On Food and Cooking Harold Mcgee

Bread is the most everyday and familiar of foods, the sturdy staff of life on which hundreds of generations have leaned for sustenance. It also represents a truly remarkable discovery, a lively pole on which the young human imagination may well have vaulted forward in insight and inspiration. For our prehistoric ancestors it would have been a startling sign of the natural world’s hidden potential for being transformed, and their own ability to shape natural materials to human desires. Bread is nothing like the original grain, loose, hard, chalky, and bland! Simply grinding grains, wetting the particles with water, and dropping the paste on a hot surface, creates a flavorful, puffy mass, crisp outside and moist within. And raised bread is even more startling. Let the paste sit for a couple of days, and it comes alive and grows, inflated from within, and cooks into a bread with a delicately chambered interior that the human hand could never sculpt. Plain parched grains and dense gruels provide just as much nourishment, but bread introduced a new dimension of pleasure and wonder to the mainstays of human life.

So it was bread that became synonymous with food itself in the lands from western Asia through Europe, and took a prominent place in religious and secular rituals (Passover matzoh, Communion bread, wedding cakes). In England, it provided a foundation for naming social relations. “Lord” comes from the Anglo-Saxon hlaford, “loaf ward,” the master who supplies food; “lady” from hlaefdige, “loafkneader,” the person whose retinue produces what her husband distributes; “companion” and “company” from the late Latin companio, or “one who shares bread.” The staff of life has also been a mainstay for Western thought.

Food Words: Dough, Bread

Dough comes from an Indo-European root that meant “to form, to build,” and that also gave us the words figure, fiction, and paradise (a walled garden). This derivation suggests the importance to early peoples of dough’s malleability, its clay-like capacity to be shaped by the human hand. (Cooks have long used both clay and dough to make containers for cooking other foods, especially birds, meats, and fish.)

The word bread comes from a Germanic root, and originally meant a piece or bit of a loaf, with loaf meaning the leavened, baked substance itself. Over time, loaf came to mean the intact baked mass, and bread took over loaf’ s original meaning. Otherwise we would now ask for a bread of loaf!

The Evolution
of Bread

Bread’s evolution has been influenced by all the elements that go into its making: the grains, the machines for milling them, the microbes and chemicals that leaven the dough, the ovens that bake the loaves, the people who make the bread and eat it. One consistent theme from ancient times has been the prestige of refined and enriched versions of this basic sustenance. Bread has become a product increasingly defined by the use of high-rising bread wheats, the milling of that wheat into a white flour with little of the grain’s bran or germ, leavening with ever purer cultures of mild-flavored yeasts, enrichment with ever greater quantities of fat and sugar. In the 20th century we managed to take refinement and enrichment to the extreme, and now have industrial breads with little flavor or texture left in them, and cakes that contain more sugar than flour. In the last couple of decades, bread lovers have led a rediscovery of the pleasures of simple, less refined breads freshly baked in old-fashioned brick ovens, and even supermarket breads are getting more flavorful.

Prehistoric Times

Two prehistoric discoveries laid the foundation for the transformation of grains into breads and noodles, pastries and cakes. The first was that in addition to being cooked into a porridge, pastes of crushed grain and water could also be turned into an interesting solid by cooking them on hot embers or stones: the result was flatbread. The second was that a paste set aside for a few days would ferment and become inflated with gases: and such a paste made a softer, lighter, more flavorful bread, especially when cooked from all sides at once in an enclosed oven.

Flatbreads were a common feature of late Stone Age life in parts of the world where grains were the chief food in the diet; surviving versions include Middle Eastern lavash, Greek pita, Indian roti and chapati, all made mainly from wheat but also other grains, and the Latin American tortilla and North American johnnycake, both made from maize. Such breads were probably first cooked alongside an open fire, then on a griddle stone, and some of them much later in beehive-shaped ovens, which were open at the top and contained both coals and bread; pieces of dough were slapped onto the inside wall.

Bread wheat, the unique species that can make large, light loaves, had evolved by 8000 BCE (p. 465), but the earliest archaeological evidence for leavened breads comes from Egyptian remains of around 4000 BCE. The first raised doughs arose spontaneously, since yeast spores are ubiquitous in the air and on grain surfaces, and they readily infect a moist, nutritious grain paste. Bread makers throughout history have harnessed this natural process by leavening new dough with a leftover piece in which yeast was already growing, but they’ve also valued less sour starters, especially the frothy residue from brewing beer; yeast production had become a specialized profession in Egypt by 300 BCE. Meanwhile grinding equipment progressed from the mortar and pestle to two flat stones and then, around 800 BCE in Mesopotamia, to stones that could rotate continuously. Continuous milling made feasible the eventual use of animal, water, and wind power, and thus the grinding of grains into very fine flours with little human labor.

Greece and Rome

Leavened loaves of bread arrived fairly late along the northern rim of the Mediterranean. Bread wheat was not grown in Greece until about 400 BCE, and flat barley breads were probably the norm well after. We do know that the Greeks enjoyed breads and cakes flavored with honey, anise, sesame, and fruits, and that they made both whole-grain and partly refined breads. At least from the Greeks on, whiteness in bread was a mark of purity and distinction. Archestratus, a contemporary of Aristotle and author of the Gastronomia, a compendious account of ancient Mediterranean eating whose title gave us the word “gastronomy,” accorded extravagant praise to a barley bread from the island of Lesbos on just these grounds, calling it “bread so white that it outdoes the ethereal snow in purity. If the celestial gods eat barley bread, no doubt Hermes goes to Eresus to buy it for them.”

By late Roman times, wheat bread was a central feature of life, and huge amounts of durum and bread wheats were imported from northern Africa and other parts of the empire to satisfy the public demand. Pliny offers a touching reminder that enriched breads — early cakes and pastries — were great luxuries in turbulent times:

Some people use eggs or milk in kneading the dough, while even butter has been used by peoples enjoying peace, when attention can be devoted to the varieties of bakers’ goods.

The Middle Ages

During the European Middle Ages, bakers were specialists, producing either common brown or luxurious white bread. It wasn’t until the 17th century that improvements in milling and in per capita income led to the wide availability of more or less white bread and the dissolution of the brown guild as a separate body. In northern areas, rye, barley, and oats were more common than wheat and were made into coarse, heavy breads. One use of flat bread at this time was the “trencher,” a dense, dry, thick slice that served as a plate at medieval meals and then was either eaten or given away to the poor. And pastry was often made to serve as a kind of all-purpose cooking and storage container, a protective and edible wrapping for meat dishes in particular.

Four stages in the evolution of machines for grinding grain. Clockwise from upper left: The saddlestone and lever mill were limited by their back-and-forth motion. The hourglass mill, which could be turned continuously in one direction by man or animal, was widely used by Roman times. Flat millstones finally made it possible to harness more elemental forces, and were put to use in water and wind mills. In the modern industrial world, most grain is milled between grooved metal rollers, but some is still stone-ground.

Early Modern Times

The late medieval period and Renaissance brought notable progress in the art of enriched breads; both puff pastry and choux pastry date from this time. Domestic recipes for bread begin to appear in cookbooks for the emerging middle class, and already look much like modern recipes. English and American cookbooks from the 18th century on contain dozens of recipes for breads, cakes, and cookies. In England around 1800, most bread was still baked in domestic or communal village ovens. But as the Industrial Revolution spread and more of the population moved to crowded city quarters, the bakeries took over an ever increasing share of bread production, and some of them adulterated their flour with whiteners (alum) and fillers (chalk, ground animal bones). The decline of domestic baking was criticized on economic, nutritional, and even moral grounds. The English political journalist William Cobbett wrote in Cottage Economy (1821), a tract addressed to the working class, that it is reasonable to buy bread only in cities where space and fuel are in short supply. Otherwise,

How wasteful, then, and indeed, how shameful, for a labourer’s wife to go to the baker’s shop…

Give me, for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman, heating her oven and setting in her bread! And, if the bustle does make the sign of labour glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not kiss that off, rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duchess?

The scolding of Cobbett and others failed to reverse the trend. Bread making was one of the most time-consuming and laborious of household tasks, a kiss on the sweaty forehead notwithstanding, and more and more of the work was delegated to the baker.

