A few days ago my husband and I got ambitious and made homemade pizza for the first time. We had a recipe for whole wheat dough and tried that in the interest of health. I used King Arthur’s white whole wheat and regular all-purpose flour in about a 2:1 ratio, following the recipe.
The problem is it gave me a stomachache. Kind of bloaty, felt like a big rock just hanging out in my stomach for a while. My husband, who has more of a cast-iron digestive system, said it affected him similarly.
Is there something we might have done wrong with the recipe? Like, is there some way the yeast made the dough continue to grow in our stomachs after we baked and ate it? Could the flour itself have been too raw? It went through 2 separate “raising” cycles of about an hour each, and baked for about 15-20 minutes total. Or did we just eat too much? I have had other recipes using the same flour with no problems, so I don’t think anything about it was defective. However, there may have been some user error. Any thoughts?
When you say you’ve used the same flour before with no problems, do you mean the same package, or the same type? If it was out of a new package it’s possible, although I don’t know how likely, there was something “off” in the flour itself.
What about the yeast, new batch, or have you been using it before?
Maybe it wasn’t the crust at all. What sort of items did you add as toppings?
How long after eating did it take to feel problems?
Yes, actually the same package of flour with no problems, both before and after the “pizza incident.”
The yeast was from newly purchased little packets of Fleischman’s yeast. I don’t usually do any other baking that uses yeast, so this is the part I’m most worried about having screwed up. Are there any stupid beginner mistakes with yeast?
Toppings were tomato sauce, which I could understand giving me heartburn, but this seemed different. Also turkey pepperoni, mozzarella, and black olives. We went fairly light on the cheese. We each had 2 large slices.
I’d say I felt bad from about hour 1 to hour 4 after eating the pizza.
I have 3 more batches of the dough in the freezer, which I’m now eyeing with trepidation.
Well, its in the nature of whole wheat breads that they are very dense. And, without being too sure of the science, I have heard that high fiber-anything absorbs water and expands in the stomach, and that makes you feel fuller.
Did use a lot of crust or roll it down thin? In your estimation, was the crust properly cooked through?
The recipe said use half the dough to make a thin crust pizza, and that’s what we did. That comes out to 6 grams of fiber each, which is not completely out of whack with my regular diet, but I guess if it’s all insoluble may be a little much for one sitting.
The crust was crispy and had no obvious raw spots. The recipe was to heat the oven and pizza stone to 550, then turn it down, cook the bare crust for about 7 minutes, then top it and cook another 7 minutes. To me, that doesn’t seem like very long to bake bread.
Regular, or rapid-rise yeast? My recipe calls for rapid-rise, and I used regular once. The results weren’t what you’ve described, but I could tell the difference.
Regular, or “active dry.” That’s what the recipe called for, and I did dissolve it in warm water first, and checked the water temperature with a thermometer, because I am a yeast newbie. It got a little foamy on top, but didn’t look all white like in this video. http://www.breadworld.com/Video.aspx?id=ksziuzwLuGY Also, the recipe had me dissolve it in a whole cup of water, not a 1/4 cup like the video.
The yeast was definitely not completely dead, because the dough did rise twice.
I used a whole packet of yeast. The packages are labeled 26 1/4 teaspoon servings, which would be a little over 2 tablespoons. I’m pretty sure they don’t actually contain over 2 tablespoons of yeast, though. The recipe said to use 1 tablespoon and I just figured that was the size of the packet. Hmm.
The problem with whole wheat flour is that it doesn’t rise well. If you get a box of “vital gluten” from the flour-and-sugar aisle in the grocery store and add the amount recommended on the box, it should rise better and be less dense. Worth a try, anyway. We tried it on our whole-wheat bread-machine bread, and for once, it wasn’t a brick.
If you do add gluten use some extra water as well.
Gluten percentage is wheat is affected by the type of wheat, and by the differing milling processes. Cake or pastry flour is “softer” without as high a gluten content. It’s ideal for cakes or non yeast raised baked goods because they won’t be as “tough” What is marketed as bread flour comes from harder wheat strains and is best for bread baking because the higher gluten percentage gives the product structure. The following link is kind of a fun article about flours and gluten: