The earliest processing of cereal grains probably involved parching or dry roasting of collected grain seeds. Flavour, texture, and digestibility were later improved by cooking whole or broken grains with water, forming gruel or porridge. It was a short step to the baking of a layer of viscous gruel on a hot stone, producing primitive flat bread. More sophisticated versions of flat bread include the Mexican tortilla, made of processed corn, and the chapati of India, usually made of wheat.
Baking techniques improved with the development of an enclosed baking utensil and then of ovens, making possible thicker baked cakes or loaves. The phenomenon of fermentation, with the resultant lightening of the loaf structure and development of appealing flavours, was probably first observed when dough’s or gruels, held for several hours before baking, exhibited spoilage caused by yeasts. Some of the effects of the microbiologically induced changes were regarded as desirable, and a gradual acquisition of control over the process led to traditional methods for making leavened bread loaves. Early baked products were made of mixed seeds with a predominance of barley, but wheat flour, because of its superior response to fermentation, eventually became the preferred cereal among the various cultural groups sufficiently advanced in culinary techniques to make leavened bread.
Brewing and baking were closely connected in early civilizations. Fermentation of a thick gruel resulted in a dough suitable for baking; a thinner mash produced a kind of beer. Both techniques required knowledge of the “mysteries” of fermentation and a supply of grain. Increasing knowledge and experience taught the artisans in the baking and brewing trades that barley was best suited to brewing, while wheat was best for baking.
By 2600 BCE the Egyptians, credited with the first intentional use of leavening, were making bread by methods similar in principle to those of today. They maintained stocks of sour dough, a crude culture of desirable fermentation organisms, and used portions of this material to inoculate fresh doughs. With doughs made by mixing flour, water, salt, and leaven, the Egyptian baking industry eventually developed more than 50 varieties of bread, varying the shape and using such flavouring materials as poppyseed, sesame, and camphor. Samples found in tombs are flatter and coarser than modern bread.
The Egyptians developed the first ovens. The earliest known examples are cylindrical vessels made of baked Nile clay, tapered at the top to give a cone shape and divided inside by a horizontal shelflike partition. The lower section is the firebox, the upper section is the baking chamber. The pieces of dough were placed in the baking chamber through a hole provided in the top.
In the first two or three centuries after the founding of Rome, baking remained a domestic skill with few changes in equipment or processing methods. According to Pliny the Elder, there were no bakers in Rome until the middle of the 2nd century BCE. As well-to-do families increased, women wishing to avoid frequent and tedious bread making began to patronize professional bakers, usually freed slaves. Loaves molded by hand into a spheroidal shape, generally weighing about a pound, were baked in a beehive-shaped oven fired by wood. Panis artopticius was a variety cooked on a spit, panis testuatis in an earthen vessel.
Although Roman professional bakers introduced technological improvements, many were of minor importance, and some were essentially reintroductions of earlier developments. The first mechanical dough mixer, attributed to Marcus Virgilius Euryasaces, a freed slave of Greek origin, consisted of a large stone basin in which wooden paddles, powered by a horse or donkey walking in circles, kneaded the dough mixture of flour, leaven, and water.
Guilds formed by the miller-bakers of Rome became institutionalized. During the 2nd century CE, under the Flavians, they were organized into a “college” with work rules and regulations prescribed by government officials. The trade eventually became obligatory and hereditary, and the baker became a kind of civil servant with limited freedom of action.
During the early Middle Ages, baking technology advances of preceding centuries disappeared, and bakers reverted to mechanical devices used by the ancient Egyptians and to more backward practices. But in the later Middle Ages the institution of guilds was revived and expanded. Several years of apprenticeship were necessary before an applicant was admitted to the guild; often an intermediate status as journeyman intervened between apprenticeship and full membership (master). The rise of the bakers’ guilds reflected significant advances in technique. A 13th-century French writer named 20 varieties of bread varying in shape, flavourings, preparation method, and quality of the meal used. Guild regulations strictly governed size and quality. But outside the cities bread was usually baked in the home. In medieval England rye was the main ingredient of bread consumed by the poor; it was frequently diluted with meal made from other cereals or leguminous seeds. Not until about 1865 did the cost of white bread in England drop below brown bread.
At that time improvements in baking technology began to accelerate rapidly, owing to the higher level of technology generally. Ingredients of greater purity and improved functional qualities were developed, along with equipment reducing the need for individual skill and eliminating hand manipulation of bread doughs. Automation of mixing, transferring, shaping, fermentation, and baking processes began to replace batch processing with continuous operations. The enrichment of bread and other bakery foods with vitamins and minerals was a major accomplishment of the mid-20th-century baking industry.