Innovations in Leavening A new method of leavening made its first appearance in the first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery. Four recipes, two for cookies and two for gingerbread, call for the use of “pearlash,” a refined version of potash, which was made by soaking the ash produced when plant materials are burned, draining off the liquid, and drying it down to concentrate the substances dissolved in it. Pearlash is mostly alkaline potassium carbonate, which reacts with acid ingredients in doughs to generate carbon dioxide gas. It was the precursor to baking soda and baking powders, which arrived between 1830 and 1850. These chemical ingredients made it possible to leaven instantly mixtures that living, slow-growing yeasts couldn’t very well: such things as fluid cake batters and sweet cookie doughs. Purified commercial yeast cultures for loaf breads, more predictable and less acidic than brewer’s yeast, became available from specialist manufacturers around the turn of the 20th century.

Food Words: Flour

While the words for ground grain in French, Italian, and Spanish, farine and farina, come from the Latin for a kind of grain (far), the English word “flour” arose in medieval times from “flower,” meaning the best part of the ground grain: that is, the portion left after screening out the large particles of germ and bran. To a medieval Englishman, “whole wheat flour” would have been a contradiction in terms!

The Decline and Revival
Of Traditional Breads

Twentieth-Century Industrialization The 20th century brought two broad trends to Europe and North America. One was a decline in the per capita consumption of plain bread. As incomes rose, people could afford to eat more meat and more high-sugar, high-fat cakes and pastries. So we now lean less heavily than did our ancestors on the staff of life. The other trend was the industrialization of bread making. Today very little bread is made in the home, and with the exception of countries with a strong tradition of buying fresh bread every day — especially France, Germany, and Italy — most bread is made in large central factories, not in small local bakeries. Mechanical aids to breadmaking, powered mixers and others, began to appear around 1900, and culminated in the 1960s in largely automated factories that produce bread in a fraction of the usual time. These manufacturing systems replace biological dough development, the gradual, hours-long leavening and gluten strengthening of the dough by yeast, with nearly instantaneous, mechanical and chemical dough development. This production method produces breads with a soft, cake-like interior, an uncrusty crust, and an uncharacteristic flavor. They are formulated to remain soft and edible in plastic bags for a week or more. Industrial breads bear little resemblance to traditional breads.

The Return of Flavor and Texture Europeans and North Americans began to eat significantly more bread in the 1980s than they had the decade before. One reason was the revival of traditional bread making. Small bakeries began to produce bread using less refined grains and grain mixtures, building flavor with long, slow fermentation, and baking small batches in brick ovens that produce a dark, crusty loaf. Another reason was the home cook’s rediscovery of the pleasures of baking and eating fresh warm bread. The Japanese invention of the bread machine made it possible for busy home cooks to put all the ingredients into a single chamber, close the lid, and fill the house with the forgotten aroma of fresh-baked bread.

Breads baked by home cooks and artisans account for a small fraction of the overall bread production in England and North America. But their revival demonstrates that people still enjoy the flavors and textures of freshly made traditional breads, and this fact has caught the attention of industrial producers. They have recently developed the “par-baking” system, in which manufacturers ship partly baked and frozen loaves to supermarkets, where they’re baked again locally and sold while still crusty and flavorful.

Industrial breads were first “optimized” to make bread-like products at minimum cost and with maximum shelf life. Finally taste and texture are entering the calculations, and at least some products are improving.

Chemical Leavening and the First American Cookie Recipe

Cookies

One pound sugar boiled slowly in half pint water, scum well and cool, add two tea spoons pearl ash dissolved in milk, then two and a half pounds flour, rub in 4 ounces butter, and two large spoons of finely powdered coriander seed, wet with above; make rolls half an inch thick and cut to the shape you please; bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a slack oven — good three weeks.

— Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1796

The Basic Structure
of Doughs, Batters,
and Their Products

Wheat flour is strange and wonderful stuff! Mix pretty much any other powdery ingredient with water and we get a simple, inert paste. But mix some flour with about half its weight in water, and the combination seems to come alive. At first it forms a cohesive mass that changes its shape reluctantly. With time and kneading, reluctance gives way to liveliness, a bouncy responsiveness to pressure that persists even after the kneader lets go. It’s these qualities of cohesiveness and liveliness that set wheat doughs apart from other cereal doughs, and that make possible light, delicate loaves of bread, flaky pastries, and silken pastas.

The various textures of baked goods and pastas are created by the structures of their doughs and batters. Those structures are composed of three basic elements: water, the flour’s gluten proteins, and its starch granules. Together, these elements create an integrated, cohesive mass. That cohesiveness is what gives pasta its close-textured silkenness. It’s also what makes bread doughs, pastry doughs, and cake batters divisible into microscopically thin but intact sheets. Breads and cakes are light and tender because the protein-starch mass is divided up by millions of tiny bubbles; pastries are flaky and tender because the protein-starch mass is interrupted by hundreds of thin layers of fat.

We call a mixture of flour and water either a dough or a batter, depending on the relative proportions of the two major ingredients. Generally, doughs contain more flour than water and are stiff enough to be manipulated by hand. All the water is bound to the gluten proteins and to the surfaces of the starch granules, which are embedded in the semisolid gluten-water matrix. Batters, on the other hand, contain more water than flour and are loose enough to pour. Much of the water is free liquid, and both gluten proteins and starch granules are dispersed in it.

The structure of a dough or batter is temporary. When it’s cooked, the starch granules absorb water, swell, and create a permanent solid structure from the original, semisolid or liquid one. In the case of breads and cakes, that solid structure is a sponge-like network of starch and protein filled with millions of tiny air pockets. Bakers use the term crumb for this network, which constitutes the bulk of the bread or cake. The outer surface, which usually has a dryer, denser texture, is the crust.

With this overview in mind, let’s look more closely at the structural elements of doughs and batters.

Gluten

Chew on a small piece of dough, and it becomes more compact but persists as a gum-like, elastic mass, the residue that the Chinese named “the muscle of flour” and that we call gluten. It consists mainly of protein, and includes what may well be the largest protein molecules to be found in the natural world. These remarkable molecules are what give wheat dough its liveliness and make raised breads possible.

Gluten Proteins Form Long Chains That Stick to Each Other Gluten is a complex mixture of certain wheat proteins that can’t dissolve in water, but do form associations with water molecules and with each other. When the proteins are dry, they’re immobile and inert. When wetted with water, they can change their shape, move relative to each other, and form and break bonds with each other.

Proteins are long, chain-like molecules built up from smaller molecules called amino acids (p. 805). Most of the gluten proteins, the gliadins and the glutenins, are around a thousand amino acids long. The gliadin chains fold onto themselves in a compact mass, and bond only weakly with each other and with the glutenin proteins. The glutenins, however, bond with each other in several ways to form an extensive, tightly knit network.

At each end of the glutenin chain are sulfur-containing amino acids that can form strong sulfur-sulfur bonds with the same amino acids at the ends of other glutenin chains. To do this they require the availability of oxidizing agents — oxygen in the air, certain substances produced by yeasts, or “dough improvers” (p. 529) added by the flour manufacturer or baker. The long, coiled middle stretch of the glutenin molecule consists mainly of amino acids that form weaker, temporary bonds (hydrogen and hydrophobic bonds) with similar amino acids. Glutenin chains thus link up with each other end-to-end to form super-chains a few hundred glutenins long, and coiled stretches along their lengths readily form many temporary bonds with similar stretches along neighboring gluten proteins. The result is an extensive interconnected network of coiled proteins, the gluten.

Gluten Plasticity and Elasticity The gluten of the bread wheats is both plastic and elastic; that is, it will change its shape under pressure, yet it resists the pressure and moves back toward its original shape when the pressure is removed. Thanks to this combination of properties, wheat dough can expand to incorporate the carbon dioxide gas produced by yeast, and yet resists enough that its bubble walls won’t thin to the breaking point.

Gluten plasticity results from the presence of the gliadin proteins among the glutenins; because they’re compact, the gliadins act something like ball bearings, allowing portions of the glutenins to slide past each other without bonding. Elasticity results from the kinked and coiled structure of the interconnected gluten proteins. Kneading unfolds and aligns the protein molecules, but there are still loops and kinks along their lengths. Stretching the dough straightens out these loops and kinks, but when the pressure is relieved, the molecules tend to revert to their original kinkiness. In addition, the coiled spring-like structure of individual proteins can extend and store some of the energy of stretching, but when the stretching is stopped, the molecules spring back to their compact coiled form. The visible result of these submicroscopic events: the stretched dough creeps back toward its original shape.

