Freezing half my bread dough
Hello!
I bake a sandwich loaf using Ken Forkish's recipe for 50% Whole Wheat Bread With Biga, with these changes: I use 75% whole wheat flour and 25% all-purpose white flour, and I incorporate ¼ cup canola oil and ¼ cup honey when I combine the biga with the final dough. I am using SAF Gold Instant Yeast. I'm quite happy with the results.
I want to make two loaves worth of this dough and take half of it and freeze it after the shaping step so that I can bake that loaf, starting with the final proof, at a later time. Specifically what I am aiming for is to be able to bake a loaf of bread on a weeknight, after work. So far, I haven't been able to get a good rise with the loaf that's been frozen and defrosted. I've been ending up with tasty bread that is denser than I want. The proofing is exhausted before enough of a rise has been achieved.
My process so far has been to freeze the shaped loaf, covered in the pan. I've taken the loaf out of the freezer before I go to bed the night before and put it in the refrigerator. It's stayed there until I get home in the evening. Then I take the loaf out of the refrigerator and let it proof at room temperature or at up to 90 degrees. (I've played around with several approaches to this final proofing step.) I've been surprised that there is no or almost no rise taking place in the refrigerator. But more importantly, after the loaf is out of the refrigerator, I've waited up to four hours to allow the proofing to run its course. I haven't over-proofed the dough, except perhaps once, for experimental purposes.
My restriction is that I don't want to make changes, ingredient-wise, to just half the recipe to improve the result with the frozen loaf, since the point is efficiency and convenience.
Does anyone have any advice or suggestions for things to try?
Thanks,
Jayson
Jayson, I can’t speak to freezing dough, but freezing individual slices has been my practice for decades. I really like taking out the slices I need, microwaving a few seconds and either eating of toasting.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/62257/tip-frozen-bread-individual-slices
By the way, when microwaving with my appliance, choosing Defrost > setting “01” per slice (“02= for 2 slices, etc) the bread comes out perfect. Moist, soft, and IMO every bit as good as straight out of the oven.
God bless frozen bread!
Hi, DanAyo. Thanks for your comments. I have taken that approach, and because I bake for one, myself, most of the time and sometimes don't eat a lot of bread, I usually do freeze part of my loaf, sliced. I was experimenting with freezing an extra loaf's worth of dough as an alternative to having a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer for possibly more than a couple weeks, which sometimes happened when I baked two loaves at once. I could do a more thorough job of wrapping that extra loaf for freezing than I have in the past, however, so reverting to this approach is still an option.
I agree that the fact that bread takes well to freezing is a blessing!
Welcome to TFL!
Just in case you haven't checked, there are a handful of posts on the topic going back a while.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/search/node/freezing%20dough
Feel free to chime in with a comment or question on old posts. The "regulars" here usually check all new comments on the comment-feed.
By the way, do you know the temps of your freezer and your fridge?
Thank you idaveindy. I read dozens of posts about freezing dough here and on other sites before embarking on my project. As with many subjects, opinions and experiences were quite varied. Some people never had much luck with it; others did. There were enough of the latter that I tried it, but so far I more resemble the former.
Also, the different examples involved so many variables, and I didn't see a use case just like mine, so I thought it would be worth seeing if anyone might identify with the specifics of my situation. I am starting to revisit some old posts, however.
One solution might be to divide the dough into two before the bulk rise and incorporate extra yeast into the one destined for the freezer. That would reduce the degree of efficiency/convenience I'd hoped to achieve, but it's worth my trying out.
Oh, the freezer (non-self-defrosting) is around 13 deg F and the refrigerator 37.
Thanks, Jayson
So far I share your experience with frozen dough. The bread is decent, but denser than usual, and I also sometimes end up with a rubbery texture.
I have tried before first proof, after, after 2nd proof...
At this point I am freezing the baked bread, take it out in the morning and leave it on the counter, the at night run it briefly under cold water (trickle of water and slide it one way then other quickly), and rebaking at 350C for 3 min which gives me warm bread with a bit of crust on a week night, but I have nothing better to offer.
Do share your findings if you make any progress on this! :)
Thanks for describing your experience, even though it does not fill me with hope. I will share any future findings, although due to the nature of the issue they will be slow in coming.
Jayson
Here’s what I’ve decided to try next. I am making a two-loaf batch of dough as described in my original post. Usually, I'd do four stretch-and-folds as part of the bulk rise. This time, I will divide the dough into two portions after the third. One portion will go into the freezer, unshaped, while the other goes on to become a freshly baked loaf of bread.
On the back side, when I am hankering to bake bread on a weeknight, this is my plan. When I “get home from work” (that’s just a concept now, since I am working from home for the foreseeable future), I’ll take the thawed dough out of the refrigerator, and I will incorporate some extra yeast. How much yeast, I haven’t yet decided. How to incorporate it? I thought I would wake it up a little with a little warm water and then alternate gentle, slow-motion, Forkish-style pincering with a fold or two. As little of this manipulation as I can while feeling like I accomplished a decent distribution of the added yeast. Then I’ll let the dough finish its “bulk” rise, and after that proceed as usual through proofing in the loaf pan and baking.
This would be much less convenient than what I was originally aiming for, but if it enables me to bake a good loaf of bread on a weeknight, that sure beats what I’ve encountered so far. I’d welcome any comments on this idea, especially on how to incorporate the additional yeast.
Interesting idea! I read another thread where they doubled the yeast in the recipe, first proof, punch down and shape, then froze in pan ready to bake... might give that a try next weekend.
My latest trial, following the plan in my 3/28 post, didn't work out. The dough sat in the refrigerator after coming out of the freezer for 24 hours -- only 17-18 hrs was in the plan, but some other developments got in the way. I mixed in additional yeast equalling 50% of the amount called for for the "final dough" in the Forkish recipe (so, 0.75 g for a single loaf) in the form of a tiny amount of water-flour-yeast slurry. I used a modified, slow-motion pincering action to mix, folding the dough in half between pincering's. I did three pincering's and then stopped, based on the degree to which the dough was firming up, because I didn't want to overwork the dough (turns out I didn't at all).
I let the dough sit in its container at room temperature for an hour and then put in my oven in proofing mode (90° F), just because of the earlier delay I'd experienced. The dough sat in there for 3 ½ hours (!) before I pulled it out. It was still kind of slack and soft (thought it produced good windowpane), but I had to get moving. I shaped it and put it in the loaf pan for proofing. After an hour, I put it in the oven to bake. The loaf hadn't risen as much as I usually like to see, but oven spring made up for that and was excellent — at least some evidence that the extra yeast was making a difference.
The resulting loaf was pretty good but with a little finer crumb than I like — a little finer than the reference sibling loaf that I had baked straightaway. Tasted a little blander, too, as if under-salted, and this was based on a side by side taste test.
In sum, this variation, which required more work, was of no help whatsoever in terms of enabling me to get frozen bread dough to bake up expediently on a weeknight.
If I experiment with this some more, which I still may have enough motivation to do, I may repeat this method except for giving the dough at least one stretch-and-fold after incorporating the extra yeast, since it appeared the gluten could have used more development. Maybe this would motivate the yeast?