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Regardless of the inevitable heat of summer, the cumulative result of the whole afternoon stew, or the extravagant baking, the kitchen is a way to warm up faster than any other room. The air may be a bad heat conductive as Kenji explained beforeBut over time, it can be enormous, slowly heating the kitchen in degrees. Room temperature is more than the air around you; This also represents the temperature of the flour, the mixing bowl, the worksheet and the roller tap.
Reversing the air conditioner can help you feel better in the short term, but if you rotate it 24 hours a day, you will have no chance to cool the equipment and the chamber. For example, this weekend we do not run air conditioning for serious meals when no one is surrounded. The blast on the summer morning cools the space to 23 ° C to 74 ° F, but the descent is thermometer He tells another story to a bag of flour.
This 78 ° F (26 ° C) flour is well below the body temperature, making it cool to us, but a real heat source for the butter block. This is a big deal for the pie dough because its texture depends completely on butter. When this butter is beautiful and cold, the dough feels so soft and elastic, well-worn skin, not least wet or sticky. But when the “room temperature” climbs above 73 ° F (23 ° C), everything that touches the dough heats the contact, softened the butter and stick to the touch.
This is the reason why the dough pasta needs less water on a hot summer day; Soft butter is more like a liquid than a solid dough. Folk wisdom says that humidity plays a role in how much water you need, but I disagree. The flour has a rather low capacity to absorb moisture from the air, and this property is stable on the shelf. If the flour can suck up enough environmental moisture to change the behavior of the recipe, then the supermarket bread bread like a bread.
Usually a terrible idea is to use less water in the dough. For beginners, this makes it difficult to form gluten and produces a weaker dough that is more likely to provide. The weak dough is also prone to cutting off in the oven and collapsing easily when baked once. Not only is such a dough thirsty, you can't wait to absorb moisture from the pie filling, so the bark is wet and pale.
When things warm up in the kitchen – say anything above 73 ° F – the only viable solution is to keep the dough temperature below 21 ° C (21 ° C) 70 ° F. This means taking a few steps to counteract the heat sources in the kitchen – and I don't talk about ice water or frozen butter, repairs that do nothing to treat heat.
Cool everything
The first and easiest step is to throw everything into the refrigerator, from the bowl and the rolling needle to the pie. (The warm, pie plate can soften the dough while contacting, encouraged to stick and make the finished cake harder.) The “dry mixture” of the recipe and the water (flour, sugar, salt) and water as the measuring cup itself can be warm enough to drain the cold tap water.
The purpose of this step is not to make things frost-cold, but to simulate the temperature of a slightly cooler kitchen so that the finished dough hours are somewhere 65 and 70 ° F (18 to 21 ° C). The straight frozen ingredients are bad news, butter cooling to a point where you no longer have plasticity to roll and fold inside the dough, causing cracking and crumbling.
Keep it cunning
If the recipe gives detailed instructions for the temperature-sensitive ingredient, such as butter, take care! For example, my Old -fashioned fluffy pie dough It draws the two butter sticks cut into half -inch cubes, each roughly broken.
These specific directions consider the pieces relatively large and thick and are therefore cold and solid. Cutting the butter into smaller pieces increases the surface, creating thinner pieces of voivode that quickly become sticky and soft. This is exponentially real for the butter, which is rubbed or cut into a delicious food, which also gives a crumbling, biscuit texture to the pie.
Ice, ice baby
If you are really hot in the kitchen, your worksheet itself is the enemy, the heat source for each square inch for dough. Fortunately, there is an easy repair.
Divide several cups of ice between two gallons -sized zippered bags, add a little cold water to each, close it tightly and lie down until the lower counter is beautiful and cool. Again, you don't try to turn your kitchen into a winter wonderland! You simply want a work sheet that will be an ally to maintain the temperature of the dough between 65 and 70 ° F.
Learn your dough
One Instant reading digital thermometer It facilitates the identification of ingredients that are too hot from the beginning, and this is a fool -safe method to monitor dough temperature. If the kitchen is particularly warm, try to keep the dough around 18 ° F (18 ° F). Whatever colder and will not behave as it should, and makes the digital thermometer particularly useful by softening pre -prepared and cooled pasta.
Flour generously
When the time comes to roll, do not whimper on the flour. I am not talking about a pinch or sprinkle, but the full handheld, thrown above and below. This prevents the dough from sticking when it warms up and smashed between the counter and the tap. You can always spray excess flour with a confectioner brush, so don't be shy!
Remember that these steps simply serve to counteract excessive heat in the kitchen, so they may not need each one. If you are aware of how the temperature of the ingredients and equipment can affect the dough, it will result in a long way to avoid the disappointment of the sticky mess. Keep the dough temperature between 65 and 70 ° F and the rolling will always be a breeze.