Gluten formation. When flour is mixed with water and made into a dough, glutenin protein molecules link up end-to-end to form long, composite gluten molecules. Dough is elastic because the gluten molecules are coiled and have many kinks in them. When a mass of dough is stretched, the kinks are straightened out, the coils extended, and the proteins get longer(bottom). When the stretching tension is released, many of the kinks and coils re-form, the protein mass shortens, and the dough shrinks back toward its original shape.

Gluten Relaxation Another important characteristic of wheat flour doughs is that their elasticity relaxes with time. An elastic dough that never relaxed could never be formed into the many shapes of raised doughs and pastas! In a well developed dough, the protein molecules have been organized and aligned, and have formed many weak bonds with each other. Because there are so many of them, these bonds hold the proteins firmly in place and resist stretching, so a ball of dough is firm and taut. But because the bonds are weak, the physical tension of the taut ball shape slowly breaks some of them, and the dough structure gradually relaxes into a flatter, more malleable mass.

Controlling Gluten Strength Not all baked goods benefit from a strong, elastic gluten. It’s desirable in yeasted breads, bagels, and in puff pastry; but it gives an undesirable toughness to other forms of pastry, to raised cakes, griddle cakes, and cookies. For tender preparations, bakers intentionally limit the development of gluten. There are a number of ingredients and techniques by which the baker controls the gluten strength and consistency of doughs and batters. They include:

The kind of flour used. High-protein bread flours produce a strong gluten, low-protein pastry and cake flours a weak one, durum semolina (for pasta) a strong but plastic one.
The presence in the flour of oxidizing substances — aging and improving agents — which can increase the end-to-end linking of glutenin molecules and thus dough strength (p. 529).
The water content of the dough, which determines how concentrated the gluten proteins are, and how extensively they can bond to each other. Little water gives an incompletely developed gluten and a crumbly texture; a lot of water gives a less concentrated gluten and a softer, moister dough and bread.
Stirring and kneading the flour-water mixture, actions that stretch and organize the gluten proteins into an elastic network.
Salt, which greatly strengthens the gluten network. The electrically positive sodium and negative chlorine ions cluster around the few charged portions of the glutenin proteins, prevent those charged portions from repelling each other, and so allow the proteins to come closer to each other and bond more extensively.
Sugar, which at the concentrations typical of raised sweet breads, 10% or more of the flour weight, limits the development of gluten by diluting the flour proteins.
Fats and oils, which weaken gluten by bonding to the hydrophobic amino acids along the protein chains and so preventing them from bonding to each other.
Acidity in the dough — as from a sourdough culture — which weakens the gluten network by increasing the number of positively charged amino acids along the protein chains, and increasing the repulsive forces between chains.

Food Words: Gluten

Though Chinese cooks discovered the useful properties of gluten long before anyone else (p. 468), it was two Italian scientists who brought it to the attention of Europe. In a posthumously published manual of 1665 on optics, the Jesuit scholar Francesco Maria Grimaldi noted that durum semolina dough for pasta contains a thick, sticky substance that dries to a hard, brittle one. He named this substance gluten, using the Latin word for “glue.” Gluten in turn came from an Indo-European root gel-¸ which gave rise to a number of words meaning to form into a ball, to make a coagulated lump, to be thick or sticky: these include cloud, globe, gluteus, clam, cling, and clay. In 1745, Giambattista Beccari studied gluten more carefully and noted its similarity to substances characteristic of animals: that is, he recognized that it is what we now call a protein.

Ingredients That Contribute to the Structure of Doughs, Batters, and Their Products

Starch

The elastic gluten proteins are essential to the making of raised breads. But proteins account for only about 10% of flour weight, while about 70% is starch. Starch granules serve several functions in doughs and batters. Together with the water they hold on their surfaces, they make up more than half the volume of the dough, inter-penetrate the gluten network and break it up, and so tenderize it. In the case of cakes, starch is the major structural material, the gluten being too dispersed in the large amount of water and sugar to contribute solidity. During the baking of bread and cakes, the starch granules absorb water, swell, and set to form the rigid bulk of the walls that surround the bubbles of carbon dioxide. At the same time their swollen rigidity stops the expansion of the bubbles and so forces the water vapor inside to pop the bubbles and escape, turning the foam of separate bubbles into a continuous spongy network of connected holes. If this didn’t happen, then at the end of baking the cooling water vapor would contract and cause the bread or cake to collapse.

Gas Bubbles

Gas bubbles are what make leavened doughs and batters light and tender. Breads and cakes are aerated to the point that as much as 80% of their volume is empty space! Gas bubbles interrupt and therefore weaken the network of gluten and starch granules, dividing it into millions of very thin, delicate sheets that form the bubble walls.

Food Words: Starch

As far back as the Romans, purified starch has been incorporated into paper to give it body and smooth its surface. In the 14th century, Holland and other northern European countries began stiffening their linen cloth with wheat starch. The word starch dates from the 15th century, and comes from a German root that means “to stiffen, to make rigid,” which is also what starch does to convert bread dough into bread. The German in turn came from an Indo-European root meaning “stiff”; related words are stare, stark, stern, and starve (which results in the rigidity of death).

Bakers use yeasts or chemical leavenings to fill their products with gas bubbles (p. 531). However, these ingredients don’t create new bubbles: their carbon dioxide is released into the water phase of the dough or batter, and diffuses into and enlarges whatever tiny bubbles are already there. These primordial bubbles are air bubbles, and are created when the baker first kneads a dough, or creams butter and sugar, or whips eggs. The initial aeration of doughs and batters thus strongly influences the final texture of baked goods. The more bubbles produced during the preparation of a dough or batter, the finer and tenderer the result.

Fats: Shortening

Since the early 19th century, the term shortening has been used to mean fats or oils that “shorten” a dough, or weaken its structure and thus make the final product more tender or flaky. This role is most evident in pie crusts and puff pastry (p. 561), where layers of solid fat separate thin layers of dough from each other so that they cook into separate layers of pastry. It’s less evident but also important in cakes and enriched breads, where fat and oil molecules bond to parts of the gluten protein coils and prevent the proteins from forming a strong gluten. To make a rich bread with a strong gluten (e.g. Italian panettone, p. 546), the baker mixes the flour and water alone, kneads the mix to develop the gluten, and only then works in the fat.

Fats and related substances also play an important but indirect role in the formation of the cooked structure of breads and cakes, where the addition of small quantities significantly increases volume and textural lightness (p. 530).

Dough and Batter
Ingredients: Wheat Flours

Though other grains and seeds can also be used, most familiar baked goods and pastas are made from wheat.

Kinds of Wheat

Several kinds of wheat are grown today, each with its own characteristics and uses (see box, p. 527). Most are species of bread wheat, Triticum aestivum. Their most important distinguishing characteristic is the content and quality of gluten proteins, with high protein content and strong gluten often coinciding with a hard, glassy, translucent grain interior. Hard wheat grains constitute about 75% of the American crop. Soft wheats, which make up 20% of the crop, have a lower amount of somewhat weaker gluten proteins. Club wheat is a distinct species, T. compactum, whose proteins form an especially weak gluten. Durum wheat is another distinct species (T. turgidum durum, p. 465) used mainly to make pasta (p. 571).

A close-up view of bread dough. The dense mass of gluten and starch is divided and tenderized by gas bubbles. starch granules gluten sheet gas bubbles

Doughs and Batters: Representative Compositions

The numbers shown indicate the relative weights of ingredients in doughs and batters, with the weight of flour constant at 100. This chart is meant to give only a general idea of the proportions used in common baked foods; individual recipes vary widely.

