You baked a loaf of bread. It’s as dense as lead and flat as a piece of plywood. You post it on your favorite social media site and pose a single question. Yes, it’s time to play that exciting social media game, ‘What’s wrong with my bread?” This is a widespread thing we see in many groups. It is usually followed by 100 people giving great advice while another 100 ask great questions. The reality is, it’s just not that hard to figure out if you have a little science in your back pocket. This post will give you those tools.
A Tale of Two Leavenings
What makes bread rise is pretty simple. It is a mix of expanding gases and how much structure, traditionally gluten, has been developed in the bread. Not enough gases or gluten, and bread doesn’t rise. Oddly enough, too much gas may allow the bread to rise, but more like a balloon than having a great crumb. This is how Choux pastry works, which is a terrible dough for bread. On the other hand, too much gluten and the air can’t create enough pressure to lift the dough.
Leavened bread is any bread that rises via a leavening agent. In an over-simplification, we will say there are two types of leavening that produce the proper gases to help the dough rise; chemical and yeast. We use the term gases to cover everything from steam to carbon dioxide. Let’s take this one definition further. Chemically leavened breads are generally classified as quick breads. Examples of quick breads are pancakes, muffins, and banana bread.
Yeast breads are those that are leavened by way of critters and a byproduct of their binge eating. Yeast consumes sugar and turns starch into sugar to consume it next. The byproduct of their consumption is alcohol, carbon dioxide, and organic acids. That yeast may come in several forms, but it is all basically critters having a big ol’ party that makes your bread rise.
But Chemicals Are Bad!
Ok, yes, we know, the word chemical scares people. The word chemical, in our context here, is not some crazy concoction made by some multinational conglomerate bent on world destruction by way of your GI tract. Chemical leavening is the natural reaction of things like acids and bases that create expanding gases in the same way a school science project volcano does. If you use baking soda and baking powder, you are making a chemical leavened bread.
When Chemical Leavening Goes Wrong
Quick breads and other chemically leavened items generally are a bit more foolproof than getting yeast breads to rise. If you are following a known good recipe, and things don’t work out, it is probably something simple that went wrong. Since this is not a post on how to create a recipe using these two, for brevity, we will focus on what usually goes wrong.
- Old ingredients that have degraded. Baking powder and baking soda have a shelf life and can break down over time. To test them:
- Place a small amount of baking soda in a bowl and add vinegar. If it fizzes, it is good, otherwise replace it.
- Put hot water in a small bowl and add baking powder to it. If it fizzes, it is good, otherwise replace it.
- Improper mixing, especially over mixing of can cause quick breads to not rise. When mixed too much, gluten forms and keeps the gases from creating lift. Pancakes are notorious for having this problem so leave some small lumps please.
- You added or substituted something that threw off the chemical balance. Remember chemical leavening has to be a balance of acid and base to work right. If you use buttermilk over whole milk, you have changed the chemical composition of the recipe.
Yeast, The Beast
You can write a lot about yeast. Many of our most loved foods come from their digestive antics. Yeast are what create leavened bread and alcohol. This is a post about fixing things, not the yeast themselves. To do that, we need to understand a little but not a lot about them.
Ask someone how many types of yeast there are and you will get mixed answers because they are used in so many different ways and some have brand-specific names. To keep it simple, we will try and limit it to those used in making dough. Each type of yeast has specific qualities, which you can read about from people who know more than us. Starters such as sourdough or Bittman, are also created by yeast. They are a living, breathing, set of active critters that can be called up to help bread rise.
Unless they are dead, or asleep, or…, or…, and yes, that is the challenge with yeast. They are somewhat temperamental and need to be alive and active or they are of no use. They also need to be treated right, or they won’t produce well like any other people who work for you. Most of the time bread doesn’t rise, it is because our little bubble makers have been done wrong. We will get to why that can happen without you knowing you did anything wrong.
The Primary Reasons Breads Fall Flat
We won’t try and give every reason bread can fail to rise, but we can cover the major reasons for it. We will explain why, and how to avoid it the next time. Here are some likely culprits.
