Friends of Erre4m, good morning and welcome to this new post. Today we are talking about leavened products and two ingredients that have a very significant influence on them. FAT AND SUGAR.
At first glance you might think that fat and sugar have little to do with breadmaking, but as we will see in this post, adding them can improve the result. When we add them in the right percentages and quantities, they have a positive effect on the dough yield and the yield of the finished product.
Let’s look at their characteristics and peculiarities.
Fat plays a threefold role in leavened products: it defines their structure, increases shelf life and gives the product flavour.
The fats mainly used in breadmaking and pastry-making (as regards leavened sweet products) are lard, butter and olive oil.
Adding fat mainly improves the elasticity of the proteins that form the gluten network, giving the dough greater malleability and extensibility.
A further benefit of fat is that it prolongs the freshness of the finished product, thanks to its ability to isolate the starch granules in the flour. As time goes by, after baking, the starch releases the water it absorbed during mixing: part of it is retained by the gluten and part passes from the crumb to the crust and disperses into the surrounding air. In this way the crumb grows drier and drier and the crust more and more moist — a factor that encourages the growth of mould.
Fat, in this case, hinders this process (which is called staling) because it forms a kind of impermeable film around the starch, preventing water from escaping and therefore from migrating, and so extending the shelf life of the product. Moreover, by coating with an oily film the carbon dioxide bubbles that have formed inside the gluten network, the fat is able to trap them. This process is extremely useful for the volume and softness of the finished product because, thanks to the addition of fat, you can obtain more voluminous, softer leavened products with a finer, more even crumb structure. In addition, adding fat significantly increases the nutritional value of the finished product.
Fat has a negative effect on the yeast because it slows down its activity, isolating its cells and preventing water and the necessary nutrients from passing through. Like sugar, fat too should not be added at the start of mixing, but in the final phase.
Sugar, as has been stressed several times, is not only food for the yeast cells but also acts as a stimulant of fermentation and, thanks to the Maillard reaction, determines the aroma and colour of the crust.
It should be noted that, as with salt, a large amount of sugar in the dough slows fermentation down rather than stimulating it. As with salt, a high concentration of sugar in the recipe causes plasmolysis of the yeast cells, because it creates a strong osmotic pressure around the cells that destroys them. In fact, in recipes — for example for leavened breakfast products such as brioche, which can contain as much as 10–15% sugar — it is always advisable not to add it at the start of the dough, but to move its incorporation to the middle stage.
Sugar helps bind the ingredients together thanks to its binding power, which comes from the natural viscosity it develops once dissolved in the dough.
It can be replaced with honey in an amount of 1–2%, thereby increasing the colouring during baking and the shelf life of the product, especially when the dough contains cocoa. Cocoa has the property of absorbing considerable amounts of water even after baking, which speeds up the staling process.
Honey, compared with sugar, can inhibit the power of cocoa and keep the crumb of the baked dough softer.
Because of their ability to slow down fermentation, sugar and fat, when added to the dough, make it necessary to increase the amount of yeast in the recipe. If, on the other hand, the dough contains large amounts of sugar and fat, the yeast’s fermenting functions are almost completely inactivated. For this reason, when a dough calls for large amounts of sugar and fat, baker’s yeast is replaced with baking powder — as, for example, in pastry-making.
If, on the other hand, a recipe involves many rich ingredients but must also rise well (and here I am referring to large leavened products such as panettone, pandoro, colomba, etc.), these ingredients are added a little at a time, after a period of fermentation and over several mixing stages.
To conclude this post, fat and sugar prove indispensable when you are after softness, taste, colour and a longer shelf life in a product. And it makes little difference whether the product to be made is mainly savoury or sweet: these two ingredients give the leavened product a surplus of organoleptic qualities that cannot be achieved without them. So whether it is oil bread, a ferrarese or a maritozzo, Mr. Fat and Mrs. Sugar offer themselves up and blend pleasingly with our palate.
Blog by Enrico Gumirato, pastry chef and trainer
