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Kitchen Humidity and Dough

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Steve

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How much does the kitchens humidity affect the rise of the dough? Due to current spacial restrictions, our dough table is 6 feet away from the back of our oven. It seems to be that when we are able to complete dough in the morning, it doesn’t blow up nearly as fast. Now this past Wednesday night we were slammed and had to knock out 5 50lb flour batches to get ready for Friday, this was done around 7pm. Water temp was as cold as we could get it and tried to store some water in the walk in to chill it even further. These dough balls are blowing up to the point they are falling off the trays in the walk in. Dough is done in a spiral mixer with a total mixing time of 11 minutes.

Should we relocate the dough table/mixer to somewhere cooler in the store?

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ddariel20 said:
We use ice in the water when it gets hot and humid
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We had done that before with a different mixer. We know a guy who broke his hook using the ice in the water so we are a little hesitant to try it with the spiral. You’re using the spiral though, correct?

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My place gets up to 90 at the end of the night. I only have a little 2 ton unit. I always use my dough chart and it works out fine.
 
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Steve said:
We had done that before with a different mixer. We know a guy who broke his hook using the ice in the water so we are a little hesitant to try it with the spiral. You’re using the spiral though, correct?

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We don’t have a spiral mixer yet, we still have a Hobart Legacy.
 
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If it’s hot, reduce your yeast.
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Tried this today. Reduced our IDY from .5oz to .35. I should have a good idea tomorrow with how the dough looks

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Are you monitoring your finished dough temperatures? The humidity has little to nothing to do with the blowing of the dough, it’s all in the dough temperature. Additionally, when mixing multiple doughs back to back I always like to have a 5-gallon bucket of ice water at hand, pour the entire contents into the mixing bowl while you’re scaling the ingredients, then pour it back into the bucket, add your dough water with the appropriate amount of SHAVED/FLAKE ICE, NEVER CUBE OR TUBE ICE. Repeat this for each dough (this is also the recommended procedure when making multiple doughs using the VCM (vertical cutter mixer). Reducing the yeast level to compensate for dough temperature is never a good idea as it can impact your dough in terms of performance a couple of days out or in oven spring. Remember, insufficient yeast level due to poor temperature control is a major factor resulting in “the dreaded gum line” I wrote an article on this not too terribly long ago.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Are you monitoring your finished dough temperatures? The humidity has little to nothing to do with the blowing of the dough, it’s all in the dough temperature. Additionally, when mixing multiple doughs back to back I always like to have a 5-gallon bucket of ice water at hand, pour the entire contents into the mixing bowl while you’re scaling the ingredients, then pour it back into the bucket, add your dough water with the appropriate amount of SHAVED/FLAKE ICE, NEVER CUBE OR TUBE ICE. Repeat this for each dough (this is also the recommended procedure when making multiple doughs using the VCM (vertical cutter mixer). Reducing the yeast level to compensate for dough temperature is never a good idea as it can impact your dough in terms of performance a couple of days out or in oven spring. Remember, insufficient yeast level due to poor temperature control is a major factor resulting in “the dreaded gum line” I wrote an article on this not too terribly long ago.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
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Tom,

Thanks for the response. Yes my finished dough temp has been in the mid to high 80’s. Mixing with a spiral mixer so I wouldn’t be able to chill the bowl and then get the ice water out (at least, not with ease since our bowl is not detachable).

Since I can’t chill all the water needed for the days batches, would it be a bad idea to place the bag of flour in the walk in? Or would there be too much moisture in the cooler for the flour? I’ve not tried this yet but have debated it a few times

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Chilling the flour can certainly help BUT it will take the better part of a week to bring a bag of flour down to 36 to 40F, that means you will need to be storing a full weeks supply of flour in the cooler, do you have that much room to spare? Most coolers are like closets…never large enough. Again, why not just use shaved or flake ice???
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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not sure why it took me over 20yrs, but I added a Mitsubishi split HVAC to my kitchen last year. I have an exhaust system with make-up air near the cooking area but my dough prep area and dishwashing/salads was a dead zone. It has been a game changer in both summer & winter months and the operating costs are not bad. We use it on humid days to get the humidity out of the kitchen as well.

Also, we keep our water buckets for dough in the walkin freezer until it is just about ready to freeze when making dough on hot days
 
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Chilling the flour can certainly help BUT it will take the better part of a week to bring a bag of flour down to 36 to 40F, that means you will need to be storing a full weeks supply of flour in the cooler, do you have that much room to spare? Most coolers are like closets…never large enough. Again, why not just use shaved or flake ice???
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
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I have an ice machine but it’s cubed ice. We’re purchasing another walk-in so we may end up having space to chill flour but we will see

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How about just putting water into a large food safe container and adding a bunch of ice to it, store in the walk-in cooler, this way you will always have a ready supply of ice water. Assuming a mixing time of around 8 to 10-minutes, ice water should be able to get your finished dough temps down into the 70’s on the hottest days.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Just get a few buckets full with the amount of water per batch of dough and leave them in the walking box. This way they get to 38 degrees. 20 mins before you make your dough put it in the freezer to drop it a few more degrees and your set.

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Steve said:
How much does the kitchens humidity affect the rise of the dough? Due to current spacial restrictions, our dough table is 6 feet away from the back of our oven. It seems to be that when we are able to complete dough in the morning, it doesn’t blow up nearly as fast. Now this past Wednesday night we were slammed and had to knock out 5 50lb flour batches to get ready for Friday, this was done around 7pm. Water temp was as cold as we could get it and tried to store some water in the walk in to chill it even further. These dough balls are blowing up to the point they are falling off the trays in the walk in. Dough is done in a spiral mixer with a total mixing time of 11 minutes.

Should we relocate the dough table/mixer to somewhere cooler in the store?

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Many years ago I used to be in the pie business. We encountered many of the same issues being discussed here. The best dough we made was as a result of putting flour in the walk in a week ahead of time and in addition we made up portioned buckets of water and put them in the walk in the night before we made dough. In those days some of our locations did not have enough a/c to keep the room temperature down so our offset to that was to make the dough in the early a.m. during the hottest months. Obviously we also escaped the effect of hot ovens also.
 
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