Ask 5 questions on the text ( составьте 5 вопросов по тексту ) Using Bread Improvers in Home Baking
Most of these additives are aimed squarely at commercial bakers, but there are a few you can experiment with at home. Ascorbic acid is better known as vitamin C, so you can grind up a tablet and dissolve a pinch of it in your wet ingredients to boost gluten development. You can also add a spoonful of bean flour or diastatic malt powder to your dry ingredients and see how that affects your gluten.
Another option is simply to boost your bread’s gluten formation with the addition of a high-gluten flour, usually sold as “vital wheat gluten.” This increases ordinary all-purpose flour to become the equivalent of commercial bread flour, and it can give your bread better rise.
There are also emulsifiers suitable for home bakers. The simplest is an egg yolk, which contains naturally occurring lecithin and adds richness to your dough as well.
Bread Improver and Dough Improver
There’s a fine line between what constitutes a bread improver and a simple, normal ingredient. Your favorite sandwich bread might add a bit of milk or oil, for example, which gives a softer crumb. That’s not necessarily an improver. For practical purposes, you could think of an improver as an ingredient you add primarily for its impact on how the bread dough performs rather than for its culinary virtues.
There are several types of improvers on the market, mostly aimed at commercial bakers. Some ingredients, such as ascorbic acid, improve the strength of the gluten and therefore the rise of the bread. Small quantities of soybean or fava bean flour can have the same effect. Yeast nutrients make the yeast livelier and enhance their leavening ability. “Reducing agents” like cysteine and metabisulphite make a stretchier dough, which is great for pizza. Emulsifiers help keep your bread soft and keep it fresher longer.