Eggs In Dough

How many of you use eggs in your dough? What kind of difference does it make?

We put 3 eggs in our 50kg mix.

Don’t know if it makes much of a differenece or not as I just kept doing what the previous owner did - habit I guess.

Dave

There are a couple of issues with adding eggs to your dough. First, is using fresh, shell eggs, you must keep in mind that ALL shell eggs are deemed to be salmonilla positive by the USDA. I’m sure you have seen all or f the menue warnings about eating under cooked eggs. Sure, baking the dough will kill off the organisms, but that isn’t where the problem lies, it lies with cross contamination, and that scares the bejebers outta me. Considering who we have working for us, given the opportunity for cross contamination, they will find a way to make it a reality, and I don’t think we really want to go there. Even if using pasteurized whole eggs (frozen) there is still the potential risk for abuse, leading to contamination and then cross contamination wil provide the delivery system to your customers.
The other thing is that in most cases, the amount of egg added to the dough is less than 5%. At this level, the benefit of adding egg isn’t measurable, or worth the potential risk (see above). In some dough formulas, you might see a little additional browning due to the egg content, but you can get the same thing, cheaper, and a lot safer by just adding a couple percent sugar, or additional sugar to the dough formula.
We were covering this vert topic yesterday in our Wholesale and Commissary Pizza Production Seminar.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

It doesn’t sound good. Does your dough smell once it gets a little on the old side? I’d be leary of the issues Tom mentions. Just use a good quality oil.

The only smell you get is from the additional yeast fermentation. You would never know that there were eggs in the dough. In the wholesale bread making industry we used to make “egg bread” containing 10% added whole egg (based on the flour weight). In looking at the dough you would never know it was egg bread, in fact, we had to put “egg shade”, a type of yellow coloring in the dough to give it the color that our customers thought egg bread should have. If I remember correctly, I believe there is a regulation stating that the yellow coloring cannot be added to the dough unless whole eggs are also present in the dough. We never had any problems with cross contamination becaues we were all very well trained in safe food handling practices.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

The color thing is funny. Some of those hamburger buns are so yellow they glow. :sunglasses:

Based on what Tom said I did a little search. I didn’t realize that people were allergic to eggs. Most ask if
they can get a pizza without cheese or if we have dough that’s not wheat based, but never eggs.

http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/flowers9_01.html

I forgot to mention that the one place where yellow color is added to the dough without the benefit of any whole egg, or and constituent egg part, is in the making of Chicago style pizzas. When these are made in Chicago they add yellow (egg shade) coloring to the dough to give it the characteristic yellow glow common to Chicago pizzas.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor