if yeast turns sugar into alcohol during the fermentation process, why isn’t there alcohol in baked goods?
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The alcohol burns off during the baking process. The heat in the oven evaporates it. The same thing happens when you cook with alcohol on the stove. It can leave the flavor (depending on what you use) but the actual alcohol evaporates.
Alcohol boils at 78C, far before water. Baked goods that have alcohol added get the alcohol boiled out of them while they’re baking, so you don’t end up with alcohol in the finished food. The same thing happens when people cook with wine or beer, you get the flavor but not the alcohol because the alcohol has long boiled away by the time you eat it.
Think of how baked goods are dry compared to the dough you put in, containing water. Alcohol leaves the food even faster than water.
Alcohol already evaporates quickly at room temperature. The heat of the bread making process causes it to evaporate near instantly.
There is, but the heat kills any yeast and alcohol will burn off. There are baking products that rely on ethanol producing yeasts but they’re only going to keep producing it until baking kills off any organisms. Same as when you add a sourdough starter to a dough and let it prove.
There is. A loaf of white bread has like 0.5% alcohol by volume. Alcohol boils at 170 degrees F, a loaf of bread gets baked at 350 degrees. The alcohol is cooked away.
Fun fact actually it does contain a bit of alcohol even after baking.
“And it has long been known that bread contains residual alcohol, up to 1.9% of it. ”
– https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/08/03/why-isnt-bread-alcoholic/amp/
I would only add that the amount of alcohol in your fully fermented/proofed/risen dough is very small compared to wine because A) even a no-knead dough or pre-ferment bread recipe ferments for maybe twenty four hours, while wine ferments for many weeks, and B) there’s a lot more sugar in grape juice than there is in wet flour.
Good points but a bit more specific –
The production of alcohol takes time as it’s related to the chemistry of yeast *eating* the sugars in the dough. So a few basic starting points-
First of all, grain does not contain readily available sugars, it contains complex chemicals called “starch” which yeast cannot eat. In producing a beer you need to first chemically decompose those starches into simple sugars, you don’t do this extensively in baked goods. As an example, put a teaspoon of flour into your mouth, you aren’t going to get an orgy of sweetness. That’s because the sugars in flour are still bound up as starches. This just limits the amount of fermenting the yeast can do, which limits the amount of alcohol produced.
Secondly, in brewing conditions, it takes several hours/days for yeast to produce alcohol. In doing they breakdown the grain structures because they are literally eating it. You don’t want this in baking as this would destroy the gluten fibers that provide the structure that cause the baked good to rise. If you allowed the yeast sufficient time to breakdown the gluten it’s called “over-proofing” the dough and the baked good wouldn’t rise, it would inflate a bit and then deflate as it bakes. You’d get a puddle, not bread.
Finally- it does produce alcohol though. If you have a bread starter, a sample of living yeast active and ready to ferment and create bread, that starter creates a little puddle of alcoholic juice. You do want to remove the puddle though as the alcohol can poison and kill the yeast.
Yeast produce alcohol from sugar in the absence of oxygen. This is why it is important to keep the fermention vats sealed from the air. Any oxygen in the vat will make the yeast just produce carbon dioxide without alcohol. So it is first when all the oxygen already in the vat have been consumed by the yeast and no additional oxygen have been introduced that the yeast will start making alcohol.
But when you ferment dough to make baked goods you are not keeping it sealed and you are not letting it ferment long enough for the yeast to consume all the oxygen. So there will be a lot less alcohol produced from this but a lot more active yeast. However the tiny amounts of alcohol which may be produced when the dough is rising will likely get evaporated away or decomposed when you bake the dough anyway. Alcohol evaporates much faster then water. So you are left with no alcohol in the bread. This is also why food prepared with wine or beer is still non-alcoholic after being cooked.
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