Understanding the science of the art of baking


      While most people think of baking as an art, it’s also important to recognize that both science and business play an important part in producing quality bakery foods at a profit. Lots of bakers are good at both the art and the business end, but sometimes the science can provide the needed answers.

     At its most basic level, baking can be described as a series of mechanical and chemical reactions:

* Ingredients undergo changes due to contact with one another. For example, sugar or salt dissolves in water.
* Ingredients change after interacting with one another. For example, mixing develops the gluten in flour/water mixtures, yeast digests the sugars and produces fermentation byproducts, and baking powder reacts after dissolving to aerate batters.
* Ingredients react to the application of heat. For example, eggs coagulate, starches gelatinize and sugars caramelize.

     Baking is more precise than cooking, requiring formulas (even sounds scientific), precise temperatures and mixing methods, particular processing and handling and relatively uniform baking times and temperatures.

     You shouldn’t be leery of science, chemistry and physics, because you practice their application every day, every time you make a dough or batter. An understanding of the chemical and physical changes that take place during mixing and baking will allow you to make more uniform products, understand natural variations and compensate for them, and pinpoint areas that need troubleshooting and fix them.

     Of course, other areas of knowledge influence product quality. Don’t let complicated topics discourage you. Remember, you deal with those elements and processes every day.

Water is a chemical compound

     One of the simplest chemical compounds that exists is water, or H2O. The designation, H2O, simply stands for the chemical composition of water, which contains two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen.

     Hydrogen and oxygen are elements. Remember the table of element, called the periodic table, from your high school chemistry class? Simply explained, elements are pure substances that contain only one kind of material. Other elements are iron, gold, carbon, nitrogen, sodium, sulpher, etc.

     An atom is the smallest unit of an element that can exist. (Look what happens when you try to split an atom!). Most combinations of elements occur at the atomic level. In the case of water, two atoms of hydrogen combine with one atom of oxygen to make a molecule, which we describe as H2O, the chemical compound we call water.

     Chemical compounds are different than mechanical compounds. Water is a chemical compound. So is salt. The sodium and chlorine atoms that make up salt, or NaCl, are chemically bound together. Na is the periodic table’s symbol for sodium, while Cl stands for chlorine. Together, they make up sodium chloride, or salt. If you separate the two elements that make up the salt molecule, you’ll wind up with sodium and chlorine.

     However, when you combine salt and water, or NaCl and H2O, you’re not producing another chemical compound. Instead, you’re just making a mechanical mixture that contains both salt and water. This mixture isn’t a chemical compound because when you mix salt and water, neither of them changes chemically. If you let the water evaporate, or distill the mixture, you won’t break down the two chemical compounds that made up the mixture. You’ll still end up with water and salt.

     Other mixtures can be acted upon to produce a chemical compound as we discovered when making simple syrup)We took a mechanical mixture of granulated sugar and water, and made it into a chemical compound called simple syrup or invert syrup. Invert syrup is a chemical compound that contains glucose and fructose. To create this chemical compound, we had to create a chemical reaction. To make simple syrup, you apply heat and add a catalyst in the form of an acid (such as lemon juice or cream of tartar). If we tried to evaporate the water from the simple syrup, we would find that most, if not all, of the water would remain in the syrup, because now it’s chemically bound within the glucose and fructose molecules.



Carol Meres Kroskey is the award-winning former senior baker editor of Bakery Production and Marketing magazine, a trade magazine that covered the entire bakery industry. Her baking experience includes stints at various retail, hotel and supermarket bakeries as baker and pastry cook. She also spent several years as an experimental baking technician for the American Institute of Baking, and as a test baker at The Long Co., a co-op for independent wholesale bakers.

You can reach her at carol@bakers-exchange.com