Tang zhong what is

This post might include affiliate links. Please see my policy. In this how to make tangzhong introduction, we'll take a look at a method for bringing extra tenderness and keeping quality to your sourdough bread by pre-cooking a portion of the recipe's flour. Pre-cooking some of the flour and liquid in your formula gelatinizes the starches in the flour, transforming the two ingredients into a viscous paste that's then added directly to your bread dough.

The remarkable thing about tangzhong, also called yudane or water roux, is how the overall dough hydration can be kept relatively low, with fewer fats and oils, and still result in incredibly tender bread.

In this guide on making a tangzhong, we'll look at what flour types you can use for the roux, what liquids, and a few different methods to cook the flour and mix it into your bread dough. First, let's quickly look at yudane, a similar approach to pre-cooking some of the flour in the recipe. Yudane is Japanese and essentially means roux just like tangzhong, which is Chinese. It has the same end goal: to gelatinize the starches in flour with a hot liquid. It differs from tangzhong in that you boil the liquid usually water and pour it directly over the flour, stirring to incorporate.

After this, you let the mixture rest until it's at room temperature before mixing it into your dough or you can let it rest in the fridge until the next morning. At this point, you'll take the mixture out, let it warm to room temperature, and mix it into your dough as needed. Tangzhong and yudane both work equally well to gelatinize some of the starches in a bread formula. The yudane method saves a little time since you don't have to cook the flour at the stove, but reaches the same end goal.

In my experiments, I've not seen dramatically different results between the two methods. Because of this, in this guide, I'll talk about them both interchangeably. Tangzhong is simply the act of cooking a portion of the raw flour in a recipe with a liquid.

During starch gelatinization , the liquid is absorbed into the starch which swells as the mixture becomes more viscous and gel-like. This gelatinization is similar to how the exterior of a bagel gelatinizes during boiling. We ate them by pulling them apart string morsel by string morsel. The challahs I have been eating lately are more like soft bread. When computing, I get thatI needed to add g of liquid milk or water to bring the hydration up. Check out how these ingredients can contribute to overall hydration, and reduce the amount of additional liquid added accordingly.

Even if your recipe doesn't call for these extra ingredients, remember that g of the extra liquid will be going into the tangzhong starter, so you'll only be adding 37g extra liquid into the dough portion of the recipe, and it should work just fine. When you're calculating hydration using the water content of ingredients like eggs or milk do you add the remaining non water mass to the flour mass or does the hydration percentage always just use flour and water exclusively?

Hi Josh. Liquids like water and milk will be counted in the hydration of your calculation for bakers percentage. So for one egg the amount of liquid it would add to the hydration is 45 grams. Happy Baking! Hi Gemma. I use a bread maker machine and simple white sometimes mixed with Graham flour with tangzhong. The answer is yes! And you can do it with almost any recipe. Here's how. View our privacy policy. Blog Tips and Techniques How to convert a bread recipe to tangzhong A surefire path to softer bread and rolls Author.

Recipe in this post. How to build tangzhong into your favorite recipes So how, exactly, do you convert a standard yeast bread recipe to use tangzhong? It all starts with hydration Once you've chosen a recipe, you need to determine its hydration: the percentage of water or other liquid compared to flour, by weight.

The dough will be stiff and dry, which can inhibit its rise and lead to dense, heavy bread. Rising and baking I let the doughs rise, then shape them into loaves and place each in an unlidded 9" pain de mie pan my loaf pan of choice. Extra credit: determining water content Once you feel comfortable with the basics of tangzhong, you can try fine-tuning your hydration math.

A final note on hydration A great variety of factors come into play when you're baking yeast bread, and some of these affect hydration. Tagged: sandwich bread rolls yeast bread dinner rolls tangzhong soft bread soft rolls. Filed Under: Tips and Techniques. The Author. View all posts by PJ Hamel. Comments Hello!

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