In response to my previous posting Breadmaker Jewish Rye Bread, SeaBee asked:
Shouldn't there be some sugar involved somewhere?
Now, I'm not sure if this is a specific questions because SeaBee thinks that Jewish Rye Bread should be sweet(er), or a more general question like:
I notice in your posting on Breadmaker Jewish Rye Bread there is no sugar. I thought that yeast needs sugar to digest in order for the bread to rise. How can a bread recipe work if there is no sugar in it?
I have chosen to answer the second question.
You are right that yeast digests sugar and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol, both of which contribute to the rise on bread. And, yes, many recipes use sugar (white or brown) or honey or some other sugar to feed the yeast, but that is not the only source of sugar.
By weight, bread flour is about 72% starch, 12% protein, and 13% water. The rest is made up of some sugar, minerals, fiber and other matter. All-purpose will contain a slightly higher proportion of starch, and cake flour even more. Starch is nothing more than a long chain of sugar molecules joined together in a string to make one larger molecule.
Wheat flour also contains two important enzymes, amylase and diastase, that convert starch to sugars that the yeast can digest, so even without adding sugar it is possible to get the bread to rise. Many bread recipes such as traditional baguette and pizza are made simply with flour,water, yeast and salt, and no sugar at all. Other recipes add diastatic malt, which contains diastase to encourage a faster breakdown of starch to sugar.
Many commercial bread flours contain added enzymes to encourage the breakdown of starch to sugar.
As explained in Raising Bread, recipes made without sugar usually take longer to rise and tend to develop more complex flavors than doughs made with sugar.
|
|
Due to the volume of questions received, not all can be answered.
© Lost Hobbit Enterprises 2004 onward
Now That You Ask ... or Substituting Agave Nectar for Sugar
I frequently receive questions from readers about how to change a recipe. They may want to substitute ingredients, reduce calories, or make the recipe "healthier" in one way or another. The problem is, they send me the question without the recipe they are hoping to change and expect me to somehow be able to know the context. Think of it like calling a restaurant you have heard about and asking, "How do I get to your place?" You know that the first thing they are going to ask is, "Where are you now?" They can't tell you how to get from here to there unless they know where here is to begin with.
For example, I recently got this question:
Now, I'm not about to publish the recipe, or tell people that so and so eats vast amounts of Bourbon Spice Cake, any more than the new restaurant is going to take out billboards telling everyone your address, but it would sure help understand the context in which the question is asked. It might even allow me to test my suggested fix in the kitchen to be sure I'm on the right track.
Without the recipe, the best I can do is assume some common reference point -- "Drive to the front of City Hall, and then go right six blocks to highway 16 ..." Of course, those kinds of instructions may be way out of your way, and may not really help if you live in Podunk and I'm in East Eyebrow.
So, having no mile markers to tell me where the recipe is coming from, what can I say about the above question?
If your recipe, for example, calls for 1 1/2 cups of white sugar, then you need to use about 0.666 X 1.5 = 1 cups of agave nectar. You also need to reduce the amount of other liquid in the recipe by 1/3 of 1 cup. Now comes the problem, where to get that third of a cup of liquid. If you take out 1/3 cup the bourbon, it's no longer going to be much of a Bourbon Spice Cake. If you take out the 1/3 cup from the buttermilk, you may need to reduce the amount of baking soda by a proportional amount, just over half the total, but there may be other ingredients that are reacting with some of the baking soda, so you may not need to reduce it by that much. If you reduce the number of eggs, then the structure of the cake may change.
There could be two other ways out of the conundrum about how to change the amount of liquid. One depends on knowing the entire recipe. Start by working out the ratio of flour to liquid in the recipe, remembering that butter is around 20% water by volume, each whole egg contains only about 3 tablespoons water (the rest is protein and fat), and that the buttermilk is between 1% to 2% fat. Armed with this information, you have another option, which is to increase the amount of flour in proportion to the amount of excess liquid in the agave nectar. A typical spice cake might have around the same weight of flour as liquids, so compensating for 1/3 cup too much water could just as easily be dealt with by increasing the amount of flour in the recipe by 5.3 ounces weight or around 1/2 cup. Chances are that adding a half cup of flour wouldn't be right either, since that would change the ratios on spices, etc., but adding a 1/4 cup of flour and reducing the liquid by 2 tablespoons could very well work out, maybe without even needing to change any of the other ingredients.
Finally, you could cut the buttermilk by the required amount, in this example 1/3 cup, and then add buttermilk powder to replace it. Since buttemilk powder is used in a 1 to 4 ratio with water, adding 4 teaspoons of buttermilk powder would compensate for the amount of real buttermilk taken out and should balance the recipe back up. The water from the agave nectar will make up for the liquid lost in reducing the amount of real buttermilk used.
All of this assumes that the cake contains 1 1/2 cup of white sugar in the first place, which I don't know for sure.
The point is a) messing around with the balances on ingredients can be fussy work and b) without having the whole recipe, it's hard to know how to change it. The more information you give about where you are starting from, the easier it is to tell you the directions to get where you want to be.
Due to the volume of questions received, not all can be answered.
© Lost Hobbit Enterprises 2004 onward
Posted by Dave on May 09, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Reblog (0) | | Digg This | Save to del.icio.us | |
|