Looking to feel happier instantly? We've all been there; all you want to do is take your mind off life and its daily stressors. My advice? Go into the kitchen and start baking. It'll give you something new to engage your mind, and warm chocolate chip cookies are always a nice treat. This is also known as procrastibaking, which is the act of baking to avoid other stressful times or assignments. It's been proven that baking is a stress reliever. Baking for other people brings a sense of accomplishment and something to be proud of. A few months back, I discovered a Huffington Post article that intrigued me because it explained the psychological benefits to baking for others. Here are the benefits of baking and why it makes you feel happier.
Baking gives you directions to follow
Baking is a science and has necessary steps that must be taken in order to create the desired treat. It gives you a set of basic instructions to follow and in turn, you must have the concentration and patience to carry out the process.
You're in control of everything
Besides the necessities, you are the one deciding how much of one flavor you want over another and can even add a completely new item to the recipe to enhance the flavor if you desire. You have the freedom to customize a recipe however you would like.
Bakers’ yeast performs its leavening function by fermenting such sugars as glucose, fructose, maltose, and sucrose. It cannot use lactose, the predominant sugar of milk, or certain other carbohydrates. The principal products of fermentation are carbon dioxide, the leavening agent, and ethanol, an important component of the aroma of freshly baked bread. Other yeast activity products also flavour the baked product and change the dough’s physical properties.
The rate at which gas is evolved by yeast during the various stages of dough preparation is important to the success of bread manufacture. Gas production is partially governed by the rate at which fermentable carbohydrates become available to the yeast. The sugars naturally present in the flour and the initial stock of added sugar are rapidly exhausted. A relatively quiescent period follows, during which the yeast cells become adapted to the use of maltose, a sugar constantly being produced in the dough by the action of diastatic enzymes on starch. The rate of yeast activity is also governed by temperature and osmotic pressure, the latter primarily a function of the water content and salt concentration.
Baking allows your creativity to shine
Baking lets your creative juices flow! You can make all of the creative decisions when it comes to baking, whether you have the perfect idea for decorating cupcakes or constructing a new cake. Creativity doesn't even necessarily need to be seen. Try experimenting with the ingredient mixing process, as well.
Carbon dioxide produced from sodium bicarbonate is initially in dissolved or combined form. The rate of gas release affects the size of the bubbles produced in the dough, consequently influencing the grain, volume, and texture of the finished product. Much research has been devoted to the development of leavening acids capable of maintaining the rate of gas release within the desired range. Acids such as acetic, from vinegar, or lactic, from sour milk, usually act too quickly; satisfactory compounds include cream of tartar (potassium acid tartrate), sodium aluminum sulfate (alum), sodium acid pyrophosphate, and various forms of calcium phosphate.
A physical connection is made between your mind and body
Baking gets you into a rhythm, from measuring out the ingredients to having the constant sound of the mixer going in the background, to even kneading out the dough. Baking can be a therapeutic way to relax for those who need to unwind.
Sharing baked goods is a form of expression and emotion
When there are times that no words can properly express what you are feeling, baked goods are always the answer. They are the perfect way to let someone know you are there for them and care. Plus, who doesn't want to have an avid baker as their friend?
Being an outlet of creation, baking makes you feel happier and helps you practice patience. As mentioned in another Spoon article, there are obvious signs when someone who uses baking as their stress relief has not baked in a while. Next time you need a distraction from life's daily stressors, give baking a try.
Flour
Wheat flour is unique among cereal flours in that, when mixed with water in the correct proportions, its protein component forms an elastic network capable of holding gas and developing a firm spongy structure when baked. The proteinaceous substances contributing these properties are known collectively as gluten. The suitability of flour for a given purpose is determined by the type and amount of its gluten content. Those characteristics are controlled by the genetic constitution and growing conditions of the wheat from which the flour was milled, as well as the milling treatment applied.
Low-protein, soft-wheat flour is appropriate for cakes, pie crusts, cookies (sweet biscuits), and other products not requiring great expansion and elastic structure. High-protein, hard-wheat flour is adapted to bread, hard rolls, soda crackers, and Danish pastry, all requiring elastic dough and often expanded to low densities by the leavening action.
