to make it in results in a really impressive almost artisan looking loaf but that's very very easy to replicate at home especially with just a few quick tricks and it's the perfect example of our first type of bread which is called a lean bread or a lean dough and what a lean dough is is any kind of bread that doesn't have any kind of enriching ingredients like eggs milk butter sugar kind of anything like that so commonly ned's that you know of our baguettes and ciabatta is another great example and that's what we're gonna start off with so to start we have to make our biga and the vegan needs to set for about 12 hours overnight so it's a very quick thing that you can do and then wake up in the morning and be ready to mix your bread and we're going to be using bread flour for our biga and for our ciabatta recipe now bread flour is important to talk about too because it has a higher protein content than all-purpose flour so when you're thinking about man should I you it says I have to use bread flour but I have all-purpose I'm just gonna do it it really can change the recipe but there are also bread recipes that definitely use all-purpose so don't feel like it's the only one out there that exists we're going to measure 290 grams of bread flour into our Bowl and you want this to be a bowl that can go in your refrigerator so make sure you've got room in that fridge for this bowl because it's going to sit oh actually no it doesn't go in the fridge it just sits a good time never mind so we're measuring 290 grams of bread flour and I'm using a scale here because in baking it really is better to measure by weight there we go to under 90 so when you're using volume measures if you don't have a scale what you're gonna want to do is just scoop it in with a spoon and level it off that's the best way to get the most accurate measurement and it would be two and a quarter cups of bread flour now the pre ferment relies a lot on the wild yeast that's in the air which we love but to give it a little bit of a boost since we're only giving it 12 hours of fermentation time we're gonna add just a quarter teaspoon of active dry yeast I'm just gonna put it right in the flour just like that and then we just need to add 226 grams 8 ounces 1 cup of room temperature water I'm just gonna make a little hole in the center here and pour it in our water we don't want the water to be warm because we don't want this to go crazy even that little tiny bit of yeast is gonna ferment like mad if it was warm water so we just want to mix this to combine when I worked in the bread bakery we would have huge vats of pre ferments so when I make a little one like this it just feels so easy and so doable to have fresh-baked bread at home and the pre ferment the amount of flavor that it adds but also the texture that it contributes at the end you know some of the best crusty loaves have a pre ferment in them because that just helps that hydration helps the way that it's absorbed bread is really so simple just a few ingredients but understanding how they work and getting them just right is the key to everything okay so this looks pretty stiff and that's normal it's going to look stiff right now and then it's going to continue to absorb the moisture as it sits I'm gonna switch to a spatula here just to make sure you don't want any big dry pockets but you do want it to be fully fully combined totally homogeneous and if you're struggling you can always add an additional water a tablespoon or so at a time it's going to then slowly ferments at room temperature for 12 hours and it's gonna add all that great flavor and structure that it gained during that rise time right back into our final ciabatta dough so there you go that's all we have to do just mix those couple ingredients to combine and we have a viga so this is the biga that I just made fresh right now and this is the beaker that's been resting for 12 hours already and you can see a huge difference in the overall appearance and the number one thing that you want to see are the visible appearance of bubbles so we can see on the surface there are some bubbles there are some bubbles that have burst that just means yeast activity which is what we're looking for so to get this one looking like this we just need to cover it and let it sit overnight I'm just gonna cover it with a clean kitchen towel or you could use plastic wrap and we just want to set it in a place that's not too warm and not too cold and let it rest overnight all right so once here viga has gotten all nice and risen we're ready to mix the final dough and you only need a couple of ingredients to get this dough all put together so to start I'm going to measure out 360 grams of bread flour which is three cups and again we want to use bread flour here because of that higher protein content it gives a little more structure a little more chew and it helps it make it a little bit easier to develop the gluten the gluten which we're gonna talk about more and more as we're making bread gluten is a very misunderstood word all right and then we also need 1 tablespoon of active dry yeast which I've already measured here and that would be 12 grams we're just gonna put it right in the flour no need to put it into any water and we're gonna do 2 teaspoons of salt and it's really important in bread that you have enough salt where the bread really won't have a lot of flavor so I like to make sure that there's plenty of salt we can't leave the salt out especially in a lean dough where it doesn't have other things like sugar buttermilk etc to rely on for flavor I'm just gonna give it a quick stir just to make sure those ingredients are combined done with my scale now and then we're just going to put the biga and one and a half cups water into our mixture and we're gonna mix this by hand just using our spatula now one thing that's important to know before we start even mixing