Major Wheat Types

Protein Content,
% by Weight Use

Hard red spring wheat

13–16.5

Bread flours

Hard red winter wheat

10–13.5

All-purpose flours

Soft red wheat

9–11

All-purpose, pastry flours

Hard white wheat

10–12

Specialty whole-grain flours

Soft white wheat

10–11

Specialty whole-grain flours

Club wheat

8–9

Cake flours

Durum wheat

12–16

Semolina for dried pasta

In addition to their classification by protein content, North American wheats are named by their growth habit and kernel color. Spring wheats (including durum) are sown in the spring and harvested in the fall, while winter wheats are sown in late fall, live through the winter as a seedling, and are harvested in the summer. The most common wheat varieties are red, their seed coat reddish brown with phenolic compounds. White wheats, with a much lower phenolic content and a light tan seed coat, are becoming increasingly popular for the light color and less astringent “sweet” taste of their whole-wheat flours and products containing part or all of the bran.

Turning Wheat into Flour

The baking qualities of a particular flour are determined by the wheat from which it’s made, and how that wheat is turned into flour.

Wheat grain and flour. Left : The wheat kernel before milling. Its actual length is about a quarter of an inch/6 mm. Upper right : Soft wheat flour. The protein in this kind of wheat comes in thin, weak sections interrupted by starch granules and air pockets. When milled, it produces small, fine particles. Soft flour makes a weak gluten and is preferred for tender pastries and cakes. Lower right : Hard wheat flour. The protein matrix in hard wheat endosperm is strong enough to break off in chunks during milling. Hard flours make strong gluten and are preferred for most bread making.

Milling: Conventional and Stone Grinding Milling is the process of breaking the wheat kernel down into small particles, and sifting the particles to make a flour of the desired qualities. Most flours are refined: that is, they have been sieved to remove the germ and bran layers from the particles of protein-and starch-rich endosperm. Bran and germ are rich in nutrients and flavor, but they go rancid in a few weeks, and interfere physically and chemically with the formation of a continuous, strong gluten; so whole-grain flours make denser, darker breads and pastries. In conventional milling, grooved metal rollers shear open the grain, squeeze out the germ, and scrape the endosperm away to be ground, sieved, and reground until the particles reach the desired size. Stone grinding, which is much rarer, crushes the whole grain more thoroughly before sieving, so that some of the germ and bran end up in even the refined flours. Stone-ground flour is therefore more flavorful than conventionally milled flour, but also has a shorter shelf-life.

Improving and Bleaching Bakers have known for a long time that freshly milled flour makes a weak gluten, a slack dough, and a dense loaf. As the flour ages for a few weeks in contact with the air, its gluten and baking properties improve. We understand now that oxygen in the air gradually frees the glutenin proteins’ end sulfur groups to react with each other and form ever longer gluten chains that give the dough greater elasticity. Beginning around 1900, millers began to save time, space, and money by supplementing freshly milled flour with oxidizing chlorine gas and then with potassium bromate. However, worries about the potential toxicity of bromate residues in the late 1980s led most millers to replace bromate with ascorbic acid (vitamin C) or azodicarbonamide. (Ascorbic acid itself is an antioxidant, but becomes oxidized to dehydroascorbic acid, which in turn oxidizes the gluten proteins.) In Europe, fava bean flour and soy flour have been used as flour improvers; their active fat-oxidizing enzymes, which generate the typical beany flavor, also indirectly cause the oxidation and elongation of gluten proteins.

The traditional air-aging of flour had a visible side effect: the yellowish flour becomes progressively paler as the xanthophyll pigments are oxidized to a colorless form. Once the chemistry of this change was understood, millers began using bleaching agents (azodicarbonamide, peroxide) to whiten flours. Many bakers prefer to use unbleached flours because they have been subjected to less chemical alteration. Bleaching is not allowed in Europe.

Minor Flour Components

The gluten proteins and starch granules in flour account for about 90% of flour weight, and for much of the behavior of flour doughs and batters. But some minor components have an important influence.

Extraction Rates

The degree to which a flour has been refined is designated by the “extraction rate,” or the percentage of the whole grain remaining in the finished flour. Whole wheat flour has an extraction rate of 90%. Most commercial white flours contain between 70 and 72% of the whole grain; French bread flour ranges from 72 to 78%, and so carries more flavor of the whole grain. Home bakers can make their own higher-extraction refined flours by supplementing commercial white flour with a portion of whole wheat flour that they have sifted to remove coarse bran and germ particles.

Fats and Related Molecules Although white flour is only about 1% fats, fat fragments, and phospholipids by weight, these substances are essential to the development of a well-raised bread. There’s evidence that some fatty materials can help stabilize the dough bubble walls as they expand and prevent premature rupture and collapse. Others become attached to starch granules and help soften the bread structure and slow staling. Similar ingredients added by the cook or manufacturer can magnify these useful effects (p. 524).

Enzymes Since the flour’s normal endowment of sugars is enough to feed yeast cells for only a short period of time, flour manufacturers have long supplemented the ground wheat with malted wheat or barley: grains that have been allowed to sprout and develop the enzymes that break down starch to sugars. Because malt flours give a dark cast to flours and doughs, and because their activity is somewhat variable, manufacturers are increasingly replacing them with enzymes extracted and purified from microscopic molds (“fungal amylase”).

The Protein Contents of Common Wheat Flours

These figures are approximate, and assume that the flour contains 12% moisture. The bulk of flour weight, from 70 to 80%, is starch and other seed carbohydrates. High-protein flours absorb substantially more water than low-protein flours, and so will produce stiffer doughs with the same proportion of water.

Flour

Protein Content

Whole wheat, graham

11–15

Durum semolina

Bread

12–13

All-purpose (U.S. national brands)

11–12

All-purpose (U.S. regional brands, South, Pacific Northwest)

7.5–9.5

Pastry

8–9

Cake

7–8

0 or 00 (Italian soft wheat)

11–12

Type 55 (French blend of soft and hard wheat)

9–10

English plain

7–10

Vital gluten

70–85

Because different flours have not only different protein contents, but different protein qualities, it’s not really possible to turn all-purpose flour into pastry flour or vice versa. However, it’s possible to dilute the gluten proteins of a given flour by the addition of cornstarch or another pure starch, or strengthen them by adding powdered vital gluten. To approximate pastry flour with all-purpose, add one part by weight of starch to two parts of all-purpose flour; to approximate all-purpose flour with pastry flour, add one-quarter part of gluten to two parts of pastry flour. (Purified gluten loses a little less than half its strength in the drying process.) With its chlorine-altered starch and fats, cake flour is inimitable.

Kinds of Flour

Though manufacturers and professional bakers can obtain flours from particular wheats, most flours for sale in supermarkets are labeled according to their intended use, with no direct indication of the kind of wheat or wheats they contain — they’re usually a blend — or their protein content or quality. Flour compositions can vary significantly from region to region; “all-purpose” flour in much of the United States and Canada has a higher protein content than “all-purpose” flours in the South or Pacific Northwest. Not surprisingly, recipes developed with a particular flour often turn out very differently when made with another, unless care is taken to find a replacement that closely approximates the original. The box on p. 530 lists the compositions of common wheat flours.

Whole wheat flours are high in protein, but a significant fraction of that protein comes from the germ and aleurone layer and does not form gluten; and germ and bran particles interfere with gluten formation. They therefore tend to make dense but flavorful breads. Bread flours are high in strong gluten proteins, and give the lightest, highest, and chewiest loaf breads. Both pastry and cake flours have low levels of weak gluten protein for making tender baked goods. Cake flour is distinctive because it’s treated with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. This treatment has several effects on the starch granules that are useful in cake making (p. 555), and leaves a trace of hydrochloric acid in the flour, which gives batters and doughs an acid pH and slightly acid taste.

“Self-rising” flours are flours that contain baking powder (1¹/₂ teaspoons baking powder per cup flour/5–7 gm per 100 g), and therefore don’t require added leavening for the making of quickbreads, pancakes, and other chemically raised foods. “Instant” or “instantized” flours (two brand names are Shake & Blend and Wondra) are low-protein flours whose starch granules have been precooked until they gelate, then dried again. The precooking and drying make it easier for water to penetrate them again during cooking. Instant flours are well suited to tender pastries and last-minute thickening of sauces and gravies.

Dough and Batter
Ingredients: Yeasts
and Chemical Leavenings

Leavenings are the ingredients that fill doughs and batters with bubbles of gas, thus reducing the amount of solid material in a given volume and making the bread or cake less dense, more light and tender.

