Let’s bake a cake

Italians explain how to bake in a way that only their likes can. They say that baking bread is to bring something back to life, kill it, bring it back to life with the help of something else, and sacrifice that something to produce bread. say. If you get lost in the pronoun jungle, I’ll help. It is to kill the wheat plant, take its grain, mill it into dead flour, and then bring it back to life by adding water, salt, yeast, and as it rises, come back to the oven. Put in and give birth at the expense of yeast in glorious bread. This drama is natural because no one believes that anyone who sees odorless and tasteless flour (flour) can transform it into the heartwarming taste of freshly baked bread with just water, salt, yeast, time and heat. is.

For most of humanity, yeast was not the small dry granules you are familiar with in modern kitchens. In fact, yeast was a fairly ubiquitous and fairly invisible unicellular fungus, so we didn’t even know that a bakery existed. Simply leave the flour and water at room temperature for a few hours to ferment. This is how sourdough bread is still made today by tame the naturally occurring wild yeast (and the sourdough lactobacteria that give sourdough). flour. However, temperamental biological agents are not the only way to make unseeded bread. Baking soda and baking powder are also effective and are, in fact, preferred when baking cakes, the cousin of saccharin in bread.

The world of baking in a single column cannot be justified, so we condense it into five key elements: flour, kneading, additives, leavening agents, and ovens. Let’s start with flour.When baking bread, high-protein flour (usually called bread crumbs) is preferred, but it can also be used. Meida (Refined flour) Fortified with what is called vital wheat gluten to increase protein content.As I explained in the story about Wheat science, Atta It’s a bad idea because the gluten is damaged. When baking cakes, it’s best to use what’s called cake flour. This is a very low protein flour that is finely ground. Meida..But you can just use Meida Also, the cake is okay as long as you don’t knead the dough too much. This is a knead for element 2.

When baking bread, you need to knead the dough or leave it as it is (a process called automatic melting, in which the flour is kneaded in the presence of water over time, eliminating the need to train the muscles of deltoid ) However, when baking a cake, the cake is expected to be non-chewy, airy, fluffy and light, and kneading builds a gluten structure and should be avoided as much as possible. Simply mixing the batter in a ladle will promote the formation of gluten. Time also produces gluten. As a result, flour is often added to the cake dough at the end.

The third element is the additive. Basic bread requires only salt when baking, but adding butter to the dough makes the bread softer and tastier (because there are literally no ingredients that improve cooking with one hand than butter)) .. Fat generally shortens the structure of gluten and gives everything to bake a flaky mouthfeel. This is why croissants, which can contain up to 80 layers of butter and dough, taste. On the other hand, when baking cakes, some form of sugar is the main additive, and sugar can come from a variety of sources such as honey and fruits. It is not uncommon to use alcoholic liquids such as rum and brandy when making cakes. It serves two purposes. Alcohol slows the development of gluten, which helps to maintain a light and crunchy texture for the cake. Also, the liqueur itself has many other flavors that penetrate the cake.

The fourth element is the leavening agent. Bread uses yeast because the slow fermentation adds a tremendous flavor. Cakes use baking soda and / or baking powder because the main flavor profile of the cake is derived from additives, not primarily the fermentation of flour that interferes with the sweet flavor. Baking soda / powder serves the purpose of sending carbon dioxide to the batter to create a fluffy canvas for the additives to shine.

The fifth element (or the surprising element, as the late author / satirist Terry Pratchett calls it) is the oven. Baking far exceeds the boiling point of water, as it aims to give Dr. Maillard a magical browning reaction at temperatures between 110 and 170 degrees Celsius, while adding enough water to the dough or batter to evaporate. It is a cooking method that requires temperature. Therefore, this part of the world needs a convection oven offered in three configurations. The most popular variety is the Oven Toaster Grill (OTG), whose oven settings do the job. Air fryer is another option that has become quite popular these days, despite its somewhat misleading name. It’s actually a small convection oven, its size can bake faster than OTG or a third kind of regular size oven, which is standard in all homes, but less common in India To the west, which tends to be off-target.

Baking requires precision, unlike cooking, where you can almost always estimate the ingredients if you know what role they play in cooking. But baking is a carefully choreographed dance. It’s about bringing the right proportions of ingredients to life in a slow, laid-back, warm oven. As the author Dean Koontz says, there is hope where there is a cake. And there is always a cake.

Illustration by Krish Ashok

Krish Ashok is the author of Masala Lab: The Science Of Indian Cooking.