this is that this is a very wet dough do not be alarmed you have not made a mistake it is just the way it's supposed to be and that high hydration is something that's actually really common in some bread recipes look at this alright go in the bowl like you're supposed to but that's some of that strength that I was talking about that the process of rising allows the dough to have strength and it happens every single time so that's actually also going to be the saving grace of the very hydrated ciabatta dough is even though it has lots of moisture the real thing that brings it together in the end is the strength that it gets during the rise and from this viga just gonna pour our water right into it perfect now we get some arm arm workout and it's gonna take a little while for it to come together and at first I sort of like to stir in with the biga because that helps it to break up a little bit and start to combine with the other ingredients and when you're mixing by hand you're gonna be looking for gluten structure in a different way than you might be looking for it when you mix in a mixer sometimes you can tell that it's fully mixed because it's formed a ball around the attachment of the mixer but when you're mixing by hand it's more about the consistency and one of the things that I always tell people with baking projects like this so many people baked bread without a recipe without timers and proof boxes and tons of special equipment so it is possible especially if you learn to use your senses if you're looking at things and you know what they're supposed to look like smell like taste like you're gonna be able to replicate it every single time even trying a new recipe that you've never tried before you'll be able to do it without being scared I'm all about the fearlessness just do it just bake and if it messes up well you make bread crumbs so I'm just gonna keep stirring this and we're trying to develop gluten so this is one way that you can see if it has any gluten developed which so far it does not when I pick it up it just falls like this eventually just like that vigo when I pick it up it's gonna stretch and that's what we're looking for and gluten especially nowadays is often considered a dirty word but it's a very necessary word in bread baking in particular because gluten is a protein that is found naturally inside wheat flour so when you're making something like a cake that you want to be tender you don't want very much gluten because if you have a lot of gluten if you have a lot of those protein strands forming in the batter you're gonna end up with a really tough cake but when you're making bread those protein strands are what spa like makes it possible to have that chew that crunch that crispy crust all those things that we like in a good bread and even in bread that isn't chewy or has a crispy crust like the brioche we're gonna make later it still is providing that structure it's providing all of those things you need to get that texture that makes it a sliceable perfect loaf so we love gluten heart the only thing to be aware of when you're mixing by hand is making sure you don't have any big pockets usually that means it's a chunk of the biga so you can always just kind of press those against the side of your bowl you want to use a nice big wide mixing bowl like this and this one is particularly great because it has this pour spout which will make it easy to transfer later so already I still need to mix it a little bit more but you see how it pulls when I lift it now it doesn't just fall off it's making so we've we've formed a little bit we just need to do a little bit more and if you wanted to do this in a mixer you absolutely could it would just take about three to four minutes of mixing in a mixer but some so many bread recipes do require a mixer I think it's really great to teach people that it is so possible to make a great loaf of bread without even owning a stand mixer without needing one just need a little arm strength and making this dough you know probably ensures you an extra slice later right I think that that evens out all right look at that so now it's falling off much more readily all right I think we're there so now what we're gonna do with this dough you could leave it right in this bowl but I like to transfer it to a lightly greased Bowl to do the rising because this is such a sticky dough it makes it easier to handle later after it's risen and we'll let it rise for about one hour or until it's double in size [Music] one of the biggest tips I give people when you're asking how do I tell us the dough is double in size is to actually put it into a bowl that's about twice the size that the dough was to begin with but if you don't have that don't fret you just want to make sure that it has this noticeable rise one of the ways that you can tell is that just the level that it was in the bowl has gone up and also it'll have kind of a bubbly top appearance that's the main thing that you're looking for to show that fermentation activity that yeast activity and fermentation is sometimes a word referred to in alcohol production beer making wine but it's actually of course what's happening here as well and so we are trying to ferment it enough to get the flavor of the yeast and get all that carbon dioxide in there to help get the bubbles going and all of that business but we don't want it to over ferment because that's when it actually starts to taste a little like alcohol so you want it to be nice and puffy and risen and it takes about an hour with ciabatta it'll take a little more if you use cooler water and a little less if you use warmer water so I'm just gonna get rid of our other guy let rise for a little bit and let's shape this new ciabatta dough so this is an extremely sticky dough I'm gonna do something for the overhead camera here to show see how jiggly that is that is a very wet bread dough