SCALING UP BRIOCHE RECIPE
Hi everyone
I'm having a bit of a nightmare when scaling up a recipe in my industrial spiral mixer and I'm trying to figure out what's going wrong.
I'm making a brioche doughnut recipe /
500g flour
60g sugar
10g salt
15g yeast
200g egg
150g water
Emulsified with 125g butter when kneading
This works totally fine when being doubled or tripled in a stand mixer but in my spiral mixer the dough seems to go gloopy and break down when adding the cold butter.
The mixer is a single speed and in an ideal world should be capable of kneading as required but I just end up with a gloopy mess rather than a firm, springy dough.
This is the case no matter how short or long I mix and knead for.
Any tips or advice? Should I reduce hydration for larger batches?
Thanks
Please, check out this material and video
https://bakerpedia.com/processes/brioche/
And watch your dough temperature. It should not surpass 24C (75F) even at the end of mixing or butter will separate and create a gloppy mess.
Use room temperature or liquid butter.
You can add sugar along with butter as well if you use "double hydration" or two step approach when mixing brioche dough. First, mix a batch of stiffer dough and develop gluten, then slowly incorporate sugar and bit by bit drizzle in butter.
Some bakers incorporate sugar and water first, and eggs and butter at the end of mixing. That works too, i.e helps to develop the gluten before adding fat with butter and egg yolks. It depends on the specific formula that you use for your brioche.
The current process looks something like this...
Mix dry ingredients with egg and water until a firm dough is achieved.
Then slowly incorporate cold butter and knead further.
This works with a small batch in the stand mixer.
The reason I bought a spiral mixer is because they apparently are better for working dough without over working it. However I do notice the dough becomes warm.
Even when doubling the above recipe in the mixer it seems to become very gloopy rather than firm. I also tried this with 60% hydration instead of 70% with similar results.
You need to develop gluten first. Not just mixing until a firm dough is achieved, but knead that dough until its gluten is developed and that would take time, because you have only one, slow speed of mixing.
If water and eggs plus flour give you an excessively firm dough, then hold back a small portion of flour and add it later, along with butter.
Make sure your dough is fairly cold at that point, because DDT of brioche dough is 24C (75F).
Only then, after you see smooth dough surface and well developed gluten, and after you confirmed its temperature, begin to add soft or melted butter bit by bit.
Spiral mixers are wonderful, but you need to adjust to their slow speeds and some models heat dough more than others, especially if your bakery is warm and slow kneading takes a lot of time to develop gluten. Brioche dough should be rather cool, not warm.
When I got my spiral mixer, my first batch of dough took 40 minutes of slow kneadng to develop gluten to my satisfaction, that is how slowly it works.
I would caution against using melted butter for brioche. The objective is to get the solid fat to coat the gluten and not to be absorbed by the flour (which is what you enable when you use melted butter). Softened butter still counts as a solid fat from a physics perspective, but if you freeze it and grate it, the cold butter can help offset the temperature rise that occurs during its incorporation into the dough. I occasionally experience an inversion where the dough goes unstable during the incorporation of the butter but comes back together as the fat is uniformly mixed into the dough. I think this is a result of adding the butter too rapidly.
Jeffrey Hamelman and Raymond Calvel recommend using pliable butter (kneaded butter). To avoid adding butter that is too warm, to keep the dough cold, they recommend to take the cold butter out and beat it with a rolling pin until pliable and only then add it to the kneaded dough.
The same trick is used wth the cold brioche dough. It is taken out and beaten with a rolling pill until pliable and then shaped cold.
Most commercial bakers that I know simply add room temperature butter or melted butter to the brioche doigh.
The difference between incorporation of cold or room temperature or even melted butter is in the resulting crumb. Incorporating cold butter gives more open and irregular crumb and higher bread volume which is not necessarily the goal of brioche which shrinks as it cools if it's baked too fluffy. It has an even crumb and its high volume is due to the intensive mix more than its butter temperature.
To prevent curdling during butter incorporation, what you call "dough goes unstable", we add soft butter blended with a small amount of flour from the recipe. This butter+flour paste never disrupts "dough stability", it incorporates very well.
I like the idea of adding some flour to the softened butter. Is there a percentage (of either the butter weight or the total flour weight) that you would suggest adding?
The optimum would be 1:1 butter flour paste by weight, but even half of that would work wonders. 50-100g flour from the formula for each 100g butter added.
In the formula above, where we see 125g butter for 500g flour, I would set aside 60-125g flour.
