Fixing Issues When Baking Bread

Fixing Issues When Baking Bread - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Today I am going to talk about a little troubleshooting with bread dough. Some people have a really hard time and are afraid to make bread for many, many reasons. Some are afraid of yeast, and some have a problem with the dough actually not coming together. They have this shaggy kind of dough in the mixing bowl. So let's just talk about the ingredients for making bread. We start with a flour and you will add some liquid. It usually has yeast and water, that kind of thing. So when flour and water mix together, gluten is formed, which allows you to get the elasticity and the structure for the bread dough itself. So it is really important that those things mix together well and you create these protein molecules that will be the gluten that we need for the structure. So when you mix flour with water, you will get the dough. There are different kinds of flours. There is an all-purpose flour, that we use all the time, and then there is bread flours and then there are cake flours. And all the flours have different amounts of protein in them, and that is the key. It is the protein, and different amounts of protein, different flours absorb water in different ways. So a high-protein flour, like a bread flour, needs more water to come together as a dough. A cake flour, a softer flour, a lower protein flour, needs less water to come together. So when you are making your bread dough, you need to pay attention to what kind of flour you are using and the amount of water you are adding. So if you have a problem where the dough is not coming together and it is sort of just in pieces around, you might either add some more water or use a lower protein flour, if you are using that same recipe. That should give you a better dough that will come together and be able to be kneaded. So enjoy making bread dough and pick your flour wisely.