- The yeast you used is not active or dead.
- There isn’t enough or there is too much gluten or structure in the dough.
- You didn’t let it rise long enough.
- As with yeast problems, the starter isn’t ready even though it bubbles.
These are all the core issues for bread not rising. Let’s examine each one.
In Active or Dead Yeast
This is probably the number one reason bread doesn’t rise. Yeast are a bit finicky. They may need to be woken up to work, which is known as proofing the yeast. You need to know which type of yeast you are using to know if they must be woken up first before use. Once you know that, you can look at the type and application and do a quick Google search.
Regardless, we always proof our yeast or at least check some of it if it has been sitting, no matter which type we use. It is easy to check it is alive by putting a ¼ of a teaspoon of it in warm water to make sure it creates bubbles after a 2-3 minutes or so. Warm water brings us to the other finicky side of yeast, temperatures, and chemicals.
What is warm water? Warm is a subjective term. Warm water means any range from 95℉ to 115℉ depending on yeast type. At 120F yeast starts dying. Think about that for a minute. Our bodies are roughly 98.6F. The difference between what is ‘warm’ to us and dead yeast is not very big. This is why we use a thermometer to check our water temps.
Also remember that in certain areas of the world, the water supply has chemicals such as chlorine specifically designed to kill all bugs, not just bad ones. If you are having continuing problems, it may be time to look at that as a possibility. This can be fixed, usually, by using distilled or filtered water. We make bread with tap water all the time, but others aren’t always so lucky.
Gluten and Dough Structure
Bread requires structure, which is generally formed by gluten, to trap air bubbles to allow it to rise. If not enough gluten is present, the dough won’t have enough structure to rise. If too much gluten is present, the dough also can’t rise since the air and gas pressure can’t push or pull the structure around.
Let’s face it, most recipes also use all sorts of strange things for a definition of how bread dough should feel. It makes it hard for people new to bread making to understand when enough is enough when kneading bread. To fix this, for many breads, you can use what is known as a window pane test to get an idea of where you’re at. While this doesn’t work for all bread types, it is a good gauge to use as you teach yourself how much is enough.
It Didn’t Rise Enough
Yes, yeast is fickle. We have established that. It turns out they have their own schedule. Many bread recipes will tell you to allow it to rise for some stated time or until it doubles in size, or a combination of both. Time, in recipes, is a guideline not a reality. Even the idea of the bread doubling in size is technically a suggestion.
How much rise you can have and how fast it can happen are directly related to how active your yeast is and how much gas they can produce. That is directly related to how much food is available to them, and the temperature they are at. Simply put, yeast work faster the warmer they are up until a point. That doesn’t mean you want them going all out either. The best range for a dough rise is generally 75℉-78℉.
To improve your odds of success, it is best to do a poke test on the dough rather than simply wait and hope. When you do a poke test, you get a realistic idea of just how much rise has happened and how much the yeast has inflated the dough. This is the same way we may test a bike tire or beach ball for how inflated it is.
Starter Didn’t Start It
A challenge that arises when using a starter is that you also have to know when that starter is ready. Just because a starter is producing bubbles doesn’t mean it is a gung ho colony of yeast ready for a mission. We realized this as we started doing sourdough. Our first loaf was dense enough to be hardtack.
When you are just starting with some of these new items, you may not understand how bubbly that bubbly should be. Of course, again, most recipes will tell you ‘doubled in size’ for both starter and bread. That is a hard lesson to learn in both the amount of time and the ingredients wasted.
A helpful solution for this is what is called a float test. A float test is placing a small bit of a starter into water to see if it floats. This test gives you some assurance that the starter is not only mature enough, but is at peak production before it falls back onto itself.
Wrapping Up
Many things can go wrong in creating bread. In this post we have addressed many of the big ones. Even if these are not 100% full proof for every situation, they give you some tools to start digging into the problem. If you use them, they can help you methodically eliminate much of the noise from “What did I do wrong?”. For each item you know works with certainty, you can feel more secure in your abilities. All of this can also help reduce the wasted time and ingredients you have spent precious time and money on.