Oven Spring
I was wondering if someone could give me an explanation as to the cause of oven spring? I was working at the bakery last evening and had to make a batch of cracked wheat bread. Normally, when doing bread, I mix the dough, let it rest, form my loaf, which I put in the pan to rise before going into the oven.
The cracked wheat, I mix in the mixer, after which I portion it out, form my loaf, and place in the loaf pans. I immediately place the pans in the oven at 350° for 25 minutes and the result is great oven spring which rises 2 inches over the pans. There is no resting of the dough or allowing it to rise. Letting it rise, produces customer complaints that the slices don't fit the toaster. Way too much oven spring.
I'm working with Winona Patent flour, which is all we use for everything, whole wheat flour, cracked wheat, honey, couple of eggs, salt, yeast, and I believe there is some milk powder also.
The other breads I periodically make, white, cinnamon and cinnamon raisin, cobblestone etc. don't have the explosive oven spring, and do set out to rise, and the finished product has a nice oven spring which is less than the cracked wheat bread.
The idea of mix, directly to the pan and into to oven kind of goes against my normal bread making endeavors!
Hi Ricko,
I don't bake with cinnamon (yet) but there seems to be some collective thought and evidence out there that cinnamon, as well as a few other spices, inhibit fermentation and/or oven spring. Too many links to put here, but both TFL and the web have a number of references on this subject. Do some research to find out if your problems are associated.
alan
Thank you for your comments Alan. This cracked wheat has no cinnamon in it.
Could be that's why you get such great oven spring. I'll have to try that, because whenever I use cracked wheat in bread, it barely rises at all!
Hello Paddy, I don't know if that is the reason or not for the super charged oven spring.
Much as I love whole grain breads and putting in seeds and other crunchy stuff, the fact is that the best oven spring is from white flour. I sometimes have to remember that oven spring is not the only indication of a good bread, lovely as the sight of a nice oven spring can be. Indeed, it is rather an addictive sight to see when removing a bread from the oven. I have work to do on my own acceptance of breads lacking a robust oven spring.
Note: Good gluten development, optimal fermentation and good loaf shaping are assumed and regarded as constants.
1. As the loaf enters the heat of the oven, there is a burst of fermentation with additional CO2 production. This terminates when the temperature of the loaf reaches the level where yeast are killed.
2. Gasses expand at higher temperatures. So the CO2 generated by fermentation that is trapped in the alveoli formed by the gluten network expands.
3. The limits on oven spring are the death of yeast and formation of a firm crust which contains expanding gasses.
4. Optimal scoring can enhance oven spring by creating a weakness in the gluten sheath that permits spreading, opening up new areas of moist dough, thus delaying the containment due to crust formation.
5. Under-proofing before baking results in greater oven spring due to more unfermented free sugar available for that final burst of fermentation. Paradoxically, crumb structure suffers. (This may be why your un-proofed loaves have such oven spring.)
I could look it up, but my recollection is that Cinnamon inhibits fermentation. I don't know the mechanism. I do recall that Hamelman states that breads with significant amounts of cinnamon require higher percentages of yeast in the formulas.
David
I did work last evening and one of the many sides that I did, was 4 loaves of the cracked wheat. I also did 2 cinnamon w/raisin, 1 cinnamon, 3 white, 1 jalapeno with cheese and a cobble stone, as well as 4 sourdough.
Again, the cracked wheat had what I'd say was too much oven spring, as it kind of looked like it stretched thin on the sides. There was no letting the cracked wheat dough sit either. It was out of the mixer bowl, portioned into 1# 15 oz. pieces, placed in the bread pans and flattened down, and into the oven!
As for the cinnamon loaves, we use a Dawn Foods product which is Cinnamon Spread Filling with margarine (#00014597). It's pretty much a wet cinnamon paste that is scooped out of the pail with a #20 ice cream scoop and applied to the dough. I can't tell you anything about the taste.
Thank you David for your comments. As I've mentioned above, this cracked wheat is the only bread I make at the bakery that has such an explosive oven spring. The other breads really don't show the same tendencies for oven spring. Your #5 comment is interesting and may be my problem.
It's difficult to say what exactly is causing the problem re: excessive oven spring without knowing the formula, but my guess is it needs more bench time. It sounds a lot like what I would call a green/young dough. We mix no time doughs in the bakery I work in and none of them go directly into the oven. Yeast needs a bit of time to digest all the nutrients that cracked wheat has to offer so I would look at lowering the % of yeast/levain and keep salt in the 2% range. Let the dough ferment longer, fold or de-gas it several times during bulk ferment and allow it to mature over a longer period of time and you should see better results.
Franko
Franko, based on the total milled white flour+milled whole wheat flour, the yeast comes out to 4.1%. This is based on the milled flours, and not figuring in the cracked wheat into the 100% milled flour total for the calculations. There was a small amount of cracked wheat added to the flour and sprinkled on the tops of the loaves. Just by what I've told you here, I believe if the % of yeast were to be reduced to 2.5-3.0% range, I might not get the explosive oven spring. Your thoughts?
There don't seem to be any ingredients in the dough that would inhibit oven spring aside from honey (don't know how much you put). If you use fresh yeast though, the honey shouldn't be a big issue either. 4.1 is about how much I'd use for a batter bread.
Aside from reducing yeast, why don't you just scale out less dough per pan? You say each loaf is almost 2#; what size pans are you using? For no-rise breads, you shouldn't scale more than 40% of pan size. The dough hasn't fermented yet and so you don't really have volume in the dough at the time of panning, you should consider that.