Leavening agents
Pie doughs and similar products are usually unleavened, but most bakery products are leavened, or aerated, by gas bubbles developed naturally or folded in. Leavening may result from yeast or bacterial fermentation, from chemical reactions, or from the distribution in the batter of atmospheric or injected gases.
Yeast
All commercial breads, except salt-rising types and some rye bread are leavened with bakers’ yeast, composed of living cells of the yeast strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae. A typical yeast addition level might be 2 percent of the dough weight. Bakeries receive yeast in the form of compressed cakes containing about 70 percent water or as dry granules containing about 8 percent water. Dry yeast, more resistant to storage deterioration than compressed yeast, requires rehydration before it is added to the other ingredients. “Cream” yeast, a commercial variety of bakers’ yeast made into a fluid by the addition of extra water, is more convenient to dispense and mix than compressed yeast, but it also has a shorter storage life and requires additional equipment for handling.
Bakers’ yeast performs its leavening function by fermenting such sugars as glucose, fructose, maltose, and sucrose. It cannot use lactose, the predominant sugar of milk, or certain other carbohydrates. The principal products of fermentation are carbon dioxide, the leavening agent, and ethanol, an important component of the aroma of freshly baked bread. Other yeast activity products also flavour the baked product and change the dough’s physical properties.
The rate at which gas is evolved by yeast during the various stages of dough preparation is important to the success of bread manufacture. Gas production is partially governed by the rate at which fermentable carbohydrates become available to the yeast. The sugars naturally present in the flour and the initial stock of added sugar are rapidly exhausted. A relatively quiescent period follows, during which the yeast cells become adapted to the use of maltose, a sugar constantly being produced in the dough by the action of diastatic enzymes on starch. The rate of yeast activity is also governed by temperature and osmotic pressure, the latter primarily a function of the water content and salt concentration.
Baking soda
Layer cakes, cookies (sweet biscuits), biscuits, and many other bakery products are leavened by carbon dioxide from added sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Added without offsetting amounts of an acidic substance, sodium bicarbonate tends to make dough alkaline, causing flavour deterioration and discoloration and slowing carbon dioxide release. Addition of an acid-reacting substance promotes vigorous gas evolution and maintains dough acidity within a favourable range.
Carbon dioxide produced from sodium bicarbonate is initially in dissolved or combined form. The rate of gas release affects the size of the bubbles produced in the dough, consequently influencing the grain, volume, and texture of the finished product. Much research has been devoted to the development of leavening acids capable of maintaining the rate of gas release within the desired range. Acids such as acetic, from vinegar, or lactic, from sour milk, usually act too quickly; satisfactory compounds include cream of tartar (potassium acid tartrate), sodium aluminum sulfate (alum), sodium acid pyrophosphate, and various forms of calcium phosphate.
Baking powder
Instead of adding soda and leavening acids separately, most commercial bakeries and domestic bakers use baking powder, a mixture of soda and acids in appropriate amounts and with such added diluents as starch, simplifying measuring and improving stability. The end products of baking-powder reaction are carbon dioxide and some blandly flavoured harmless salts. All baking powders meeting basic standards have virtually identical amounts of available carbon dioxide, differing only in reaction time. Most commercial baking powders are of the double-acting type, giving off a small amount of available carbon dioxide during the mixing and makeup stages, then remaining relatively inert until baking raises the batter temperature. This type of action eliminates excessive loss of leavening gas, which may occur in batter left in an unbaked condition for long periods.
Entrapped air and vapour
Angel food cakes, sponge cakes, and similar products are customarily prepared without either yeast or chemical leaveners. Instead, they are leavened by air entrapped in the product through vigorous beating. This method requires a readily foaming ingredient capable of retaining the air bubbles, such as egg whites. To produce a cake of fine and uniform internal structure, the pockets of air folded in during beating are rapidly subdivided into small bubbles with such mixing utensils as wire whips, or whisks.
The vaporization of volatile fluids (e.g., ethanol) under the influence of oven heat can have a leavening effect. Water-vapour pressure, too low to be significant at normal temperatures, exerts substantial pressure on the interior walls of bubbles already formed by other means as the interior of the loaf or cake approaches the boiling point. The expansion of such puff pastry as used for napoleons (rich desserts of puff pastry layers and whipped cream or custard) and vol-au-vents (puff pastry shells filled with meat, fowl, fish, or other mixtures) is entirely due to water-vapour pressure.
Shortening
Fats and oils are essential ingredients in nearly all bakery products. Shortenings have a tenderizing effect in the finished product and often aid in the manipulation of doughs. In addition to modifying the mouth feel or texture, they often add flavour of their own and tend to round off harsh notes in some of the spice flavours.