so one of the things you have to do to compensate for that is use a significant amount of flour in the shaping the final ciabatta loaf has this like flowery outer crust and that's the reason why is because we need that flour to actually even be able to handle it because it truly is a very wet dough so we're gonna give a big shower to our workspace here be generous you'll thank me later now not every bread dough is like this not every lean bread dough is like this when you make something like baguettes you actually use a lot less flour when you're shaping because if you use too much flour it can stick when you shape it we'll be able to see that with our brioche dough later well so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and just empty it onto here oh yeah now ciabatta and italian actually means old slipper that's the approximate translation and that gives you an idea of how the bread is shaped which is very minimal that's another reason why this is a really great recipe for beginners because you don't have to worry too much about the shaping the hardest part is just being brave to get through all the stickiness so I'm gonna first give it another little shower on top and then I'm gonna fold the dough a few times just to bring it into a better shape and when you fold bread dough what that means is you're kind of moving it and redistributing some of that yeast action that's going on and the way to do it is to firmly grasp it get your hands flowery as needed and pull it out and then over onto itself so we're gonna fold it a few times I like to fold it kind of in every direction and get it into like a nice uniform shape like that just like that now we wouldn't have been able to achieve that if we did not have this much flour so it's really important to remember that and if you ever get dough stuck to your fingers just get a little flour and rub them together and it comes right out it's another thing I learned back in the bread baking day washing a hand that is sticky with dough just makes it gloppy sticky dough even more so so the flour helps get it off all right with my bench knife here or you could use a regular kitchen knife if that's all you've had we're just gonna cut it approximately in half if you're a perfectionist you can be more precise and weigh them but I don't like to mess with that and that's already the base shape that we're gonna have for these loaves so got two baking sheets here and you want to put your baking sheet as close as possible to your work area let's give them one more dust on the top just like that now when I pick it up I'm just going to gently stretch it and place it right onto here in whatever shape it ends up it ends up let the dough fall where it may so I'm just gonna give it a gentle stretch which also kind of gives the texture to the final flour it's a really cool look and all this extra flour that we have on our countertop you can sift it and reuse it just sift it to make sure you don't have any bits of dough stuck in it somewhere so we don't need to waste that flour stretch and just let it fall ciabatta is a really rustic loaf a really rustic shape and then we're gonna do a more precise shaping with our brioche later so you get to see this is the easy way to do bread real simple very little shaping and very few ingredients very little rise time all right let's cover these so that they can rise and when you cover them just try to do it gently so you don't disturb too much of the flour that you've got on top because that makes some of that texture on the end of these loaves which I really love so just let them rise in a warm ish place for 30 to 45 minutes until they've got a little bit of puff going on all right our ciabatta loaves have risen and let's take a look at what they look like we're looking for them to be noticeably puffy expanded in size oh yes ooh now if this happens don't freak out you got a little stuck to my towel just pull it away and just work try to touch it as minimally as possible whenever the dough because you don't want to deflate it now let's see if this one gives us a cleaner moment oh it's a beautiful love alright and as you can see they're not exactly the same they're a little bit different in size and shape and that's the beauty of ciabatta they're very rustic very simple and now we're just ready to bake these in the oven now this is a good time to talk about one of the important things with bread baking it's really important to pay attention to the oven temperature a bread like this alein bread likes to bake at a really high temperature the higher the temperature the faster the initial oven spring the oven spring is what happens in those first moments when the yeast expands in the oven before the structure of the loaf or roll sets so you want to bake these at a really high temperature I bake them at 475 and you can also if you feel up for it bring in the help of a tray of ice and that is really great for crusty loaves like this because it brings steam into the oven so you can put these on a top shelf and just put a tray of as much ice as you can manage down below it will melt in the oven creating steam and that helps to create a really beautiful really crisp crust and it also helps to really evenly brown and just get everything absolutely perfect I love a little steam when I'm baking a leanin loaf so we're gonna bake these until the structure is set and the loaf is deeply golden-brown if you feel like it's browning a little too quickly you can always tent it with foil or knock the oven temperature down about 25 degrees for the remainder of the bake let's bake so now that you've learned all about how to make a lean bread let's talk about the other category which is enriched breads now enriched breads are some of my favorite because the word rich is right inside we've got things like butter sugar already my favorites milk really anything eggs that's