Yeasts

Humans have been eating raised breads for 6,000 years, but it wasn’t until the investigations of Louis Pasteur 150 years ago that we began to understand the nature of the leavening process. The key is the gas-producing metabolism of a particular class of fungus, the yeasts. The word “yeast,” however, is as old as the language, and first meant the froth or sediment of a fermenting liquid that could be used to leaven bread.

Food Words: Leavening and Yeast

Leavening comes from an Indo-European root meaning “light, having little weight.” Related words from the same root include levity, lever, relieve, and lung. Yeast comes from a root word that meant “to seethe, boil, bubble over.” This derivation underlines the way in which fermentation seemed to be a kind of cooking of the cereal gruel, a transformation from within.

The yeasts are a group of microscopic single-celled fungi, relatives of the mushrooms. More than 100 different species are known. Some cause human infections, some contribute to food spoilage, but one species in particular — Saccharomyces cerevisiae, whose name means “brewer’s sugar fungus” — is put to good use in both brewing and baking. For much of human history, yeast was simply recruited from the grain surface or supplied by an earlier piece of dough, or obtained from the surface of beer brewing vats. Today strains especially selected for breadmaking are grown on molasses in industrial fermentation tanks.

Yeast Metabolism Yeasts metabolize sugars for energy, and produce carbon dioxide gas and alcohol as by-products of that metabolism. The overall equation for the conversion that takes place in yeast cells is this:

C₆H₁₂O₆ 2C₂H₅OH + 2CO₂ (1 molecule of glucose sugar yields 2 molecules of alcohol plus 2 molecules of carbon dioxide)

In making beer and wine, the carbon dioxide escapes from the fermenting liquid, and alcohol accumulates. In making bread, both carbon dioxide and alcohol are trapped by the dough, and both are expelled from the dough by the heat of baking.

In an unsweetened dough, yeasts grow on the single-unit sugars glucose and fructose and on the double-glucose sugar maltose, which enzymes in the flour produce from broken starch granules. A small amount of added table sugar in a dough will increase yeast activity, while a large amount decreases it (see sweet breads, p. 546), as does added salt. Yeast activity is also strongly affected by temperature: the cells grow and produce gas most rapidly at about 95ºF/35ºC.

In addition to providing carbon dioxide gas to inflate the dough, yeasts release a number of chemicals that affect the dough consistency. The overall effect is to strengthen the gluten and improve its elasticity.

Forms of Baker’s Yeast Commercial yeast is sold to home and restaurant cooks in three common forms, each a different genetic strain of S. cerevisiae with different traits.

Cake or compressed yeast is a moist block of fresh yeast cells, direct from the fermentation vat. Its cells are alive, and produce more leavening gas than the other forms. Cake yeast is perishable, must be kept refrigerated, and has a brief shelf life of one to two weeks.
Active dry yeast, which was introduced in the 1920s, has been removed from the fermentation tank and dried into granules with a protective coating of yeast debris. The yeast cells are dormant and can be stored at room temperature for months. The cook reactivates them by soaking them in warm water, 105–110ºF/ 41–43ºC, before mixing the dough. At cooler soaking temperatures, the yeast cells recover poorly and release substances that interfere with gluten formation (glutathione).
Instant dry yeast, an innovation of the 1970s, is dried more quickly than active dry yeast, and in the form of small porous rods that take up water more rapidly than granules. Instant yeast doesn’t need to be prehydrated before mixing with other dough ingredients, and produces carbon dioxide more vigorously than active dry yeast.

An Unusual Chemical Leavening: Hartshorn

The leavening that doesn’t involve an acid-base reaction is ammonium salts — ammonium carbonate and/or carbamate — which were once known as “hartshorn” because they were produced by the distillation of deer antlers. (Hartshorn was also a common source of gelatin.) When these compounds are heated to 140ºF/60ºC, they decompose into two leavening gases, carbon dioxide and ammonia, and don’t produce water. They’re especially suited to thin, very dry cookies and crackers with a large surface area to release the pungent ammonia during baking.

Baking Powders and Other
Chemical Leaveners

Yeast cells produce carbon dioxide slowly, over the course of an hour or more, so the material surrounding them must be elastic enough to contain it for that much time. Weak doughs and runny batters can’t hold gas bubbles for more than a few minutes, and are therefore usually raised with a faster-acting gas source. This is the role played by chemical leavenings. These ingredients are concentrated, and small differences in the amount added can cause large variations in the quality of the finished food. Too little leavening will leave it flat and dense, while too much will cause the batter to overexpand and collapse into a coarse structure with a harsh flavor.

Nearly all chemical leavenings exploit a reaction between certain acidic and alkaline compounds that results in the production of carbon dioxide, the same gas produced by yeast. The first chemical leavening was a dried water extract of wood ash — potash, mainly potassium carbonate — which reacts with the lactic acid in a soured dough as follows:

2(C₃H₆O₃) + K₂CO₃2(KC₃H₅O₃)+ H₂O + CO₂(2 molecules of lactic acid plus 1 of potassium carbonate yield 2 molecules of potassium lactate, plus a molecule of water, plus a molecule of carbon dioxide)

The Acid Components of Baking Powders

Some of these acids are available only to manufacturers. Most double-acting supermarket baking powders are a mixture of sodium bicarbonate, MCP, and SAS. Single-acting powders omit the SAS, and the MCP is coated to delay its release artificially.

Leavening Acid

Time of Reaction

Cream of tartar, tartaric acid

Immediately, during mixing

Monocalcium phosphate (MCP)

Immediately, during mixing

Sodium aluminum pyrophosphate (SAPP)

Slow release after mixing

Sodium aluminum sulfate (SAS)

Slow release and heat-activated

Sodium aluminum phosphate (SALP)

Heat-activated, early in cooking (100–104ºF/38–40ºC)

Dimagnesium phosphate (DMP)

Heat-activated, early in cooking (104–111ºF/40–44ºC)

Dicalcium phosphate dihydrate (DCPD)

Heat-activated, late in cooking (135–140ºF/57–60ºC)

Baking Soda The most common alkaline component of chemical leavenings is sodium bicarbonate (or sodium acid carbonate, NaHCO₃), usually called baking soda.

Baking soda can be the sole added leavening if the dough or batter contains acids to react with it. Common acid ingredients include sourdough cultures, fermented milks (buttermilk, yogurt), brown sugar and molasses, chocolate, and cocoa (if not dutched, p. 705), as well as fruit juices and vinegar. A general rule of thumb: ½ teaspoon/2 gm baking soda is neutralized by 1 cup/240 ml of fermented milk, or 1 teaspoon/5ml of lemon juice or vinegar, or ¼ teaspoons/5 gm cream of tartar.

Baking Powders Baking powders are complete leavening systems: they contain both alkaline baking soda and an acid in the form of solid crystals. (The active ingredients are mixed with ground dry starch, which prevents premature reactions in humid air by absorbing moisture, and gives the powder more bulk so that it’s easier to measure.) When added to liquid ingredients, the baking soda dissolves almost immediately. If the acid is very soluble, it too will dissolve quickly during mixing and react with the soda to inflate an initial set of gas bubbles. Cream of tartar, for example, releases two-thirds of its leavening potential during two minutes of mixing. If the acid is not very soluble, then it will remain in crystal form for a characteristic length of time, or until cooking raises the temperature high enough to dissolve it — and then it reacts with the soda to produce a delayed burst of gas. There are several different acids used in baking powders, each with a different pattern of gas production (see box, p. 533).

Most supermarket baking powders are “double-acting”; that is, they inflate an initial set of gas bubbles upon mixing the powder into the batter, and then a second set during the baking process. Baking powders for restaurant and manufacturing production contain slow-release acids so that leavening power doesn’t dissipate while the batter sits before being cooked.

Chemical leavenings can have adverse effects on both flavor and color. Some leavening acids have a distinctly astringent taste (sulfates, pyrophosphates). When acid and base are properly matched, neither is left behind in excess. But when too much soda is added, or when the batter is poorly mixed and not all the powder dissolves, a bitter, soapy, or “chemical” flavor results. Colors are also affected in even slightly alkaline conditions: browning reactions are enhanced, chocolate turns reddish, and blueberries turn green.