The common fats used in bakery products are lard, beef fats, and hydrogenated vegetable oils. Butter is used in some premium and specialty products as a texturizer and to add flavour, but its high cost precludes extensive use. Cottonseed oil and soybean oil are the most common processed vegetable oils used. Corn, peanut, and coconut oils are used to a limited extent; fats occurring in other ingredients, such as egg yolks, chocolate, and nut butters, can have a shortening effect if the ingredients are present in sufficient quantity.
Breads and rolls often contain only 1 or 2 percent shortening; cakes will have 10 to 20 percent; Danish pastries prepared according to the authentic formula may have about 30 percent; pie crusts may contain even more. High usage levels require those shortenings that melt above room temperature; butter and liquid shortenings, with their lower melting point, tend to leak from the product.
Commercial shortenings may include antioxidants, to retard rancidity, and emulsifiers, to improve the shortening effect. Colours and flavours simulating butter may also be added. Margarines, emulsions of fat, water, milk solids, and salt, are popular bakery ingredients.
Fats of any kind have a destructive effect on meringues and other protein-based foams; small traces of oil left on the mixing utensils can deflate an angel food cake to unacceptably high density.
Liquids
Water is the liquid most commonly added to doughs. Milk is usually added to commercial preparations in dried form, and any moisture added in the form of eggs and butter is usually minimal. Water is not merely a diluent or inert constituent; it affects every aspect of the finished product, and careful adjustment of the amount of liquid is essential to make the dough or batter adaptable to the processing method. If dough is too wet, it will stick to equipment and have poor response to shaping and transfer operations; if too dry, it will not shape or leaven properly.
Water hydrates gluten, permitting it to aggregate in the form of a spongy cellular network, the structural basis of most bakery products. It provides a medium in which yeast can metabolize sugars to form carbon dioxide and flavouring components and allows diffusion of nutrients and metabolites throughout the mass. Water is an indispensable component of the baking-powder reaction, and it allows starch to gelatinize during baking and prevents interior browning of bakery products.
Water impurities affect dough properties. Water preferred for baking is usually of medium hardness (50 to 100 parts per million) with a neutral pH (degree of acidity), or slightly acid (low pH). Water that is too soft can result in sticky doughs, while very hard water may retard dough expansion by toughening the gluten (calcium ions, particularly, promote cross-linking of gluten protein molecules). Water sufficiently alkaline to raise the dough pH may have a deleterious effect on fermentation and on flour enzymes. Although strongly flavoured contaminants may affect the acceptability of the finished product, chlorides and fluorides at concentrations usually found in water supplies have little influence on bread doughs.
Eggs
The differences between yolks and whites must be recognized in considering the effect of eggs on bakery products. Yolks contain about 50 percent solids, of which 60 percent or more is strongly emulsified fat, and are used in bakery foods for their effect on colour, flavour, and texture. Egg whites, containing only about 12 percent solids, primarily protein, and no fat, are important primarily for their texturizing function and give foams of low density and good stability when beaten. When present in substantial amounts, they tend to promote small, uniform cell size and relatively large volume. Meringues and angel food cakes are dependent on egg white foams for their basic structure. Although fats and oils greatly diminish its foaming power, the white still contributes to the structure of layer cakes and similar confections containing substantial amounts of both shortening and egg products.
Egg products are available to bakers in frozen or dried form. Few commercial bakers break fresh eggs for ingredients, because of labour costs, unstable market conditions, and sanitary considerations. Many bakers use dried egg products because of their greater convenience and superior storage stability over frozen eggs. Processed and stored correctly, dried egg products are the functional equivalent of the fresh material, although flavour of the baked goods may be affected adversely at very high usage levels.
Sweeteners
Normal wheat flour contains about 1 percent sugars. Most are fermentable compounds, such as sucrose, maltose, glucose, and fructose. Additional maltose is formed during fermentation by the action of amyloytic enzymes (from malt and flour) on the starch. Glucose and sucrose are the sugars most frequently added to doughs and batters. The action of yeast rapidly converts the sucrose to fructose and glucose (i.e., invert sugar). Invert sugar can also be added.
Sweetening power is an important property of added sugars, but sugars also provide fermentables for yeast activity. Crust colour development is related to the amount of reducing sugars present, and a dough in which the sugars have been thoroughly depleted by yeast will produce a pale crust.
