Strike One

In the yeast bread unit, the class made four different types of bread. The first was a no knead dough, next we made pizza, pretzels, and cinnamon rolls. The no knead dough was very good and very simple, however it was much better on the third day, after it was given time to rise. The pizza was fantastic; I personally loved the grilled taste. The cinnamon rolls were good, but I do not like nutmeg and this flavor was a little too overwhelming in the dough. Lastly, were the pretzels. This is where our group had a little difficulty. When we began the process of making our dough for the pretzels we overheated the milk and water mixture and killed our yeast. Because of this we were given the opportunity to quickly fix our mistake. I was happy about this because pretzels would taste pretty bad if the dough didn’t rise. On our second try we had better luck, and we learned a few things from this. When we killed our yeast, we learned that we were measuring the temperature wrong such that we needed to fully submerge a tiny dot on the thermometer in order for it to read the temperature of the liquid, which we did not do, and that the thermometer itself was broken. We knew this because it measured the air temperature at 60 degrees, so by the time our milk mixture got up to the required temperature, it would have been at least 15 degrees off. I am glad I learned this, because next time I make yeast dough I will keep in mind that yeast is a living organism and needs to be treated with care. -Meg M