Has anyone replaced the water in a recipe with milk? Did you use whole, skim or fat free? What was the result? Did you use a 1:1 ratio of milk for water?
And what about eggs? Have you added eggs to a recipe? Did you use just the yoke or did you use the whole egg? How many (I realize that might be arbitrary and dependent on a given recipe)? We might be swerving into the realm of sourdough challah here.
I replace water with whey (1 to 1) all the time, works great.
Just curious, do you mean acid whey (i.e. from yogurt) or sweet whey (i.e. from cheese)?
I’m using whey from Greek yogurt.
Do you notice much of a difference in the bread compared to with water? It makes me wonder if the LAB in the acid whey would end up making the bread more tart than otherwise. Seems like a nice use for acid whey in any case.
I bake a lot of rye bread, the whey starts the dough off in a better place and helps prevent starch attack. It does alter the taste of the bread, for the better in my opinion. Adds a bit of tang.
Milk contains milk solids and fat. Water does not. When changing water to milk...about 10% of the milk is milk solids and the fat will be 1%, 2%, 3.5% like the label. So 100g water would be 100g milk plus 11%, 12%, 13.5% more milk in order to get the same consistency. There is much discussion whether the milk should be scalded first before using. The milk solids can be considered dry milk powder and milk sugars.
Egg whites can be measured like water. Yolks are fat. Separate before measuring and substituting into a recipe. When adding egg whites, I put the white into the cup and top off with water to the correct weight.
I’ve been doing some experimentation and for a half gallon (about 2 liters) of milk I need to keep the temperature between 180F-190F (82C-88C) for at least 5 minutes before covering and letting it sit for an hour and a half to cool off to denature the proteins. Longer is better, and those numbers are for pasteurized milk not ultra or unpasteurized. Unpasteurized (I’ve used that too) need to get a bit hotter and twice as long before covering. I have no idea about ultra-pasteurized.
This is also how I denature milk to make yogurt.
I’m pretty sure the remaining proteins in whey take up some space too, but I run pretty wet on my doughs and have never noticed a difference with swapping whey 1:1.
a difference in whey. Might even make dough wetter due to the milk sugars in whey. Sugar tends to act more like a liquid with just the smallest amount of water.
Thanks for the milk heating specifics.
I've been lurking here for a while but I saw this on the front page and it spurred me to actually make an account. :P I think this is a fun topic. Basically, in the pastry world there's a pretty good theory built up around what happens to a dough when milk, eggs, fats, sugars, etc. are added, and you can use it to guide yourself when designing recipes.
One way to categorize doughs is on a spectrum from lean to rich. The leanest doughs are based only on flour and water, without added fats or sugars, like a typical "artisan bread" dough. A very rich dough, by contrast, contains lots of sugar and fat; a classic pound cake contains a 1:1:1:1 mixture of flour, butter, eggs, and sugar by weight.
The term "shortening," à la Crisco, comes from the physical behavior of all fats when added to glutenous dough, such as that made from wheat flour. The fat coats and lubricates the gluten strands in the dough, making it less likely that they will stick to each other and thus inhibiting gluten development. Cake recipes often include a relatively high percentage of added fats because of this—by inhibiting gluten development in the dough the resulting cake will have a soft, tender texture.
Sugar also inhibits gluten development somewhat, although I'm less clear on the precise reasons why; I know it absorbs moisture so maybe the effect is somewhat similar to the way bran inhibits gluten development. If so, it might be less of an issue if you use fine sugar over coarse sugar, since it will dissolve faster. I get the impression this could use further research. The pastry textbook I have just states flatly that sugar inhibits gluten development without giving a rationale.
In any case, bread bakers often eschew such ingredients in favor of encouraging gluten development, in order to give the dough good gas retention and a chewier, toothier texture. However, there are many recipes for "moderately lean" doughs such as rolls (or challah as you mention) which include some amount of added sugars and fats. This can give the resulting product a pleasant sense of richness without inibiting gluten development as far as with cake.
Ingredients that contain proteins, such as eggs and also milk to a small degree, can add a certain amount of tensile strength and chewiness to dough in their own right aside from the gluten. One reason eggs are added to cake doughs is to give the cake structural integrity even in the face of minimal gluten development. As Mini Oven notes, the fat in eggs is in the yolk, so if you only want to add egg protein you can use only the white, which is mainly protein and water. Egg yolks contribute a nice flavor and pleasing yellow color, though.
If you want the proteins from milk without the fat, you can use water and add 3–5% of the flour's weight in skim milk powder. I haven't tried this personally but I've seen it in commercial recipes for rolls and the like. I imagine you could also use skim milk and get the same effect, although if you want to be precise you'll have to determine the ratio of water to protein in the skim milk and adjust your recipe accordingly.
Yeast can metabolize table sugar more easily than the carbohydrates in flour, so if you add sugar to a sourdough recipe the yeast are bound to eat some of it. This may make the dough proof faster, and make the resulting baked good a bit less sweet than with chemical leavening. Yeast can also utilize fats in their environment to create cell walls and things in lieu of synthesizing them metabolically, so fat in your dough can also accelerate proofing somewhat. As with anything sourdough-related you'll have to experiment with your culture in your environment to see how this plays out for you in particular.
If you want to experiment with enriching a recipe for lean bread dough while still keeping it in a leanier, breadier territory, here are some guidelines. You can add fat (butter, canola oil, olive oil, etc.) up to about 10% of the flour by weight. Same goes for sugar (which can also come in the form of various syrups and such). Eggs can be more in the 10–20% range, and you can use just the yolks or just the whites at that percentage depending on the effect you want. Milk can completely replace water, and you can adjust the amount of fat vs protein vs water in the milk to suit your recipe by using whole vs 2% vs skim, by using water and milk powder, by simmering the milk on the stove to evaporate some water, etc. (Butter also contains water, as much as around 30%, and you can remove this by making clarified butter.) Speaking in general, any liquid or semiliquid ingredient that isn't all fat probably contains some water, and you may need to adjust your recipe to compensate for this in order to hit your target hydration.
If you want to make a richer dough, more in the vein of sweet rolls or croissants or the like, you can add sugar, eggs, and/or fat (usually butter) each up to equal the weight of the flour. Rich doughs vary widely in the specific proportions each of these ingredients take on, depending on the desired characteristics of the baked good. Milk is handled more-or-less the same as with leaner doughs.
Or switching it out, will soften the crumb, and the crust so will fat. Especially if the bread is bagged after cooling. The crust can be made crisp again with a short second bake. What you will notice is that using milk will almost quarantee you need a splash more milk to get the dry flour moistened so heat a little bit more than the recipe asks in water or add water if the milk comes out short. Use the milk you normally have around, and experiment with the next loaf. Try half water half milk and see how the bread comes out.
Now if you change a recipe asking for milk to water, use less water than milk, about 13% less and see how the dough pulls together.
Seems to me you want to experiment with a flour-water-salt-yeast recipe to get a softer crumb.