another one any kind of enrichment anything that's gonna make the dough a little more buttery tasting and it's gonna make it really golden brown and one of the best examples of an enriched dough is brioche and so that's what we're gonna make today we're gonna make my salted butter brioche which is a really delicious recipe and I think brioche especially anything that has a French name tends scare people as being really intimidating but actually brioche is a really flexible recipe for people at home to bake so I'm excited to show you how it's done to start out with this is a little bit of an interesting bread recipe because brioche ultimately rises in the refrigerator and part of the reason for that is that there's so many enrichments that it's a very sticky dough so you need it to be in the fridge just so that you'll actually eventually be able to shape it because of that we don't really need our ingredients to be warm the way we might add warm water to a bread recipe we're going for a slower rise the other advantage of a slow rise is that it adds more flavor the longer that that yeast is fermenting its fermenting at a slower speed because it's in a chilled environment and as a result you get a lot more flavor rather than when you try to speed it up really quickly and it still gets nice and risen and lovely but it doesn't have that same flavor so we're gonna start with bread flour again that high protein content is gonna make this a really nice smooth elastic dough which is really important and this is 360 grams 3 cups of bread flour and this is one of those recipes we can really just put absolutely everything in so we also have 50 grams of granulated sugar sugar is an important ingredient even if you won't taste that sweetness it helps keep the loaf tender so you get a little bit of an outer crust but that inside is light and fluffy and that's something that we really want we're also gonna add a tablespoon of yeast and a half teaspoon of sea salt and that's actually a little low for breads I was talking about how it's really important to have enough salt but the reason that it's low is because we also are using salted butter so it's important not to over salt Justices it's important not to under salt I'm just gonna give that a quick mix just to get those ingredients combined before I add the liquid don't need to go crazy here just give it a little stir you could also do that by hand now brioche is a recipe that is done by intense mixing because you mix for a very long time so it's you'll see what I'm talking about but it's called intense for a reason now with the mixer running I'm gonna go ahead and add my milk and then I'm also gonna add three eggs and I'm just gonna crack them into here first make sure I don't have any shell and again because we're not worried about the temperature of these ingredients you can actually make this with cold eggs no reason for the eggs to be at room temp and our third egg we're just gonna mix this on low speed until it starts to come together it's gonna come around our dough hook attachment and that's gonna be one way that we know that it's ready we're gonna mix it just for about two minutes until it comes together and is combined and then we're gonna raise the speed and mix it for four minutes more to build up the what the gluten the gluten that's what's gonna give this crazy structure it's gonna allow us to really shape this bread and get it nice and tight that's one of the things that is really special about brioche dough is it's a really easy dough to work with if you've got it nice and cold and you can get a nice beautiful shape to your loaf it is actually great to use in dessert applications one of my favorite recipes on the site is a genius recipe that serves brioche with ice cream and makes like an ice cream sandwich it's just delicious so it has that lightly sweet thing and that insanely buttery thing when this bread is baking you can smell it like halfway down the block it smells so good so buttery so rich okay so this is looking good the dough is starting to come together around the dough hook and now I'm gonna kick up the speed now on the higher speed we're gonna mix it for three to four minutes until the dough looks pretty smooth and then we'll start adding the final ingredients our butter okay now the key here is to add it gradually if you add it too fast it kind of just gets greasy and doesn't get combined so you have to add it in and let it mix in a little bit and then add in the next one and this is that part that's called intense mixing because the ciabatta dough for example when we mixed it we just mixed it until we got the gluten structure but with this we're not only mixing it long enough to get that structure we're also now gonna add all of this butter and make a delicious doughy emulsion so let's give it a go and you can just do this on sort of a low to medium speed and about a tablespoon at a time and you want to use room-temperature butter so that can combine in there it's a little bit cold it's not gonna combine and you're gonna get chunks of butter in the brioche and you're not gonna have that beautiful smooth dough so every time this gets mixed in and I can't see it anymore or it's almost fully mixed in that's when I had the next one and if you notice that it's not combining evenly or you have a lot of dough around the edge of the bowl you can stop and scrape the bowl a couple of times as you are brioche is an example of a dough where we've slowed down the rise time I have an article about this on the site you can slow down or speed up rise times by making a few adjustments to the recipe for example if you had a recipe for pizza dough that required to be refrigerated overnight you could increase the yeast and the water temperature and it would be ready in 30 to 45 minutes ready to go it is going to be a different end result but it is possible to adjust those based