Kneading dough with Cuisinart
I always use a Cuisinart with metal blade to knead my dough. I’ve been reading a lot of articles that state that this is a bad idea as the dough will get too hot and kill the yeast. So I decided to do a little experimenting to see if this could be true. Personally, I really never had a problem with that happening in practice, or not that I could tell. From what I researched, it seems that yeast cells begin to die off at 120 degrees and are completely dead at 140 degrees.
I used my regular 66% hydration with 15 oz of bread flour in the Cuisinart bowl and 2 tsp of yeast. While it was running I added 10 oz of water through the feed tube. The water had been heated to 92 degrees as I like to “wake up” the yeast. After just a few seconds of processing, just enough to mix the water and flour, I shut off the machine and let the dough rest for a 20 minute autolyse. After the autolyse I checked and the temperature of the dough was 89 degrees.
I then sprinkled a rounded tsp of salt all over the dough and turned on the machine for one minute of kneading. After one minute I shut it off and immediately took a reading of the dough in the Cuisinart bowl. My thermometer was the Thermapen and was very accurate. The readings in different parts of the dough were from 89 degrees to 100 degrees, an increase of about 10 degrees and certainly nowhere near the temperature needed to start killing yeast cells.
So if you use the Cuisinart, have no fear. Unless you start with really hot water, above 110 degrees, there will be no killing of yeast.
Nice experiment. And well documented too. I do find it interesting that there is 11°F of variation after a full minute of mixing. That tells me that the blade is not doing much mixing at all. In fact it seems to be heating some portion of the batch and not touching the rest (otherwise the temperature would rise to some intermediate value between the post-autolyse temperature and the maximum temperature you measured somewhere else in the doughball). So while it won't kill the yeast, I am not sure it speaks well to the mixing ability of a Cuisinart when it comes to dough.
Woops!!! Slight error. Well, more than slight. The temperature after kneading varied from 99 degrees to 100 degrees, a difference of only one degree in different parts of the dough. Sorry about that. I just hit the wrong number key.
Really, when they speak of "machine kneading" and "overheating dough", they are referring to stand mixers, and maybe other type mixers(Hobart types, etc). Not bread machines. Consumer bread machines are considered to be relatively gentle on dough.
I never had problem when I made my bread in the Cuisinart.... you don't flog it to death in there, mine always came out fine..........................
My Cuisinart is a food processor, not a bread machine. I used the metal blade. As I stated, the temperature did rise about 10 degrees but, even starting at 89 degrees, it was nowhere near the temperature needed to kill yeast. I really did this experiment because so many people write these articles about all sorts of things and others accept it as truth. Don't believe everything you read. Try it yourself.
Sorry. My mistake.
In his book "The Best Bread Ever" Charles Van Over spells out his method of measuring flour temp, adjusting water temp, so that the dough is between 75 and 80 degrees at the completion of processing. It's an interesting read if you use this method of mixing.