One of the most basic foods throughout the world is bread. It has been
made for thousands of years from three simple ingredients.
This project involves making bread dough. You can let it rise and then
play with the dough, or you can have a grown-up put it in the oven and
bake it for you. Either way, it is fun to do.
In this experiment we are going to make bread dough and watch it rise.
If you are going to cook your dough, you can split the dough into more than one loaf. Then try adding an extra
ingredient to each loaf and then compare the taste of the different recipes.
Dissolve a package of powdered yeast into one cup of warm water.
Pour
one cup of flour into a mixing bowl.
Add a little water and stir with the spoon.
The mixture should wet all of the flour and it will form one big ball.
If the mixture is runny, add a few pinches of flour and mix until the
dough becomes stiff. If all the flour is not wet or it won't form one
ball, add a few drops of water and stir.
Eventually a dough ball will form and it will become too hard to
stir. Now it is ready for kneading.
Kneading involves squeezing, stretching and folding the dough over
and over again until it becomes smooth and stretchy. Kneading the dough
helps to mix the ingredients and it helps the formation of gluten.
Gluten makes the dough stretchy or elastic. This
is important for the texture of bread, otherwise it would would be
dense and hard to eat.
Once the dough has formed a smooth stretchy ball, place in in the
bowl and let it sit. Come look at it again every 30 minutes or so for
the next 90 minutes. It will grow, and grow and grow. This is called
rising the dough.
Once the dough has risen, you can play with it and smash it back into
a small ball of dough. You will see that it has filled with lots of little
bubbles. This is carbon dioxide gas that forms with the yeast reacts with
the sugars in the bread. Those little bubbles are what cause all the little
holes you see in a slice of bread.
If you want to cook the bread, have a grown up place the dough ball
on a cookie sheet and place it in the oven, heated to 350 degrees (F)
until it is golden brown, about 20-30 minutes.
As a further experiment, try mixing more than one batch. Add a a tablespoon
of sugar to one batch. Add a half teaspoon of salt to another batch.
Replace the water with milk for another batch. Compare how each loaf
looks and tastes.
