Baking – What happens to dough when sugar is added

I went to the farmers' market last week and bought a variety of apples.

After cooking, here's the order from softest to firmest:
McIntosh, Cortland, Winesap, Yellow Delicious.

The McIntosh of course practically dissolve. If you want to make quick apple sauce, or if you like really squishy pie, they're the best.

I typically prefer Cortlands for pie, b/c they don't totally dissolve but neither do they keep their shape. I think I'm going to try Winesap, though; I think they'd work great for pie.

The Winesap apples I used got very soft, but they still held their shape. Think of it like a ripe banana or pear - it has shape, but you can squish it really easily. After 30 minutes in the oven (making apple crisp), they got soft enough that lightly pressing with a fork would squish them down. They did not stay as firm as the Yellow Delicious did and definitely not as firm as Granny Smith would.

Kneading dough has a few functions. First, it distributes the ingredients together evenly and allows the flour to become hydrated. As the flour starts to absorb water, enzymatic reactions occur and some proteins begin to mesh together. The two most important in this process are glutenin and gliadin. When these proteins start to get tangled up together, they form gluten, which is the protein that allows bread dough to stretch and trap gas bubbles produced by yeast. These reactions will occur on their own to an extent, as in no-knead recipes, but kneading accelerates the process.

Kneading also allows you to control the texture of the bread. A vigorous knead can help to produce a bread with a fine crumb as the kneading an tighten the gluten, keeping the air bubbles more uniform. Doing short kneading periods (or folds) spaced by time for the dough to relax and rise can give you more extensible dough which can help give you a more open crumb structure.

Finally, kneading is sometimes used to add inclusions to the dough that would disrupt it's activity if added to early. This can be things like seeds, which would cut gluten strands if included too early in the process, or things like butter in a brioche, which would shorten the dough if included before the gluten had already developed.