A chapter from Ilya Lazerson's book "Cooking Without Cookbooks", in particular tells about the formation of a wheat bun.
Ilya Lazerson, the president of the St. Petersburg guild of chefs, always talks interestingly about cooking and culinary recipes.
This chapter from his book can be useful to both novice bakers and experienced ones. I recommend reading the work to the end.
Yeast dough for bread, pies, pies
Why is it called yeast? What is yeast for? It's very simple: yeast loosens the dough and the products from it are soft and porous. Such a dough should ferment for some time, that is, the yeast must "work": it transforms the carbohydrates of the flour itself and the sugar added to the dough into alcohol and carbon dioxide, the latter being the baking powder of the dough. The dough mixed in water with the addition of yeast will ferment, because starch (there is a lot of it in flour) partly turns into sugars, and they process the yeast. This is how ordinary bread is made - flour, yeast, salt, water.
Yeast dough can be prepared using sponge and non-steam methods. The sponge method is not that difficult, it is just that the dough is prepared in two stages, so we can say that it is somewhat longer. Why is dough made in two ways? In some cases, it is better to cook the dough this way, and in some other way. Everything here is not very complicated, but before talking about this or that method of preparing the dough, let us consider, in principle, the familiar term "baking". In order to make the dough tastier, richer or something, butter ingredients are added to it - fat (butter, margarines, vegetable oil, etc.), eggs and sugar. The greater the proportion of such additives, the more difficult it is for the yeast to "work" in such a dough. In this case, the yeast needs to be "dispersed", to make it "work" more efficiently, to "train" it. For this there is a brew. The dough is kneaded in two steps - first, a semi-liquid dough is prepared from flour and water with yeast - a dough. Usually, for the preparation of dough, take a third of the flour from the amount planned for use, about the same amount of liquid by weight - water or milk, all yeast. All this is mixed, it turns out a thin dough. It is placed in a warm place for fermentation, during which the dough greatly increases in volume. The process can take 2 to 3 hours.
Then add the remaining liquid, sugar, salt, eggs to the dough. Knead the dough, add melted butter or margarine and knead until the butter is combined with the dough. The kneading process goes in containers (a large enamel or plastic bowl) until the butter is mixed, then the dough must be transferred to a flat surface (directly on the table, a large wooden board) and, adding flour, knead with both hands. The entire cooking process (any dough, by the way) can be entrusted to a mixer, preferably one whose mechanism can provide the planetary motion of the mixing blade: it rotates in a circle and around its axis at the same time. Today such household machines exist. The kneaded sponge dough should ferment in a warm place for at least an hour and a half, then it must be kneaded and allowed to come up again. After that, you can work with the dough - to mold products from it.
Bezoparnoe dough is prepared in one step, that is, all products are immediately mixed. One has only to pre-dissolve yeast, salt and sugar in warm liquid, then add eggs (if they are included in the recipe) and flour. The mixing rules are the same as for the sponge dough. The dough is placed for fermentation in a warm place, kneaded once after one and a half to two hours, again allowed to come up and used.
Now how to better remember the ratio of ingredients. You need to imagine the following: all ingredients should be correlated with the amount of flour that will be used to make the dough.
Yeast. Usually they take from 2 to 5% (let me remind you, from the weight of flour!) Yeast, in this case we are talking about FRESH yeast. Personally, I always take 3%. This means that if I start making dough from 1 kg of flour, I will use 30 g of yeast. If there is a lot of baking in the dough, I will increase the amount of yeast by half. If we assume the use of DRY yeast, then usually take from 1 to 1.5% of such yeast. There is usually a recommendation on the packaging of dry yeast. Manufacturers of dry yeast most often pack the product for household use in bags weighing 10 or 11 g, this is just 1 kg of flour.
Water (milk). Liquids take about 2.5 times less than flour. That is, for 1 kg of flour - 400 ml of water. This is, of course, approximately. Much depends on the quality of the flour. This ratio of flour to liquid is correct when using a little eggs (after all, eggs have a lot of moisture!) And butter.