Breads

There are four basic steps in the making of yeast bread. We mix together the flour, water, yeast, and salt; we knead the mixture to develop the gluten network; we give the yeast time to produce carbon dioxide and fill the dough with gas cells; and we bake the dough to set its structure and generate flavor. In practice, each step involves choices that affect the qualities of the finished loaf. There are many ways to make basic bread! The following paragraphs explain some of the more significant choices and their effects. Breads made with special ingredients or methods — sourdoughs, sweet breads, flatbreads — are described later.

The Choice of Ingredients

Bread making begins with the ingredients, especially the flour and the yeasts. Because proportions are important, and the weight of a given volume of flour can vary by as much as 50% depending on whether it has been fluffed up (sifted) or packed down, it’s best to weigh ingredients rather than measure them in cups.

Flour The texture and flavor of bread are strongly influenced by the kind of flour used. “Bread flours” are milled from high-protein wheats, require a long kneading period to develop their strong gluten, and produce well-raised loaves with a distinctive, slightly eggy flavor and chewy texture. Lower-protein “all-purpose” flours give breads with a lower maximum volume, more neutral flavor, and less chewy texture, while flours from soft wheats with weak gluten proteins make denser loaves with a tender, cake-like crumb. The more of the outer aleurone, bran, and germ that makes it into the flour, the darker and denser the bread and the stronger the whole-grain flavor. The baker can mix different flours to obtain a particular character. Many artisan breadmakers prefer flours with a moderate protein content, 11–12%, and an extraction rate somewhere between standard white and whole wheat flours.

Water The chemical composition of the water used to make the dough influences the dough’s qualities. Distinctly acid water weakens the gluten network, while a somewhat alkaline water strengthens it. Hard water will produce a firmer dough thanks to the cross-linking effects of calcium and magnesium. The proportion of water also influences dough consistency. The standard proportion for a firm bread dough capable of good aeration is 65 parts water to 100 parts all-purpose flour by weight (40% of the combined weight). Less water will produce a firmer, less extensible dough and a denser loaf, while more water produces a soft, less elastic dough and an open-textured loaf. Wet doughs that are barely kneadable — for example the Italian cia-batta — may be 80 parts water or more per 100 flour (45%). High-protein flours absorb as much as a third more water than all-purpose flours, so water proportions and corresponding textures also depend on the nature of the flour used.

Salt Though some traditional breads are made without salt, most include it, and not just for a balanced taste. At 1.5–2% of the flour weight, salt tightens the gluten network and improves the volume of the finished loaf. (The tightening is especially evident in the autolyse mixing method, below.) Unrefined sea salts that contain calcium and magnesium impurities may produce the additional gluten strengthening that mineral-rich hard water does. In sourdoughs, salt also helps limit the protein-digesting activity of the souring bacteria, which can otherwise damage the gluten.

Yeast The baker can incorporate yeast in very different forms and proportions. For a simple dough to be fully leavened and baked in a few hours, the standard proportion for cake yeast is 0.5–4% of the flour weight, or 2.5–20 gm per pound/500 gm flour; for dried yeast, approximately half these numbers. If the dough is to be fermented slowly overnight, only 0.25% of flour weight, barely a gram per pound/500 gm is needed. (One gram still contains millions of yeast cells.) As a general rule, the less prepared yeast goes into the dough, and the longer dough is allowed to rise, the better the flavor of the finished bread. This is because the concentrated yeast has its own somewhat harsh flavor, and because the process of fermentation generates a variety of desirable flavor compounds (p. 543).

Durum Breads

Durum wheat flour forms an inelastic dough that doesn’t rise well, but has nevertheless been used to make dense, distinctively flavored, golden breads in the Mediterranean region for thousands of years. Durum flour absorbs nearly 50% more water than bread flour does, a fact that is part of the reason for the longer shelf life of durum bread.

Starters A general method for incorporating yeast into bread dough that maximizes the effective fermentation time and flavor production is the use of pre-ferments or starters, portions of already fermenting dough or batter that are added to the new mass of flour and water. The starter may be a piece of dough saved from the previous batch, or a stiff dough or runny batter made up with a small amount of fresh yeast and allowed to ferment for some hours, or a culture of “wild” yeasts and bacteria obtained without any commercial yeast at all. This last is called a “sourdough” starter because it includes large numbers of acid-forming bacteria. Starters go by many names — French poolish, Italian biga, Belgian desem, English sponge — and develop different qualities that depend on ingredient proportions, fermentation times and temperatures, and other details of their making. Sourdough breads are described on p. 544.

Preparing The Dough:
Mixing and Kneading

Mixing The first step in making bread is to mix the ingredients together. The moment flour meets water, several processes begin. Broken starch granules absorb water, and enzymes digest their exposed starch into sugars. The yeast cells feed on the sugars, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol. The glutenin proteins absorb some water and sprawl out into their elongated coils; the coils of neighboring molecules form many weak bonds with each other and thus form the first strands of gluten. We see the dough take on a vaguely fibrous appearance, and feel it cohere to itself. When it’s stirred with a spoon, the protein aggregates are drawn together into visible filaments and form what has been vividly described as a “shaggy mass.” At the same time, a number of substances in the flour cause breaks in and blocking of the end-to-end bonds of the gluten molecules, and so an initial shortening of the gluten chains. As oxygen from the air and oxidizing compounds from the yeasts enter the dough, the breaking and blocking stop, and the gluten molecules begin to bond end-to-end and form long chains.

Mixing can be done by hand, in a stand mixer, or in a food processor. The processor works in less than a minute, a fraction of the time required for hand or mixer kneading, and therefore offers the advantage of minimizing exposure to air and oxygen, an excess of which bleaches the remaining wheat pigments and alters flavor. The high energy input heats the dough, which should be allowed to cool before fermentation.

Two-Stage Mixing: Autolysis

An alternative to mixing all the dough ingredients at once is the autolyse or “autolysis” method championed by a legendary French bread authority, Raymond Calvel, to compensate for some of the disadvantages of rapid industrial production. It has also been adopted by many artisan bakers. Autolysis involves combining only the flour and water and letting them sit for 15–30 minutes before adding the leavening and salt. According to Calvel, this initial preparation gives the starch and the gluten proteins a chance to absorb as much water as possible without the interference of salt, and allows the gluten chains to shorten more (autolysis means “self-digestion”). The result is a dough that’s easier to manipulate, requires less kneading and therefore less exposure to oxygen, and so better retains the wheat’s light golden color and characteristic taste.

Dough Development: Kneading Once the ingredients have been mixed and the dough is formed, the process of dough development begins. Whether the dough is kneaded by hand or in an electrical mixer, it undergoes a similar kind of physical manipulation: it is stretched, folded over, compressed, stretched, folded, and compressed many times. This manipulation strengthens the gluten network. It unfolds the proteins further, orients them side by side and encourages the development of many weak bonds between neighbors. The glutenin molecules also form strong end-to-end bonds with each other and thus a cohering network of extensive gluten chains. The dough gradually gets stiff, harder to manipulate, and takes on a fine, satiny appearance. (If the dough is worked so hard that many end-to-end bonds start breaking, its overall structure breaks down, and the dough becomes sticky and inelastic. Overdevelopment is a real problem only when kneading is done mechanically.)

Gluten formation. The view of wetted flour through a light microscope. Left: When water is first added to flour, the gluten proteins are randomly oriented in a thick fluid. Right: As this fluid is stirred, it quickly develops into a tangle of fibers as the glutenin proteins form elongated bundles of molecules.

Gluten orientation. When flour is initially mixed with water, the glutenin molecules form a random network of gluten chains. Kneading helps orient the gluten chains in orderly arrays.

Kneading dough. Kneading repeatedly stretches and elongates the gluten, helping to orient the long chains and encourage the side-by-side bonding that contributes to gluten strength.

Kneading also aerates the dough. As it’s repeatedly folded over and compressed, pockets of air are trapped and squeezed under pressure into smaller, more numerous pockets. The more pockets formed during kneading, the finer the texture of the final bread. Most of the air pockets are incorporated as the dough reaches its maximum stiffness.

Some bread recipes call for a bare minimum of kneading. This generally results in fewer and larger air cells, and so a coarse, irregular texture that has its own appeal. The gluten of such doughs is less developed as they begin fermentation, but the rising of the dough continues to develop gluten structure (below), so little-kneaded doughs can eventually rise well to give an airy, tender crumb.

