[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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