on how much time you have so this is just another example of how you really can bake bread so easily and fit it in to even a busy schedule it's one of my favorite forms of baking to introduce people to is bread because they're often so scared of that yeast when you figure out what's going on you're gonna have great great great results all right we're almost done before I add this last little bit I'm gonna give the bowl a scrape oh now look how soft that is I'm just gonna scrape but you can see how soft and gooey so unlike the ciabatta dough which is soft because it has a lot of hydration this is soft because it has a lot of fat and the fat particularly is why we like to keep this dough cold because when fat is cold its Burton so it's easier to handle and work with all right once the last addition of butter goes in it's just really important to mix it until it's totally smooth and come together the whole process of adding the butter will take anywhere between three to six minutes and it's really important to get it fully incorporated so don't worry about over mixing focus on getting it nice and smooth it's so hard to use the mixer facing this way makes me feel like I don't know how to use a mixer alright so now we're just gonna give this bowl a good scrape make sure we've got everything all the way at the bottom that everything is incorporated uniformly especially in standing mixers sometimes the dough at the very bottom is a little bit of a different color so by giving it a little bit of a stir by hand you ensure that you get it all nice and even and everything's combined and that's what we're dealing with look how sticky sticky we're gonna put this into a greased bowl and let it rise at room temperature for a little bit just to let it start the process then we're gonna put it into the refrigerator where it's gonna rise overnight it's important to know that it won't be as bulky as a bread you leave to rise at room temperature it may even look like it hasn't risen much at all but the texture is going to change it's going to become a little bit puffier and you're gonna see some signs of air pockets that's what's important to look for and we've got one ready that we can show you so you know what you're looking for and don't worry too much about the shape because this is a sticky sticky dough so just get it in the bowl cover it and you'll let it rise for about an hour at room temperature and then in the refrigerator for about 12 hours or overnight that makes brioche also a really great bread for when you have a special occasion or something that you're doing a lot of cooking because you can make it ahead of time and then bake it when you're ready this is our freshly mixed brioche dough and you see how sticky and tacky it is and here we have this hunka hunka buttery dough that I can pick right up with my hands because it's nice and chill the number one thing you're looking for like I said is kind of this appearance of tackiness where you can see some pockets of air and really the bulk of the rise for this bread is going to come in the second rise that we're going to do in the loaf pan so I'm gonna go ahead and cover this one let it start it's room temp rise and we can go ahead and shape this lovely brioche loaf so shaping bread one of the most important things is that the bread shaping is relatively tight if it's not tight and you don't seal it well that's when you get kind of an explosion of the dough in one direction or another that said if you do it too tight it also can restrict the air from being able to allow the dough to rise to its maximum ability so you gonna have to find that sweet spot somewhere in the middle first I'm gonna put a little flour down one of the biggest mistakes people make with a lot of bread is using too much flour in the shaping when you use too much flour the dough can't stick to itself so when you're trying to seal it and make this nice shape like we're gonna try to do if it has too much flour it's not gonna be able to do it so I like to just do a little bit and I flour my hands and put some of that hand flour onto the dough and you can also put flour directly on any parts that are sticky now there's lots of different ways to shape bread dough but we're gonna do a shape that's often called a batard and that can go into a loaf pan like this or be baked on a sheet tray with parchment so just start I'm gonna form it a little bit into a rectangular shape and then I'm gonna flatten it out using flour as I knead and you want to work quickly with this dough because it is really buttery and it's gonna start to warm up with the heat of your hand so if at any point it starts to feel sticky and you can't handle it anymore just toss it in the fridge for a second and come back to it okay so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fold the dough over onto itself pinching firmly with my fingertips each time so again I'm kind of pulling it out and pressing it down I love doing this when you are shaping bread dough it's always going to get longer as you're working so occasionally you can also kind of tuck the ends in so that you don't end up making it too long as you work like that pressing so when we get to the stage where you can fold it over as much there's none left kind of has just that tiny little tidbit that's left that's when we're going to use the heel of our hand to seal the bread loaf so now what I'm gonna do is that same motion just sort of folding it over but I'm pressing it firmly with the heel of my hand and then I'll just squish it in a little tighter and roll it a little bit into a log now again if I'd been using a lot of flour during this process when every time I folded that dough on to itself it wouldn't stick it would just kind of spring back so another common problem when people are making loaves when they lift the loaf to put it into the pan they lift from the edges and then