In order to reduce the amount of flour set aside for the melted or very soft butter incorporation, another method could be used: adding butter in two portions. 10% from flour in the formula in the beginning of mixing and the remaining butter - at the end, when the gluten has already been developed.
In the formula above it would mean 50g of butter are mixed with 450g flour immediately and kneaded until the dough is well developed and at the end incorporate the remaining 75g of butter blended with 50g flour.
Basically, there are two distinctly different kinds of brioches depending on when you incorporate softened butter: breadlike and cakelike (muffin-like)
"Some brioche recipes first make a simple dough with yeast, water, and flour. Softened butter is mixed in only after the dough has been formed and kneaded to develop the gluten. Once the gluten has been formed, it remains intact, and the butter has less effect on its strength.
Other brioche recipes add softened butter directly to the flour before the dough is formed. This method, of course, coats the gluten-forming proteins, so that once liquid is added very little gluten forms. Such a delicate dough (more like a batter) results in a very moist and tender brioche. It's quite different in texture from the more breadlike brioche."
https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/icooks/01-13-03.html
I think I will try that approach with Liege waffles and see how it works.
Of the three main types, spiral, fork and diving arms, spiral creates the most friction and therefore heats dough the quickest... They are popular because they are very effective but they are the least gentle and the most prone to overworking...
fork is the least effective and and creates the least friction, ideal for very low hydration doughs and doughs that require gentle development.
diving arms (double arm) mixers are best for enriched doughs, they are gentle and are excellent at incorporating additional ingredients i.e.; fats, sugar and add-ins etc.
No working knowledge of diving arms, but the spiral mixer creates much less dough heat than Kitchenaids or Ankarsrum. I have to run the Famag long and hard to get the dough temp (~68-70% hydration) to 80F.
Maybe Doc will join in and either confirm or disagree. He also runs the same mixers.
I think Michael has it right. So far, my experience with a spiral mixer suggests that it will overwork dough relatively easily, so I take special precautions to avoid it. Heating is simply a matter of how much energy is dissipated in the process of mixing which you can roughly calculate but is easier to just measure. If the mechanical impedance match between the mixer and the dough is good, you get good mixing and modest temperature rise. But if the match is poor (a spiral mixer with a big load of 80% hydration dough), you will get a lot of temperature rise without getting very effective mixing. Thus my practice is to mix at low(er) hydration and low(er) speed until gluten development is well underway and then carefully bassinage in enough additional liquid to reach the target hydration in conjunction with reaching both my target dough temperature and gluten development objective. And doing that is a process of trial and success. When in doubt, mix at a lower speed (because in the limit the mixer and the dough are perfectly matched when the mixer is stopped). You can get a mental image for what is going on at the other end of the curve by thinking about what is happening at very high speeds: the mixer is ripping and cutting the dough rather than stretching, and massaging it.
This may also provide a clue for the OP to follow.
Danny, we're not comparing the same things here. I was addressing the commonly available professional mixers used in bakeries. Domestic mixers like the Ankarsrum and KitchenAid don't even come into it.
There is a simple explanation to your observation, I'm betting your Famag spiral mixer is the largest of your three mixers? Large objects, both dough and the mixer itself take longer to heat up, the greater the mass, the more energy is required to heat it up and larger objects have a bigger surface areas from which to lose energy too. While smaller doughs and smaller mixers take less energy to heat up.
I went back and read the original post after Doc replied. Didn’t realize only commercial mixers were considered.
The capacities of all 3 mixers are fairly close.
This same question was asked and answered before. Maybe this would help
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/60451/brioche-spiral-mixer
Thanks for all of your help so far.
I initially started this dough with the recipe at the top, in a Kitchen Aid Professional. The results have been great overall and usually made with 8 mins of mixing followed by a further 8 minutes of kneading with incorporating butter.
Doubling the recipe also is pretty reliable in the kitchen aid.
I picked up a Buffalo (pretty entry level) Spiral mixer as following on from some discussions with others "in the know" it was apparent that the spiral mixer doesn't overwork the dough in the same was as a stand mixer.
Previously I'd used softened butter at room temperature but more recently have gone with very finely sliced butter from the fridge, more pliable and incorporates far more quickly.
Are we saying melted butter left to cool would be better here?
I'm going to triple the recipe at the top and see how I get on mixing the initial ingredients until I reach a window pane level of dough and then incorporate the butter.
Keep hitting me up with advice as it's all really helpful 🙌
Old post but did OP solve this problem? Also having issues scaling up a brioche and getting dough development correct when using a spiral.