Freezing bread dough

stilernin

No probs........... just [STRIKE]wasting time [/STRIKE] having an educational half hour before starting the day.

Good luck

Penelope_Penguin

shopndrop wrote: »

Can I freeze some of the dough mix or just keep it in the fridge.

We have an existing thread on freezing bread dough I'll merge this thread to that one later to keep ideas together

Penny. x

Primrose

We have just made our first two loaves of bread this week using our Magimix food processor with its bread paddle, and they turned out fine.
We'd like to make more on a batch basis and wonder whether you can freeze or refrigerate the dry flour & yeast mixture or the risen dough mixture to make life simpler, or does any yeast based mixture "die" when chilled or frozen.

angeltreats

I know some people freeze fresh yeast, some say it works really well and others say it doesn't. I've never tried it, and have no idea what it would be like with dried/instant yeast.

I can tell you what we do at work though - we make all our own bread, and we weigh out and make up buckets of dry ingredients in advance (so flour, sugar, salt, bit of milk powder) and put the yeast in a separate little container wrapped in cling film so it doesn't come into contact with the salt or any moisture. Then when we want to make the bread we just take one of the dry mixes and add the liquid to it as normal. You could do something similar. I can't think why you'd really need to freeze the dry mix. The bread itself freezes very well though, if you wanted to bake a larger batch and then freeze some for later use.

rock-chic

Hi yes my mum did use to freeze fresh yeast in small batches and it was ok, hope this helps,

while I am on here does anyone know if you can still get fresh yeast from tesco or sainsburys or asda if so would it be the larger stores in the uk.
thanks

Primrose

rock-chick. Thanks. What I'm actually trying to discover is whether the yeast can be frozen when it's actually in the damp dough mix, i.e. when it's ready made up, before it goes in the oven for baking. I'm unclear whether your mum actually froze the yeast alone in small amount or whether it was actually in the dough mixture?

zippychick

Hi Primrose

I've merged this with an older thread discussing freezing bread dough, so you can see all the previous discussion

thanks
Zip

rocketone

I have spent ages looking for information on whether you can freeze dough and at least I have discovered that you can.


HOWEVER ! not a single poster anywhere who explains that you can freeze bread dough says anything meaningful about how to deal with it when removing it from the freezer to bake.

In particular, they all seem to instruct you to place the dough into bread baking tins in the freezer and then simply thaw and bake. The implications is that the tin keeps the bread confined in a loaf shape.

What I want to know is, having frozen the dough, can you successfully re-knead it after freezing to shape it .

The reason I really need to know this is that if bread dough is left to defrost, it will flop. Baking like that is not sensible and so it needs to be re-kneaded and shaped when it reaches room temperature.

Can you do this ? Is the yeast going to continue working ? What is the life of yeast in dough.

I mean, If I continually keep re-kneading dough, will the yeast just carry on fermenting forever until I bake it ? Or does the yeast
run out of nutrient to feed off ?