when they put it into the pan the center is sunk a tiny bit so what you actually want to do is you want to try to support it all the way across the loaf just hold it like a little little precious and if necessary even push it in so that the center is a little thicker and then we drop it into the loaf pan just like that perfect and now as you can see this doesn't even fill the loaf pan all the way on the sides that is all gonna come from this second longer proofing with brioche or any enriched bread that's a time that you actually want to use a little bit of a warmer environment if you live somewhere really cold you keep your house really cold it's near an air conditioning vent anything like that this is gonna take a really long time to rise so this is a time to let it be a little bit warmer put it sort of near your stove anything like that so we'll cover it and we're gonna let it rise until it comes about a half an inch over the edge of this pan and that's really the visual cue here to be able to tell that it's risen enough if it doesn't come above the pan it's going to be a really sad piddly little loaf we don't want that alright so here's an example of the finished low you see that it's come about a half an inch up the side or above the rim of the pan and just to see what it looks like with my loaf I just made freshly look how piddly those looks side-by-side like that how does that become this but it does with enough time and patience so that's really the exercise here is being patient enough to let it rise and then being patient enough to let it bake while it smells like butter and then being patient enough to let it cool so you can slice it but we're gonna be really patient because in the end we get brioche so I get questions all the time in my email or in my Instagram inbox they're the same kinds of questions from people who are learning to bake and they keep having the same problems so we're gonna troubleshoot one of the most common problems with baking bread with yeast and that is proofing so proofing is when you let the bread dough rise bread dough Rises at two stages first it has the bulk fermentation when it rises the whole amount of dough in the bowl and then it has the final fermentation which is when you've shaped it and it's exactly the way that you want it and you're getting ready to bake it so first of all we're gonna show you an example on these unbaked clover rolls of how you can tell when something is properly proofed so in the on the left here I've got an under proofed batch of clover rolls and the way that you can tell that they're under proofed is that when I press them they just hold the indent and it kind of just stays exactly where it is or sometimes it'll pop really fast back at you it's kind of depends on the type of bread dough that it is another way that you can visually tell is just the appearance these look very similar to when I shaped them they only expand it a little bit and people tend to follow a recipe a recipe says let it rise for 30 minutes but if you keep your home really cold or it's summer and it's really warm it's going to take a different amount of time so learning these visual cues is just so important to getting it right even if the recipe might lead you astray on inten so this is a properly proofed and the way you can tell it properly proofed is that when I press it it very slowly comes back to its place so you just press it gently and it holds the indentation for a brief moment but comes back to its exact same place so the other way that you can tell when something is proofed properly is that it looks puffy a lot of recipes say that they say it looks noticeably puffy and what that means is especially compared to this under puffy one which looks a lot like it did when we just shaped this one has started to expand but it's not gone crazy it's just noticeably puffy noticeably lighter than it was when we first put it into the pan so those are your two visual cues you're looking for when you press it back that it's going to slowly come back into place and you you don't need to Jam your finger in when you're doing this or you will put a hole in your roll just gently touch it and get a sense now with this overproofed one when you press it it's going to hold the indentation all the way so the same sort of thing that we're dealing with with this with the under proofed but it's going to hold it in a much different way because as you can see this looks noticeably puffy but I know because I've made this recipe many times that these are risen too much they're too big and when these go into the oven they're gonna continue to explode because they continue to rise in the oven not just outside the oven so when you press this one it just holds that indentation it never springs back and that's what you don't want once it's over proofed the most likely thing that's gonna happen in the oven it's not only gonna get super big but it might also collapse on itself because what you're doing the whole time it's rising you're letting the yeast fede fede fede fede until you hit the oven and the oven kills the yeast but if you let it rise too much it feed bpp feet and then it runs out of food to eat and it dies before it even hits the oven and that's what we're trying to avoid so those are some keys to how to tell when a bread is under or over proofed before baking but what about what it does the bread after baking I've got some loaves of challah and I'm gonna show you post baking what it looks like so when it comes to proofing what does it look like after baking this is a properly proofed loaf of challah and as you can see it's relatively even the braids have stayed in place and it's just got like a nice overall shape and a nice volume it's nice and lofty without being overly wide it stayed in the shape that I braided it in this is an under proofed loaf of challah and when you under proof a loaf of