Fermentation, or Rising

Fermentation is the stage during which the dough is set aside for the yeast cells to produce carbon dioxide, which diffuses into the air pockets, slowly inflates them, and thus raises the dough. This gentle stretching action continues the process of gluten orientation and development, as does the oxidizing effect of other yeast by-products, which continue to help the glutenin molecules to link up end-to-end. As a result, even initially wet, barely cohesive doughs become more manageable after fermentation.

Yeasts produce carbon dioxide most rapidly at around 95ºF/35ºC, but they also produce more noticeable quantities of sour and unpleasant-smelling by-products. A fermentation temperature of 80ºF/27ºC is often suggested for a relatively quick rising time of a couple of hours. Lower temperatures may extend fermentation times by an hour or more, and with them the generation of desirable yeast flavors.

The end of the fermentation period is signaled by the dough’s volume — it approximately doubles — and by the condition of the gluten matrix. When poked with the finger, fully fermented dough will retain the impression and won’t spring back: the gluten has been stretched to the limit of its elasticity. The dough is now gently handled to reconsolidate the gluten, divide the gas pockets, redistribute the yeast cells and their food supply, and even out the temperature and moisture (fermentation generates heat, water, and alcohol). Thanks to the added moisture and to the gluten-interrupting bubbles, fermented doughs feel softer and easier to work than newly kneaded dough.

Food Words: Knead

The word knead comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to compress into a ball”; related words are gnocchi, quenelle, knoll, and knuckle.

Doughs made from high-protein flours may be put through a second rising to develop their tougher gluten fully. Either way, the fermented dough is then divided, gently rounded into balls, rested for a few minutes to allow the gluten to relax somewhat, and then molded into loaves. The loaves are then allowed another partial rise, or “proof,” to prepare them for the final and dramatic rise during baking.

Retarding the Fermentation Traditional breadmaking can last many hours, and bakers would often have to work through the night in order to sell fresh bread in the morning. In the 1920s, bakers in Vienna began to experiment with breaking the work into two periods, a daytime stint for mixing, fermentation, and molding into loaves, and then an early-morning baking. During the night, the formed loaves were kept in a refrigerated chamber. Cool temperatures slow the activity of microbes substantially; yeasts take 10 times longer to raise bread in the refrigerator than at warm room temperature. Refrigeration of dough is therefore called retarding, and the cold chamber a retarder. Retarding is now a common practice.

In addition to giving the baker greater flexibility, retarding has useful effects on the dough. Long, slow fermentation allows both yeasts and bacteria more time to generate flavor compounds. Cold dough is stiffer than warm dough, so it’s easier to handle without causing a loss of leavening gas. And the cycle of cooling and rewarming redistributes the dough gases (from small bubbles into the water phase, then back out into larger bubbles), and encourages the development of a more open, irregular crumb structure.

Baking

Ovens, Baking Temperatures, and Steam The kind of oven in which bread is baked has an important influence on the qualities of the finished loaf.

Traditional Bread Ovens Until the middle of the 19th century, bread was baked in clay, stone, or brick ovens that were preheated by a wood fire, and that could store a large amount of heat energy. The baker started the fire on the floor of the oven, let it burn for hours, cleaned out the ashes, and then introduced the loaves of dough and closed the oven door. The oven surfaces start out at 700–900ºF/350–450ºC, the domed roof radiating its stored heat from above, the floor conducting heat directly into the loaves from beneath. As the dough heats it releases steam, which fills the closed chamber and further speeds the transfer of heat to the loaves. Slowly the oven surfaces lose their heat, and the temperature declines during the bake, at the same time that the loaf is browning and therefore becoming more efficient at absorbing heat. The result is a rapid initial heating that encourages the dough to expand, and temperatures high enough to dry the crust well and generate the color and flavors of the browning reactions (p. 778).

Modern Metal Ovens The modern metal oven is certainly easier to bake in than the wood-fired oven, but it isn’t as ideally suited to breadmaking. It usually has a maximum cooking temperature of 500ºF/250ºC. And its thin walls are incapable of storing much heat, so its temperature is maintained by means of gas flames or electrical elements that get red-hot. When these heat sources switch on during baking, the effective temperature temporarily rises well above the target baking temperature, and the bread can be scorched. Because they are vented to allow the escape of combustion gases (carbon dioxide and water), gas ovens don’t retain the loaves’ steam well during the important early stage. Electric ovens do a better job. Some of the advantages of the traditional stored-heat oven can be obtained from the use of ceramic baking stones or wraparound ceramic oven inserts, which are preheated to the oven’s maximum temperature and provide more intensive and even heat during baking.

Steam Steam does several useful things during the first few minutes of baking. It greatly increases the rate of heat transfer from oven to dough. Without steam, the dough surface reaches 195ºF/90ºC in 4 minutes; with steam, in 1 minute. Steam thus causes a rapid expansion of the gas cells. As the steam condenses onto the dough surface, it forms a film of water that temporarily prevents the loaf surface from drying out into a crust, thus keeping it flexible and elastic so that it doesn’t hinder the initial rapid expansion of the loaf, the “oven spring.” The overall result is a larger, lighter loaf. In addition, the hot water film gelates starch at the loaf surface into a thin, transparent coating that later dries into an attractively glossy crust.

Professional bakers often inject steam under low pressure into the oven for the first several minutes of baking. In home ovens, spraying water or throwing ice cubes into the hot chamber can produce enough steam to improve the oven spring and crust gloss.

Early Baking: Oven Spring When the bread first enters the oven, heat moves into the bottom of the dough from the oven floor or pan, and into the top from the oven ceiling and the hot air. If steam is present, it provides an initial blast of heat by condensing onto the cold dough surface. Heat then moves from the surface through the dough by two means: slow conduction through the viscous gluten-starch matrix, and much more rapid steam movement through the network of gas bubbles. The better leavened the dough, the faster steam can move through it, and so the faster the loaf cooks.

As the dough heats up, it becomes more fluid, its gas cells expand, and the dough rises. The main cause of this oven spring is the vaporization of alcohol and water into gases that fill the gas cells, and that expand the dough by as much as half its initial volume. Oven spring is usually over after 6–8 minutes of baking.

Mid-Baking: From Foam to Sponge Oven spring stops when the crust becomes firm and stiff enough to resist it, and when the interior of the loaf reaches 155–180ºF/68–80ºC, the temperature range in which the gluten proteins form strong cross-links with each other and the starch granules absorb water, swell, gelate, and amylose molecules leak out of the granules. Now the walls of the gas cells can no longer stretch to accommodate the rising pressure inside, so the pressure builds and eventually ruptures the walls, turning the structure of the loaf from a closed network of separate gas cells into an open network of communicating pores: from an aggregation of little balloons into a sponge through which gases can easily pass. (If the dough were not transformed into a sponge, then cooling would cause each isolated gas cell to shrink, and the loaf would collapse.)

Bread dough before and after baking. As the dough heats up, starch granules absorb moisture from the gluten, swell, and leak some starch molecules, creating reinforcement for the dough walls that surround the gas pockets.

Late Baking: Flavor Development and Cooking Through Baking is continued for some time after the bread center approaches the boiling point. This gelates the starch as thoroughly as possible, thus preventing the center from remaining damp and heavy, and slowing subsequent staling. Continued baking also encourages the surface browning reactions that improve both color and flavor. Though limited to the hot, dry crust, these reactions affect the flavor of the whole loaf because their products diffuse inward. A light-colored loaf will be noticeably less flavorful than a dark one.

Bread is judged to be done when its crust has browned and its inner structure has become fully set. The second condition can be verified indirectly by tapping on the bottom of the loaf. If the interior still contains a continuous gluten mass with embedded bubbles, it will sound and feel heavy and dense. If it has cooked through and become an open sponge, the loaf will sound hollow.

Cooling

Immediately after being removed from the oven, the loaf’s outer layer is very dry, around 15% water, and close to 400ºF/200ºC, while the interior is as moist as the original dough, around 40% water, and around 200ºF/93ºC. During cooling, these differences partly even themselves out. Moisture diffuses outward, and much of the loaf’s moisture loss occurs now. It ranges from 10% to 20% of the dough weight, depending on surface area, with small rolls losing the most and large loaves the least.

