L-Cysteine Dough Relaxer Process

and Calculations
By Allen Cohn
San Francisco, California
Copyright © 2022 Allen Cohn. All Rights Reserved.

If one wishes to use l-cysteine as a dough relaxer, how does one do it and how does one calculate
how much to add?

According to Lallemand’s Baking Update, Vol. 1, Number 7

(https://www.lallemand.com/BakerYeastNA/eng/PDFs/LBU%20PDF%20FILES/1_7REDUC.P
DF), l-cysteine should be used at 10 – 90 ppm (which is 0.001% – 0.009% in baker’s math).
That’s a very tiny amount! So, what is apractical way for a home or small artisan baker do it?

The chemical itself is easy to purchase. I bought it on Amazon, at the time just $12.99 for a bottle
of 120 600 mg capsules. Literally a lifetime supply!

Then I very thoroughly mixed the contents of a single 600 mg capsule with 500 g of bread flour.

Dough Relaxer Calculations 1 Revised: 4/4/2022

All I have to do while making dough is replace a little bit of the bread flour with this mixture. But
how much?

This is exactly the same as any other baker’s math calculation. Suppose your formula uses Y g of
flour and you want to use 10 ppm l-cysteine:

? g l-cysteine = Y g flour × (0.001% l-cysteine / flour / 100%)

[The colored lines are dimensional analysis (https://www.chem.tamu.edu/class/fyp/mathrev/mr-

da.html) I used to check my work.]

How much of the mixture do you need to achieve this? Suppose the calculation above yielded Z g
of l-cysteine. Then,

? g mixture = Z g l-cysteine / (0.6 g l-cysteine / 500.6 g mixture)

For example, at home I am making little test batches with only 250 g of flour.

250 g flour × (0.001% l-cysteine / flour / 100%) / (0.6 g l-cysteine / 500.6 g mixture)

= ~2 g mixture

So, for every 10 ppm l-cysteine I want to include in my dough, I just replace 2 g of the flour with
2 g of the mixture. 30 ppm seems to be working well for me, so that’s just 6 g for every batch.

Dough Relaxer Calculations 2 Revised: 4/4/2022