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baking, process of cooking by dry heat, especially in some kind of oven. It is probably
the oldest cooking method. Bakery products, which include bread, rolls, cookies,
pies, pastries, and muffins, are usually prepared from flour or meal derived from some
form of grain. Bread, already a common staple in prehistoric times, provides many
nutrients in the human diet.
History
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 doughs 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.

Britannica Quiz

Baking and Baked Goods Quiz

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 poppy seed, 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.

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Now
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 Vergilius
(sometimes spelled Virgilius) Eurysaces, 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.
Ingredients
Flour, water, and leavening agents are the ingredients primarily responsible for the
characteristic appearance, texture, and flavour of most bakery products. Eggs, milk,
salt, shortening, and sugar are effective in modifying these qualities, and various minor
ingredients may also be used.

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 a 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.
 Britannica Quiz

A World of Food Quiz

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.