March 6, 2015 - 12:15pm
Intimate look at the autolyse
I know I will get some flack for my take on the autolyse, but this forum thrives on opinionated baking comments. The intimate look at the autolyse basically reaches the conclusion that you can't go wrong with including an autolyse phase when making bread, not that I always do.
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'Bread making' is way too broad a term to apply rules categorically, but hydrating the flour hugely improves the development and workability of the dough. And one only needs to walk away and do something else for a while!
...at least for 30 minutes. And all I bake is SD now, so it's always just flour + water.
I am totally sold on notion that the autolyse improves my dough (especially at higher hydration levels)...what I have yet to decide for myself is the merit of the super-long autolyse of the major flour in the loaf (let's say 6 hrs or more). I know a number of people here believe that it's diminishing returns after the first 2 hours, but I still find myself frequently mixing the flour and water at the same time as the levain, letting them rest alongside one another in their respective containers. In some ways it's just easier to do the majority of the mixing at one time (often in the morning for me). Leaves very little cleanup in the evening, when I mix the final dough!
Former (and only briefly) TFL poster Ian Lowe (aka Ars Pastoria) advocated what he called an "enzymatic preferment". We have enjoyed some flavors from processes employing his "eP" that I've not tasted anywhere else. What Ian did/does was to mix all the white flour in a formula with water in a proportion that more or less achieved the formula's final hydration, and left it at ~75-78˚F for up to 8 hours (no longer). No salt, so no inhibition of enzymatic activity that salt at ~2% is usually included (e.g., in soakers) to inhibit. Ian believes(d) that his "eP" released metabolites from the otherwise minimally flavor-contributing white flour that enhanced Maillard reactions and other flavor-generating processes. I found this to be the case in breads with 60% or more white flour. Less than that, the wholegrain contributions overwhelm the subtleties of this enhanced white flour contribution.
So it's not strictly an autolyse for gluten's sake, but for flavor. Hasn't got a lot of airplay on TFL, but has worked little flavor miracles for us in the past. Wholegrain percentage of our 'house breads' has gone up beyond the utility of Ian's "eP" now, so I haven't done it for a while. But worth exploring if you bake formula with >half white flour.
Tom
For this I'm willing to break my silence, I have been rather quite here since new year...
Ian's writings have not been lost on me. An autolyse, that is, a true autolyse is more than just a rest but yes an enzymatic preferment.
What you dance around is how free amino acids are liberated with such "eP". Free amino acids are the pre-cursors to volatile aroma compounds.
The more free amino acids you have the flavoursome your bread.
Yeasts have a thirst for them hence why a levain /starter should be omitted from an autolyse.
Michael
Maybe what I perceive as better overall "performance" of my predominantly white flour loaves is actually due to the flavor/Maillard-enhancing effects of my long autolyse! Though I have gone to 10 hours...whoops...why no more than 8?
example of why autolyse is so great for bread. I autolyse all of my breads with a general rule of the more whole grains in the mix the longer the autolyse. Since it is so hot in AZ, if the autolyse is longer than 4 hours, I do it in the fridge. Well done and
Happy baking
Buongiorno Michael,
Good to hear from you. I don't mean to dance around the enzymology here. My favor of Ian's eP is more empirical than biochemically supported. It 'works' (i.e., creates novel flavors). However, I confess that I teach plant biology and it just so happens that among this week's topics was seed germination and the physiology of the catabolism of polymers stored in seeds. The dogma (as I referred to it in my very first TFL post a few years back) is that the enzymes that degrade the carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids stored in monocot endosperm tissue upon seed imbibition are synthesized de novo in the aleurone upon signaling (via the soluble and diffusable hormone gibberellin) from the embryo. While I'm not intimate with the literature in germination physiology, that's the textbook version.
But taking a more pragmatic and less pedantic view, milled flour, no matter how pure and white, is not intact endosperm. I have no reason to believe that the dogma of enzymes only forming de novo in imbibed seeds is any more than dogma. It would be very surprising indeed if white all purpose or 'bread' flour did not have proteolytic enzymes, or bacteria that secrete them, present in some inactive, desiccated state and activated by flour wetting.
A_w_t: Ian said either in his TFL posts or in his short-lived Ars P blog that he had tried different lengths of eP and found diminishing returns beyond eight hours. I have found the same when allowing it to proceed overnight or 24 hours. Not surprisingly, crumb structure quality suffers if one allows the proteases to feast too heavily upon the gluten proteins responsible for it. It's a trade-off.
Tom
I will definitely try a long autolyse - or eP - with my next bread. I have added a postscript at the top of my post to note this very different view and process. I stand corrected and it's good to know there is much more to learn in my next 37 breads. Probably lots more than 37 breads.