Doughs with high concentrations of dissolved substances retard fermentation because of the effect on yeast of the high osmotic pressure (low water activity) of the aqueous phase. Sugars constitute the bulk of dissolved materials in most doughs. For this reason, sweet yeast-leavened goods develop gas and expand more slowly than bread doughs.
Most of the bakery foods consumed throughout the world are breads and rolls made from yeast-leavened doughs. The yeast-fermentation process leads to the development of desirable flavour and texture, and such products are nutritionally superior to products of the equivalent chemically leavened doughs, since yeast cells themselves add a wide assortment of vitamins and good quality protein.
Follow the Recipe
If you had to boil this article down to a single tip, this would be it. Everything from preheating the oven to whether or not you should grease the pan is already in the recipe. Yes, you often need to grease your pan. But sometimes you shouldn't. Ditto when it comes to using room temperature butter versus cold. But rather than holding all that knowledge in your head, along with the various exceptions to each rule, and the exceptions to the exceptions, just be sure to follow the recipe. That, after all, is what it's there for.
Measure Your Ingredients Properly
To measure your ingredients properly, that means weighing them. This mostly refers to the flour, since it's the main ingredient in baking and one that is notoriously difficult to measure properly using volume measurements like cups. As a corollary, look for recipes that list the ingredients in grams instead of by volume. Sure, you can do the conversion, but chances are if a recipe is written that way to begin with, it's going to work better.
Use Fresh Ingredients
Top priority here goes to chemical leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda, because they lose much of their effectiveness after six months or so, meaning your baked goods won't rise the way they should. But spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves will also lose their potency, especially if you buy the pre-ground kind, so it's important to use fresh ingredients.
Understand How Over-Mixing Can Effect Gluten
Dough and batters are made with flour, and flour contains gluten, which becomes increasingly firm and elastic the more you stir it, beat it, and kneads it, and so on. With a pizza dough you might want that, but with pie dough, not so much.
The good news is that your recipe should offer you some sort of guidance as to how much, how long, how intensely, to mix your dough, so follow the recipe and understand how over-mixing can effect gluten.
Avoid Gratuitous Changes
Avoid gratuitous changes is another way of saying "follow the recipe." Example: Don't just randomly add a cup of blueberries to a plain banana bread recipe.
This is not to say that blueberry banana bread won't be delicious. It might. But given how easy it is to find a recipe for blueberry banana bread, you're better off using that one than trying to wing it on your own.
Calibrate Your Oven
Be sure to calibrate your oven. The issue here is that the temperature in your oven might not actually be what you set it to. If you set your oven to 350 F, but it only heats up to 320 F, or maybe it hits 380 F, your recipe isn't going to turn out right.
Repairing the oven might be a major undertaking, but the solution is to get an inexpensive oven thermometer. Set your oven to 350 F and see what the thermometer reads. If it's different, you can adjust accordingly.
Use a Light-Colored Pan
Be sure to use a light-colored pan. The reason for this is that dark-colored pans absorb more heat than light-colored ones, which can actually cause the bottoms of your cakes or cookies to burn. The assumption is that recipes are written and tested for light-colored pans. If dark-colored ones are all you have, you can lower the temperature or play with the cooking time, but this violates rule #1, so it might be better to invest in some new pans.
Use Unsalted Butter
Be sure to use a light-colored pan. The reason for this is that dark-colored pans absorb more heat than light-colored ones, which can actually cause the bottoms of your cakes or cookies to burn. The assumption is that recipes are written and tested for light-colored pans. If dark-colored ones are all you have, you can lower the temperature or play with the cooking time, but this violates rule #1, so it might be better to invest in some new pans.
Scrape the Mixing Bowl
Recipes often remind you to do this, but when you're mixing batter in a stand mixer, you're trying to mix the ingredients together as thoroughly as possible, and this doesn't happen if significant parts of the mixture, like butter, eggs, or sugar, are stuck to the sides of the bowl. Fortunately, it's a simple matter to stop the mixer every 30 seconds or so and scrape the mixing bowl—as long as you remember to do it.
Keep the Oven Closed
Definitely keep the oven closed. It's tempting to look inside to see how things are going, but it's just not a good idea. If you're baking a cake, the influx of air, or even the vibration of the oven door, can cause it to fall. Not to mention, you let all the heat out, which is obviously going to affect the baking.
Some cooks recommend rotating pans of cookies midway through cooking, but the benefit you gain isn't worth the lost heat. Keep it closed.
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