Pizza dough: Scientists have created a yeast-free dough that rises

Due to a severe allergy to yeast, Italian material scientist Ernesto Di Maio can’t eat traditional pizza, which is a tough bunch of leaves that can be eaten while living in it. place of birth of this famous dish. So he embarked on a journey making Neapolitan pizza dough that could rise without the help of yeast. The Results From a culinary and physics experiment published Tuesday in the Journal of Fluid Physics.

The researchers’ previous experience has demonstrated its pivotal role in compensating for the absence of yeast. Di Maio has studied how bubbles form in polymers including polyurethane, which is used as a component of paints, varnishes, adhesives and foams. He knew that both baking and polyurethane formed after two simultaneous processes, curing and foaming (producing a mass of tiny bubbles).

The researchers placed a small, unleavened pizza dough no larger than a penny in size into a hot autoclave. Over the course of a few minutes, they then shifted the pressure levels up and down while dissolving the gas in the dough at high pressure levels. When the pressure was slowly released from the autoclave, bubbles formed in the dough.

The study authors said that the texture of the final dough was similar to that of traditional yeast dough.

“The key to the process is to design the rate of pressure release and not to squeeze the dough that likes to gently stretch,” Di Maio said in a press release.

“We mainly studied how dough behaves with and without yeast — how softness changes with fermentation (rise), and how dough responds to a temperature program during baking,” Rossana Pasquino, a co-author on the study, said in a press release. . “This was fundamental to the design of a dough-pressing protocol without yeast.”

Because the authors were slowly making the bubbles, they were not quite the same as the bubbles in the yeast dough.

Unfortunately, Di Maio said, “the project is very immature” – so you can’t try this at home, unless you have a steam sterilizer and a way to pump gas into your pizza dough. But as someone with a yeast allergy, Di Maio hopes the new method can be used for other fermented foods, such as cake, in the future, “to help people enjoy healthy and delicious food,” he said.

“We will now start a study on a full-size pizza on lab equipment that should be ready in two months. Then, depending on the results, we will consider selling the idea to companies,” Di Maio added. “I think two years will be enough, if everything works out and the good people get involved.”