Yeast stopped working. Dough-y no rise-y anymore!

[Pete-zza]

Tom,

I saw a You Tube video recently at

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PRA_BJYvTc" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PRA_BJYvTc</a>

where the pizza operator, Luigi, rehydrates ADY in room temperature bottled water, as shown starting at around 1:11 in the video. We don't know what room temperature is specifically but the mixer is around the corner from the oven and may be somewhat warmer than normal. Also, since we suspect that Luigi is making a same-day room temperature dough, I suppose that maybe Luigi uses his rehydration method to slow down the fermentation process a bit by reducing the fermentation capacity of the ADY. Or maybe that is how he learned to rehydrate the ADY. I have used ADY completely dry before in order to slow down the fermentation process and thereby increase the fermentation period. An example of this is at Reply 48 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,6758.msg64308.html#msg64308. In writing up my experiment at Reply 48, I was careful to note my deviation from the recommended ADY rehydration method. I did this because I did not want anyone to think that the deviation was the rule rather than the exception. I suspect that if you told the members over at the PMQ Think Tank that it was OK to rehydrate ADY in room temperature water, you could expect some of them to come back knocking at your door again with problems for you to diagnose and correct. I personally believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Peter

[The Dough Doctor]

Peter;
I'd bet that Luigi is just doing it the way he learned to do it. I don't think abusing the yeast by re-hydrating it in cold water is the correct way to slow down fermentation, but to each his own. I'm in your court, in that if I want to slow down the fermentation I'll just save a few pennies and use less yeast, or adjust the temperature of the dough water to give me a slightly cooler dough off of the mixer, hence a slower fermenting dough, but that is using a technology that everyone is not familiar with, which, underscores one of my main objectives, to provide useful information and increase the technical understanding of the ingredients and processes that go into the making of our favorite food PIZZA.
Back when I first started at the PMQ web site I was accused of speaking and writing in a foreign language. That was the language of "bakers percent". Today they all speak that language over there, and many of the long time regulars have developed an excellent understanding of the more technical aspects of dough, sauce, and pizza production.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

[scott123]

I don't think abusing the yeast by re-hydrating it in cold water is the correct way to slow down fermentation, but to each his own.

Luigi is using room temp (>70 deg.) water. Peter posted this earlier in the thread (bold mine):

Warm rehydration maximizes dry yeast performance by quickly reforming the cell membrane. Cold rehydration hurts performance by slowing down the recovery of the cell membrane and allowing more cell constituents to escape or “leach.” The effect is not that great between 70° and 100°F, but at lower temperatures up to half of the yeast cells’ soluble components can be lost.

And this, as you stated earlier, is just an ADY issue, not an IDY one.  If commercial pizzerias and home bakers stick to IDY, they never have to worry about heating water ever again (in large or small amounts), unless an emergency dough is the goal.

Peter, fwiw, I know, in that video, that Guy Fieri calls it 'dry active yeast,' but, in this instance, unlike the flour, he's not reading it off a bag, so it's quite possible he's calling it the wrong thing.  It could be IDY. It's really hard to detect the yeast granule size in the video.

[Pete-zza]

Back when I first started at the PMQ web site I was accused of speaking and writing in a foreign language. That was the language of "bakers percent". Today they all speak that language over there, and many of the long time regulars have developed an excellent understanding of the more technical aspects of dough, sauce, and pizza production.

Tom,

I have been on this forum since August, 2004. Before I joined, I had read just about everything that I could find that you wrote, either at the PMQ website, the Pizza Today website, and even at the AIB. So, by the time I joined, I think I had something to say and, as I said it (like how to rehydrate ADY ), I gave attribution to you. A lot of what I learned from you also ended up being used to design the various dough calculating tools at http://www.pizzamaking.com/dough_tools.html, which are based on using baker's percents (whose use and manipulation I learned mainly from you). We have some members whose very first post on the forum is one based on using one of those tools, and we have other members who use the tools almost exclusively, sometimes in ways that are amazingly creative. Your fingerprints, directly and indirectly, are all over this forum. You are even in the forum's Pizza Glossary, at http://www.pizzamaking.com/pizza_glossary.html#L. 

Peter

[Pete-zza]

Peter, fwiw, I know, in that video, that Guy Fieri calls it 'dry active yeast,' but, in this instance, unlike the flour, he's not reading it off a bag, so it's quite possible he's calling it the wrong thing.  It could be IDY. It's really hard to detect the yeast granule size in the video.

scott123,

That thought did cross my mind but when Guy commented about needing to stir the yeast longer to compensate for the room temperature water, Luigi did not correct him and went on to say that he adds a bit of sugar to the yeast/water mixture.

Peter