Basic baking concepts: Elasticity and extensibility

by Shayna Glick, Posted Oct 7th 2008 @ 10:30AM

A large piece of bread dough with someone's hand stretching one side of it.

The magic of wheat flour is its ability to produce leavened bread. Wheat is the only grain that can do that because it is the only grain that can make gluten, the three-dimensional protein structure that can stretch and expand and hold air, then set when baked into glorious bread.

That stretchiness and ability to expand both have a name. Elasticity, the stretchiness, is the tendency for the dough to want to shrink back into its previous shape. It's like a rubber band: after you stretch it out the band snaps back into place. The ability to expand is called extensibility. The dough becomes more extensible, it will expand, as the gluten structure is allowed to relax.

The give and take between elasticity and extensibility is what makes yeast raised bread what it is. It is able to be worked into desirable shapes and to expand with the gas inside of it. Because of the elastic element, bread dough has to be rested several times during the process to allow it to be more extensible, but you don't want to get rid of either aspect. Without elasticity, the dough would simply be a slack mess, unable to hold it's shape. The two elements work together to form the bread that we've depended on for a good chunk of human history.

Filed Under: Ingredients
Tags: bread, elasticity, expansiveness, extensibility, gluten network, GlutenNetwork, protein structure, ProteinStructure, stretchiness