August 20, 2007 - 2:48pm
Can you double bread recipes?
This is probably a silly question to all of you but can you simply double bread recipes? I gave my sister a recipe ive used succesfully for pizza dough, she doubled it and apparently it came out way too wet and had to add twice as much flour (on top of the doubled recipe, does that make sense?). I thought ive heard before that you shouldnt double the yeast amount when doubling recipes but im not sure!!
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You can double some recipes, but I've had problems with my mixer not being able to handle above about 2.5 lbs of dough without complaining. You don't have to worry about the amount of yeast too much, you can usually double it if you want but a teaspoon will work any amount of dough for the most part, although it may take a little longer to get started.
I think the parts you need to worry about is your mixer being able to handle that much dough, inaccuracies compounding if you go by volume rather than weight for dry ingredients, and a huge lump of dough can take longer to proof because of the sheer bulk.
"a teaspoon will work any amount of dough for the most part"
Thanks ,i didnt know that was the case. I still have alot to learn.
You can safely increase bread recipes with very little correction if you are measuring your ingredients by weight. A lot of times these problems come down to small error growing larger. If you are measuring by volume and say you double 1 cup of water, do you fill a 1 cup measure twice or a 2 cup measure once? In the first case you measure twice and you have two chances to make some error, in the second case you only have to measure once but there are probably less graduations on the larger measure which means your single error could be just as large as your two errors earlier. Which is better, who knows? So in conclusion a cheap scale is worth 1000 volumetric measuring devices.
demegrad
http://www.demegrad.blogspot.com
in my cooking. I started using one almost at the same time I started baking bread and have used it for other recipes too. I find it so much easier to weigh ingredients than to measure - and it's a lot less messy!
Trish
The important thing to remember is the dough percentages. I always weigh my ingredients and double check my percentages when I double/triple a recipe. These two steps will make your formula accurate and that is the key. They are right. Buy a decent scale and I think you will love it.
rcornwall