[Sca-cooks] Dough question

Mary + Doug Piero Carey mary.doug at pierocarey.info
Wed Mar 19 05:33:49 PDT 2008


I have made yeast dough and frozen it quite frequently.  The bread has 
always turned out tasty, but the thawing & rising times have varied 
WILDLY.  Not just a matter of hours, but a matter of DAYS.  As in, I 
used to take the frozen lumps out of the freezer on Thursday night 
expecting to be able to work them sometime on Friday, and end up baking 
them anytime between way after bedtime Friday night and Sunday 
afternoon.  No dough recipe I've ever tried has ever thawed & been ready 
to form into loaves in the time the recipe told me to expect thawing to 
take.  Sometimes it thaws way fast, & sometimes MUCH slower.  I seldom 
freeze dough anymore because of this unpredictability.  However, if you 
want to try it...

My advice is to NEVER freeze the whole batch in one lump.  It just takes 
too bluidy long to thaw & warm enough for the yeast to wake up.  You can 
end up with the outside of the batch thawed & rising, while the center 
is still hard as a rock.  Divide the dough into the loaf-sized pieces & 
freeze them separately.  After they are hard, you can chuck them into a 
big bag if you want to, but don't let them touch while they are 
freezing, as they Want to join back together.  I put the loaves into 
individual ziplocs.  And Don't skimp on the size of the bags!  Yeast is 
tenacious and sometimes keeps on rising for an amazingly long time in 
the freezer, therefore outgrowing the bag I thought would be plenty big 
enough.

Please keep in mind that my experience is in fairly large family-size 
batches.  I rarely make bread in less than a 6-8 loaf amounts.  How the 
dough will behave when your recipe makes either 2 or 20 loaves is 
outside my experience.

Good Luck,

Maria



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