This post is dedicated to all those poor souls that made an enriched dough that ended up looking like a messy soup instead of a properly developed dough. This has never happened to me, of course. I’m just posting this for a friend.
Oh, ok, fine, I admit it. It happened to me today. I’m just going to fess up to it and hopefully you can learn from my mishap.
Enriched dough is opposite of a lean dough. It is one that is made with a higher percentage of sugar and fats. The order that these ingredients are placed in your mixer makes a HUGE difference. Read on to find out why.
As it happened, today I got distracted making an enriched dough and got lazy. Instead of adding the sugar and fat at the proper stage of dough development, I just threw it all in at the beginning. Sacrebleu!
Take a look at the two examples above. The first dough is basically a super-sticky, gooey mess which is not going to produce an acceptable product. It went in the trash :(.
The second dough is the same exact dough in every way except that the sugar and fat were added at the correct point in dough development. What a difference timing makes!
WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?
SUGAR
Sugar is hygroscopic, which means it strongly absorbs water from its environment. When mixed into a yeasted dough, yeast activity goes down because yeast needs that water to stay active. More sugar means less water is available for the yeast and fermentation is slower. This oftentimes means your final dough temperature should be higher (80-85F versus a normal bread at 70-75F) during the bulk fermentation to give the yeast a needed boost.
Besides less water for yeast, sugar also draws water away from the gluten in your dough. If gluten is not properly hydrated, it will not link up as efficiently and your dough will not be as strong.
CONCLUSION: If you have up to 12% of flour weight as sugar, you can add it all at the beginning. If you have more than 12% sugar, it is best to add it in two or three stages during mixing and towards the end when most of the gluten has been hydrated and developed.
FAT
Fat, of course, is a lubricating substance. As such, it coats gluten proteins and prevents proper development. This is why it’s important that gluten is well hydrated and developed before too much fat is introduced. Too much fat too soon results in a soupy mess which is difficult or impossible to recover into a properly developed dough.
CONCLUSION: If you have up to 5% of flour weight as fat (eg. butter, oil), you can add it all at the beginning. If you have between 5-15% fat, you should add it when the gluten is at around the halfway point of development. If you have more than 15% fat, you should add it towards the end (around 80% developed) and the gluten structure is strong enough to tolerate all that lubrication.
POST GAME ANALYSIS
So in my example above, I made a dough with 20% sugar and 30% fat. Since my sugar level was above 12%, I should have added it in 2 or 3 stages towards the end of my gluten development.
Since my fat level was above 15%, I should have added it in the last stage of development.
I added my sugar and fats all at the same time at the beginning of mixing in the first example. This is why my first dough, even though it was identical to the second dough in every way, failed.
Questions? Comments? Please let me know what you think below.