Highlights of what I have learned so far...

First of all, I want to tell you all how much I love what I’m doing. I am learning pastry arts at Clark College in Vancouver, Wa. I am getting answers to questions I always wondered about baking/cooking, and I am gaining knowledge and confidence in an area I have dubbed very important in life (well, in mine anyways). Food and the science of it is very interesting to me. While I cannot be bothered with much in the way of science, the way ingredients work together to create something delicious (or not so) fascinates me. What happens if I put too much baking powder in this? At what temperature does Italian meringue burn? Why must we whip egg whites to medium peaks for a chiffon cake? I love learning these things – in books and by example! I love to be a food scientist, experimenting with things I think will work well together, or just trying things I have always wanted to.

So as I would have appreciated these tidbits of information before I became a student of baking, I wanted to share these things with you. Here we go!

1. It is SO easy to overdevelop the gluten!

In my Breads station, the thing I heard the most was “do not overdevelop the gluten”! Um, the what? I barely knew what gluten was (only that my sister could not eat it, so I just summed that up to all things bread), let alone how tricky it could be. Sure, you can stir flour all you want, but once you add liquid to it, STOP. Well, don’t stop, but don’t just let a mixer beat away. You must must must be careful. At the end of a cookie recipe when it says “mix in flour by hand”, they don’t mean ‘if you want to because you have all the time in the world and you want to feel like you’re roughing it’ (my mistake). They say that for a reason. Once you add liquid to flour, gluten strands start to develop. These are what we love about bread. The binding cells in a bread’s structure that break apart when you tear at a slice of bread. These are what bind the delicious sugars and butter in a cookie. These strands, when tender, are what make a cake so satisfying. Have you, however, tasted bread that seemed to have no air pockets in it, but was one lump of tough wheat? A bagel you couldn’t tear with your teeth? Or tasted a cake that wasn’t quite so delicate? This is probably because of the common, easy mistake of over-developed gluten.

Therefore, be careful when mixing a dough of any kind. Hand-mixing is always better, and mixing something just until the wet and dry ingredients come together (does not need to be smooth and look all uniformly mixed) is sufficient. As a dough is baked, the leavener (chemical or natural – more on this later) will do it’s job to bind everything together, as well as puff it up into a delicious, airy, tender treat.

2. Measurements are important!

If you are like my mom and follow recipes to the T, you don’t need to pay as much attention to this section. I, however, have learned that baking is more scientific than cooking. I love to just throw things together and see how they come out. While this is fine for a home baker with lots of extra money to waste on hard cookies and collapsed bread experiments, it will not fly in any money making bakery.

At school, we weigh EVERYTHING. 3 lbs flour, 2 oz yeast, 2 lbs sugar, etc. Even the eggs are weighed. This is to get precisely the desired texture, amount, and taste of a product. Once you find what you want to make and sell in a bakery, you need consistency. Customers are people of habit (I know this all too well from Starbucks, where we know everyone by what they drink every single day) and expect things to taste the same every time. And the best way to get this consistency of a great product (well, the first step!) is proper measurement. And in large-scale bakeries, weight measurements keep things efficient.

When dealing with breads, everything is based on the weight of the flour. Flour is always 100%, and everything else has a percentage assigned to it. This is called Baker’s Percentages. If the flour is 4 lbs, and the water is set at 50% (every ingredient varies per recipe), you can easily deduce that the water should weigh 2 lbs. This makes it easy if you are doubling, tripling, or making any percentage of a recipe.

3. Lard is better for you than shortening.

I think some people disagree on this (definitely vegans), but I was taught that lard is better for you than hydrogenated shortening. Non-hydrogenated shortening is better for you than hydrogenated shortening, but is more expensive and large bakeries often won’t put up the cash (think Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, and some large grocery stores) for this benefit that most people do not know exists. So between the cost-effective lard and hydrogenated shortening, the latter gets picked first. Lard is made from animal fat, and while that sounded gross to me at first, it is natural. It is great for pie doughs, but keep in mind that it does not cream well (cookies) because it is very dense. Hydrogenated shortening, on the other hand, is not natural (it’s an evil trans fat!), and stays packed in your body once you eat it, as your poor body doesn’t know what to do with it. Think of it as an extra lining/coating inside of your stomach and arteries. Hmmm, and why is America so overweight? So next time you cannot use butter (the obvious choice for the best flavor and texture and the fact that it leaves your body after you eat it), choose lard! Ha, never thought I would say that.

P.S. Did you know gelatin is made from horse hoof connective tissue?? Why do we use so many gross parts of animals (think sausage casings...) as ingredients in food? That's enough to make me become a vegetarian right there!

4. All about leaveners

Baking soda, baking powder, air & steam. These are the three most common leaveners in baked goods. A leavener is something that helps the mixture to rise and create a delicate cell structure. I knew about baking soda and baking powder, but air & steam – natural, free ingredients – as leaveners were new to me. The best illustration I can think of for these is when you are baking a Foam Cake (Genoise, Angel Food, Sponge, Chiffon). The batters for these cakes are so light and fluffy. When you put the batter into the hot oven, all the air you worked so hard to whip into the batter instantly turns to steam, causing it to rise. Often when baking a foam cake, you will need to turn the temperature down halfway through or so, so that you can bake it evenly. The high temperature at the beginning, though, is definitely important to your cake’s light and fluffy texture.

Okay wow. That was a lot of information! Or, mostly I got carried away and wrote too much on each subject. I hope you learned something. =) I will learn much much more and will try to keep sharing useful knowledge with you. I will also try to post yummy recipes from my classes on here. The problem with them, though, is they produce so much! For instance, I have a recipe for French bread I wanted to share, but it makes 35 lbs of dough! I will try to pare it down just a tad. Baker’s Percentages will help, right?

Happy baking everyone!