bread it actually is prone to tearing so this right here you can see the pieces of the braid are actually starting to separate from one another and there's a physical sometimes you can actually see the dough there's big jaggedy tears and it also makes the loaf significantly less even in shape so this is a very common problem when you under proof your bread now when you overproof your bread a couple of things happen the first is it's humongous it's way wider than it's supposed to be it's really fat low it hasn't stayed even it's thicker on one side than it is on the other and it's deflated slightly so whereas this loaf has a little bit more height this one is verging on being a little bit flat because when it hit the oven it started to collapse a little bit this can also affect the interior crumb structure so let's give it a go here and see there's a slice whoa that's a beautiful piece of bread so this is the properly proof tile and as you can see we have some nice bigger air bubbles but for the most part the air bubbles are uniform in size and we have this nice tight crumb structure which is typical of this loaf of bread when dough is under proofed it's likely to be less light a little less air bubbles a tighter crumb structure and when it's over proofed it might have big gaps or air bubbles as well so we've got our perfect loaf these are the signs that you want to look for first press your finger into that dough before you put it into the oven because once you bake it it's too late there's no going back and proofing it again now he's an under proofed loaf of bread not good to eat absolutely not it may just be a little less beautiful and a little less even an over proofed loaf of bread sometimes can have a slight yeast or even alcohol flavor so if you're unsure a little bit better to err on the side of under proofing but that's just from a flavor perspective once you get those visual cues and you press you can get a perfect proof every time so once your loaf has risen let's give it a nice coating of egg wash which helps it Brown but it also keeps the surface nice and shiny which I really love with brioche and my egg wash is just one egg mixed with about a tablespoon of water and you can double that triple that if you've got a lot of baking projects coming up and I like to use that combination because the egg yolk browns and the egg white makes it shiny and you want to be gentle brushing this because it's very puffy and can very easily deflate just like we showed with the proof test you know when you press with your finger it could just leave a mark so we want to be gentle with the brushing get it brushed all over the surface and the key to getting a really good brioche is to bake it until it's very deeply golden-brown I find a lot of times with bread people are so afraid of burning things but really you want that dark outer crust that's something that is really bakery level so we're gonna do that this is ready to bake it bakes at 375 until the internal temperature is 190 to 200 degrees so here we have our two finished loaves Arleen bread the ciabatta and our enriched bread the brioche and this is what they look like when they're baked and I want to slice into them to show you what they look like inside but it is important to remember to cool your bread before you slice it if you don't let it cool entirely it actually can compress the interior crumb structure so even though it is delightful sometimes to tear into a still warm baguette it'll just change the texture on the inside could be a little gummy err just a little bit different so we're thinking about but sometimes you're impatient and you can't wait I get it so let's give this one a cut see what it looks like oh yes this is very typical of a brioche super tight spongy crumb you know some very even crumb structure and a nice even crust all the way around that's what we like to see and I can smell the butter just from having cut that slice which is also particularly amazing and exciting all right let's cut this one ooh you hear that that's crusty and this is exactly what you're looking for inside a ciabatta very light airy crumb not as spongy lots of big air pockets inside and a really crisp crust which I love like that yes so that's what we're talking about looking for with ciabatta it's gonna give one more slice cuz why not yes see honestly this is what you love to see you love to see big air pockets like this because that's the sign that there was lots of hydration in that loaf and that is the ciabatta [Music] so things we learned today we learn the difference between the different kinds of yeast we learned how to make a pre ferment and how to utilize a pre from it with bakers percentage we learned how to make lean dough's we learned how to make enriched dough's we learned how to slow down and speed up east rise times there's no reason not to be incorporating more yeasted recipes into your baking adventures because it really is much more easy and much more doable than you think especially if you know the reasons why behind everything that's happening so time to eat some bread I think that work I hope this video gives you the confidence to tackle any recipe that has East in it don't be afraid it is totally possible if you've got that confidence you can make any of these recipes and so many more so be sure to check out my other articles about yeast and bread baking on food 52 all these recipes are there as well and if you like this video be sure to LIKE and subscribe so that you can see future episodes happy baking [Music]

Channel: Food52

Views: 569,373

Rating: 4.9408283 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, ciabatta, challah, clover roll, brioche, baking, bread, yeast, dry active yeast, rapid rise yeast, preferment, baker's percentage, erin mcdowell

Id: QD2GGo181bQ

Length: 50min 14sec (3014 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020