What happens if yeast rises too long

I rushed them into the oven right away. Rising your bread dough just until blisters start to form is fine and a great way to tell when your bread is ready to go into the oven, but right as they just barely start to form, you need to hurry to get it into the oven. No distractions.

If you walk away from it to answer the phone first, you could end up having too many blisters or too much gas in your dough, and it will flop just like mine did. How long should it take? A lean, moist dough in a warm kitchen will probably rise in 45 minutes or less.

A firmer dough with less moisture will take longer to rise. The important thing to keep in mind that setting a timer for your dough to rise should only tell you when to go check on the dough, not necessarily when the bread is ready to go into the oven.

Think of it this way: your yeast comes with its own thermostat, not a watch. Yeast is very sensitive to temperature; even a few degrees less in the kitchen can extend the rise time significantly. A change of 17 degrees will cut the rise time in half.

A trick that we like to use to cut the rise time in half is putting the dough somewhere warm, like in the front of the car, in front of a sunny window, or on top of a warm kitchen appliance, like the fridge.

Another thing we like to use is a proofing bag. Placing the pan with the dough inside a bag and then in a warm area efficiently captures the heat, traps in the moisture, and creates a greenhouse effect to make the dough rise significantly faster.

Bread that has risen slowly has a different flavor than fast risers, a more acidic flavor—hence the sourdough flavors in slow rising breads. When you purposefully slow down the rising process, a different kind of chemical reaction happens with the yeast. Instead of simply causing gas bubbles in the dough, it breaks down the sugars and starts to make alcohol in the bread.

This makes a wonderful flavor. You can use a proofing bag and a cool spot in the house or even a refrigerator to slow the rise. The bread in the spotlight product picture— New England Rustic Sourdough — was placed under an open window on a cool day to deliberately slow the rise. Total rise time, first and second rising combined, was about five hours. While lean breads are deliberately retarded to enhance the flavors, rich doughs or doughs with ample sweeteners or flavors will gain little with an extended rise since the flavors and sugars tend to mask the natural flavors of the yeast.

You can get roughly thirteen loaves of bread out of one bottle of dough conditioner Want some proof that the dough conditioner really works? The Perfect Dough Rise. The bread has a heavy yeasty taste or smell and in some cases, can even taste sour. This problem can also happen if you place the dough in a very warm location so that it rises too quickly. The worst-case scenario of letting bread rise too long is that it simply collapses during baking.

Imagine blowing a bubble with bubble gum. As the bubble expands, the bubble gum skin stretches tighter and tighter. Keep blowing and it eventually explodes. This is a bit like what happens to bread in the oven. If the bread contains too many carbon dioxide bubbles, the gluten in the bread can't support them and breaks down. There is not much you can do if bread dough has risen too much except comfort yourself with the knowledge that almost every baker has made the same mistake.

Going forward, though, you probably won't make the same error again. After you've kneaded the dough, form it into a soft ball and place it in an oiled bowl. Place a clean kitchen towel or plastic wrap over it and set it in a warm spot out of drafts. Let the dough rise until it doubles in size. Then, stick two fingers into the dough. Note: This technique generally doesn't work with sourdough bread, which has usually already undergone quite a long fermentation process before its final rise.

Notice there's a lot of room for the dough to expand here. If your log of shaped dough fills the pan full or nearly so to begin with, you need a larger pan. Wait — you don't use a plastic shower cap or bowl cover to tent your rising yeast loaf? Get with the program!

The loaves have risen 1" over the rim of the pan. Pop them into your preheated oven and they'll continue to rise into nicely domed loaves. But wait — what if you space out on Facebook , or have to make an emergency run to school to deliver your kid's basketball uniform? What would happen if you baked this bread as is? We'll see later on. But for now, let's perform an emergency rescue. First, deflate the dough. It actually feels kind of satisfying to press all that air out; you know, like you're breaking the rules and getting away with it.

Next, reshape the dough into a loaf. Here are our two baked loaves, side by side. On the left: the "remembered" loaf, baked at the proper time. On the right: the forgotten loaf, deflated and allowed to rise again before baking.

Notice the loaf on the right, with the extra rise, actually rose a bit higher — thanks to the extra yeast activity inherent in two rises rather than one.

And the flavor? No discernible difference between the two. Is it possible to build an extra rise right into your recipe? Sure; but it's easier to let the dough rise twice in the bowl, rather than twice in the pan. And what about that over-risen loaf that went right into the oven without being deflated and reshaped?

Because the bread had risen so much before it hit the oven's heat, there was no more capacity for additional expansion in the oven. It rose; it fell; it collapsed. Still tastes good, but not a pretty picture. So, can over-proofed dough be saved? Simply follow the steps above, and you can turn this potential culinary disaster into a perfectly lovely loaf!

Interested in more great baking advice from the experts — along with incredible recipes, great writing, and breathtaking photography? Or purchase it online. PJ bakes and writes from her home on Cape Cod, where she enjoys beach-walking, her husband, three dogs, and really good food! I was able to rescue some overproofed rustic sourdough bread dough.

Maybe it helped that this bread had some commercial yeast. The other thing that might have helped was that the overproofing happened at the bulk stage, so I gave it another rise before the shaping stage. Anyway, the bread turned out fine.