Difficulty with frozen bread dough

Question

My favorite yeast bread dough yields more rolls then my family can eat. I usually freeze it in quart-size Ziploc freezer bags. When I'm ready to bake a few rolls, I take a bag out, let it defrost enough to shape the rolls, let them rise, and bake them.

Sometimes this worked really well, yielding delicious fresh fluffy rolls. Other times it flops into a sticky flatbread that doesn't bake through.

I'm not sure why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Is it a problem with the yeast? The defrosting process? The storage?

Answer 1

I've had better luck freezing bread dough before it rises, or at least right after punching it down. At normal household freezer temperatures, the yeast may keep growing very slowly. If you freeze the already-risen bread, you risk getting a yeasty-tasting flat pancake :-).

And of course you're right to look at the defrosting process too. If you try to push this too fast, you could end up killing the yeast entirely.

Answer 2

Prepare the rolls as if you were to cook them–rising times included–, and froze them at the moment you would put them in the oven.

When you want to use the rolls: Do not defrost them. Put them directly in the oven.

It works for croissants too!