So:
Ingredient Part by weight
Flour 1 KG
Water 2/5 by weight of flour
Fresh yeast (or dry) 3% (1% dry) by weight of flour
Butter 50 g per 1 kg of flour
Eggs approx. 2 pcs.
Sugar 3 tbsp. spoons
Salt 1 tsp
Remember: in 1 st. a spoonful of sugar is about 25 g, and salt in a teaspoon is 10 g.
Freshly kneaded bezoparny dough resembles the density of an earlobe in consistency. Remember (with an emphasis on the second syllable!) With your fingers the lobe of your (someone else's?) Ear - this is exactly the consistency that should be. freshly cooked, but not fermented yeast dough.
What is the "technique" of mixing? I have already touched on this a little, in more detail, however, it is worth dwelling on an important process. Remember how cookbooks recommend kneading the dough: "Put the flour in a slide, make a depression at the top and gradually pour into it: yeast diluted in warm water, warm milk, eggs ...". This rule has been passed from book to book for centuries. Note, the bottom line is that it is recommended to pour liquid into the dry part, and not put the dry part into the liquid. What is the difference? Let's imagine that “we have laid out a hill ...” etc. In general, we poured the liquid part into the hill and began to knead the dough. Knead, knead, mash the earlobe and feel that a very dense dough has turned out. How to be? We will pour in water, but now the dough will not “take” water so easily, it will become sticky on the surface and will stick to the sides of the bowl or to the table. Then you need to add flour! But after all, we need to make the dough more moist, we pour water, but we have to add flour! I mean that with this kneading technology, the dough often turns out to be denser and it is almost impossible to fix it. (Let me remind you that the amount of water "taken" by the dough depends on the quality of the flour, in particular on the amount of gluten in it, in general, proteins - the more gluten, the "stronger" the flour and the more water it can "accept").
In this case, isn't it better to deliberately make the dough initially thinner and gradually (!!!) add flour to it until we reach the desired consistency? Therefore, it is more logical to prepare the entire liquid part (water with yeast, sugar, salt, eggs dissolved in it) and gradually, while stirring, introduce a slightly smaller amount of flour at first, look at the result and add a little flour, if necessary. Do you feel the difference? So forget about the "slide"! At the same time, I do not urge you, the reader, to take the cookbooks "with a slide" to the dacha and burn them in the oven.
So, we looked at the average yeast dough. If we talk about butter dough, then boldly increase: for 1 kg of flour the amount of fresh yeast up to 45 g (dry up to 15 g), eggs up to 5 pcs., Sugar up to 100 g, butter or margarine up to 125 g (do not be afraid of this figure, often, after all, the oil is packaged in 250 g each, so this is exactly half of such a pack), there is less liquid - only 300 ml, but leave the same amount of salt.
I deliberately do not touch on the final products - pies, pies, that is, I do not write about their types, etc. This topic, if not for a separate book, then for a certain book with a video application. We only cover the basics.
I will only note one thing: you need to understand that when we shape the dough into products, we subject it to strong mechanical processing - we roll it out, pinch it, etc. At the same time, carbon dioxide produced by the yeast comes out of it. This cannot be avoided, but the already formed dough must be given the opportunity to accumulate carbon dioxide again. For this reason, the formed pies and pies are subjected to proofing before baking, that is, they are kept warm so that they "fit" and increase in volume. They do this - put the shaped pies (pies) on a greased baking sheet and place it in a warm place. If this is not done, then, once in a hot oven (and products from any dough should always be placed in a preheated oven), the dough begins to warm up, the yeast begins to work incredibly intensively, the dough rises very quickly, but at the same time the crust is on the surface dries up, and the dough grows from the inside, as a result of which the crust breaks and the products lose their presentation. The other extreme is also possible - if the molded products are kept warm for a very long time, they can rise, rise, and then take and fall off. This is due to the fact that domestic flour does not always have good gluten, flour is often "weak". Therefore, it is not worth delaying the proofing process.
