Question about yeast

[vitoduke]

If you want to make a double batch of dough, do you double the amount of yeast?  Some other dough recipes say not to double the yeast. THANKS

[canadave]

Hmmmm.....interesting, never heard of that before!  I always make a double-batch of dough, and I always double the yeast....guess I always just took it for granted that that's what one would want to do.  Can you point us to a place where it says to do otherwise?

Dave

[vitoduke]

It was a  dough recipe on the food network website. I've made pizza twice using Tom Lehmann's recipe, and they turned out great.  My wife who doesn't like pizza thought it was the best pizza she ever had. I appreciate all the research everybody on this site has done to take the mystery out of making a great New York pizza-I guess it's not the water!!!

[Pete-zza]

vitoduke,

Your question is a great one.

In the cases where baker's percents are used (including the basic Lehmann recipe for NY style dough), the scaling of a dough recipe up or down would be linear and proportional. That is, to make double the dough all the ingredients would be doubled.

However, I have seen dough recipes where that was not the case. Some time ago, I received a booklet on flours produced by Pendleton Mills, a miller located in the Pacific Northwest (WA). The booklet included dough recipes for a thin crust pizza (using the Pendleton Mondako flour) and a thick crust pizza (using the Pendleton Power Flour). What caught my eye was that as the amount of flour called for in the recipes went from 10 pounds, to 25 pounds, to 32 pounds, to 50 pounds, the amounts of the dough ingredients did not increase in the same proportion. For example, for the 10 pound flour case (for a thin crust pizza) the yeast (IDY) was 1 1/2 ounces; for the 25 pound case, it was 3 oz.; for the 32 pound case, it was 4 oz.; for the 50 pound case, it was 6 oz. (that is, as the flour weight went up, the yeast weights did not go up in direct proportion). The same pattern held true for the thick crust dough recipe. The non-proportionality also held true in both recipes for sugar and oil, but the amount of water (80 degrees F) went up in direct proportion.

I don't have a good explanation for the phenomenon. It may be that the recipes were developed over time and the amounts of ingredients recited reflected the results of actual experience in the field. It may also have something to do with the way that differents weight batches are processed in mixers. With different batch sizes, the operating speeds and mix times in a mixer may well be different, and the frictional temperature of the mixer will be different for the different batch sizes. Yet the instructions in the Pendleton booklet for the two recipes were identical as to mixing speed and mixing time.

Maybe some one of our members with experience in the field can provide an explanation.

Peter

[Gils]

I don't know the scientific reasons for it, but I can only guess you would not need to double the yeast in a doubled dough recipe. This I would think would be due to the fact that the doubled dough, would not be double size. Density would play a bigger part than size. The dough would be denser, but I believe the yeast would not need be as heavy to gain control of the surface area.  You could (no clue how to figure it without trial and error) probably end up with some equation for scaling the yeast down per increase in dough, but I think you would be okay just keeping notes on how the dough reacted, & tasted and cut back if it would be effective.

Sorry thats not much of an answer, I am just bumbling along here on this one. I am with Pete, as I have seen the non-preportionate adjustments in some recipes, but not others.