As the temperature declines, the starch granules become firmer and so the loaf as a whole becomes easier to slice without tearing. This desirable firming continues over the course of a day or so, and turns out to be the first step in the process called staling.

The Staling Process;
Storing and Refreshing Bread

Staling Staling takes place in the days following baking, and seems to involve the loss of moisture: the bread interior gets dry, hard, and crumbly. It turns out that bread will stale even when there’s no net loss of moisture from the loaf. This was shown in the landmark study of bread staling in 1852, when the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Boussingault showed that bread could be hermetically sealed to prevent it from losing water, and yet still go stale. He further showed that staling is reversed by reheating the bread to 140ºF/60ºC: the temperature, we now know, at which starch gelates.

Staling is now understood to be a manifestation of starch retrogradation, the recrystallization, water migration out of the granules, and hardening that take place when cooked starch is then cooled (p. 548). The initial firming of the freshly baked bread loaf, which improves its ability to be sliced, is caused by the retrogradation of the simple straight-chain amylose molecules, and is essentially complete within a day of baking.

Food Words: Stale

Though stale now suggests a food that is past its prime, old and dried out, it hasn’t always had these negative connotations. It is a medieval Teutonic word, and originally meant “to stand” or “to age.” It was applied to wines and liquors, which became clarified and stronger in flavor when they were allowed to stand for some time and settle. A kind of settling and strengthening also takes place among the starch molecules in bread, but these have toughening effects that are undesirable, at least for bread to be eaten fresh. Stale toughened bread does have its uses (see box, p. 542).

The majority of starch molecules, the branched amylopectins within the granul, also retrograde. But thanks to their irregular structure, they form crystalline regions and expel water much more slowly, over the course of several days. This is the process responsible for the undesirable firming in texture after the bread has become sliceable. For some reason, both the rate and the extent of staling are lower in lighter, less dense breads.

Certain emulsifying agents have been found to retard staling substantially and for this reason have been added to mass-produced bread doughs for about 50 years. True buttermilk (p. 50) and egg yolks are rich in emusifiers and have the same effect. It’s thought that these substances complex with starch or in some other way interfere with water movement, thereby inhibiting recrystallization.

Reheating Reverses Staling As long as much of the water released by the starch granules remains in the surrounding gluten — that is, as long as the loaf isn’t too old, or has been wrapped and refrigerated — staling can be reversed by heating the bread above the gelation temperature of wheat starch, 140ºF/60ºC. Once more the crystalline regions are disrupted, water molecules move in between the starch molecules, and the granules and amylose gels become tender again. This is why toasting sliced bread makes the interior soft, and why a loaf of bread can be refreshed by heating it in the oven.

Storing Bread: Avoid the Refrigerator Staling proceeds most rapidly at temperatures just above freezing, and very slowly below freezing. In one experiment, bread stored in the refrigerator at 46ºF/7ºC staled as much in one day as bread held at 86ºF/30ºC did in six days. If you’re going to use bread in a day or two, then store it at room temperature in a breadbox or paper bag, which reduces moisture loss while allowing the crust to remain somewhat crisp. If you need to keep bread for several days or more, then wrap it well in plastic or foil and freeze it. Refrigerate bread (well wrapped) only if you’re going to toast or otherwise reheat it.

Bread Spoilage Compared to many foods, bread contains relatively little water, and so it often dries out before it becomes infected by spoilage microbes. Keeping bread at room temperature in a plastic bag allows moisture from the staling starch granules to collect on the bread surfaces and encourages the growth of potentially toxic molds, especially blue-green species of Aspergillus and Penicillium, gray-white Mucor species, and red Monilia sitophila.

The Virtues of Stale Bread

Cooks have long known that stale bread is a very useful ingredient in its own right. It is more robust than fresh bread, and retains its sponge-like structure in wet preparations that would cause fresh bread to disintegrate, such dishes as bread salads, bread puddings, and pain perdu. Similarly, bread crumbs retain their individual identity when wetted, and can serve as tender binding agent in stuffings, panades, and breadings for frying. The source of dry bread’s structural integrity is its starch. When it retrogrades, it forms some regions that are extremely ordered and stable and that hold the rest of the starch network strongly together (p. 458).

Bread Flavor

The incomparable flavor of simple wheat bread has three sources: the flavor of wheat flour, the products of yeast and bacterial fermentation, and the reactions caused by oven heat during baking. The aroma of low-extraction white flour is dominated by vanilla, spicy, metallic, and fatty notes (from vanillin, a furanone, and fatty aldehydes), while whole-meal flour is richer in most of these and in addition has cucumber, fried, “sweaty,” and honey notes (from other fatty aldehydes and alcohols and phenylacetic acid). Yeast fermentation generates a “yeasty” character, a large part of which comes from fruity esters and eggy sulfur compounds. Baking contributes the toasty products of browning reactions. Starters add general complexity and a distinctive sour note from acetic and other organic acids.

Mass-Produced Breads

The manufacture of commercial breads bears little resemblance to the process described above. Ordinary mixing, kneading, and fermentation require several hours of work and waiting from the bread maker. In bread factories, high-powered mechanical dough developers and chemical maturing agents (oxidizers) can produce a “ripe” dough, with good aeration and gluten structure, in four minutes. Yeast is added to such doughs mainly as flavoring. The formed loaves are proofed briefly and then baked as they move through a tunnel-like metal oven. These breads tend to have a very fine, cakelike texture, because machines are far more efficient at aerating dough than are hands or stand mixers. The flavor of manufactured bread can sometimes be marked by such unpleasant aroma compounds as sour, sweat-like isovaleric and isobutyric acids, which are produced by flour and yeast enzymes in unbalanced amounts during intensive mixing and high-temperature proofing.

A Scientific Definition of Bread Quality

Raymond Calvel is an eminent figure in the world of baking, a researcher and teacher who made great contributions to the understanding and improvement of bread quality in postwar France. His definition of high quality in good French bread doesn’t necessarily apply in detail to other bread styles, but it shows how much there is to appreciate in a well-made loaf.

A good bread — a real quality loaf — …will have a creamy white crumb. The proper creamy-white color of the crumb shows that the dough oxidation during mixing has not been excessive. It also presages the distinctive aroma and taste that are a subtle blend of the scent of wheat flour — that of wheat germ oil, along with the delicate hint of hazelnut aroma that comes from the germ. All of these are combined with the heady smell that comes from alcoholic dough fermentation, along with the discreet aromas that are the results of caramelization and crust baking…. the grain of French bread should be open, marked here and there by large gas cells. These should be thin-walled cells, with a lightly pearlescent appearance. This unique structure, resulting from the combination of numerous factors including the level of dough maturation and the loaf forming method, is basic to the eating qualities, flavor, and gustatory appeal of French bread.

— The Taste of Bread, transl. R. L. Wirtz.

Special Kinds of Loaf Breads:
Sourdough, Rye, Sweet,
Gluten-Free

Bakers make distinctive variations on the basic loaf bread from a variety of grains and other ingredients. Here are brief descriptions of some of them.

Sourdough Breads Sourdough breads get their name from the fact that both the dough and bread are acid. The acidity, along with other distinctive flavor components, is produced by bacteria that grow in the dough along with various yeasts. The bacteria often include some of the same lactic acid bacteria that make milk into yogurt and buttermilk (p. 44). The leavening for this kind of bread begins as a “wild” starter, a mixture of whatever microbes happened to be on the grain and in the air and other ingredients when flour was mixed with water. The mixture of yeasts and bacteria is then perpetuated by saving a portion of the dough to leaven the next batch of bread.

The first breads probably resembled modern sourdoughs, and bread in much of the world is made with sourdough starters that give distinctive regional flavors. The bacteria somehow delay starch retrogradation and staling, and the acids they produce make the bread resistant to spoilage microbes: so sourdough breads are especially flavorful and keep well. Because browning reactions are slowed in acid conditions, sourdough breads tend to be lighter in color than straight yeast breads, and their flavor less toasty.

It isn’t easy to make good bread with sourdough cultures. There are two reasons for this. One is that the bacteria grow faster than the yeasts, almost always outnumber them by factors of a hundred or a thousand, and inhibit the yeasts’ gas production: so sourdoughs often don’t rise very well. The other is that acid conditions and bacterial protein-digesting enzymes weaken the dough gluten, which makes it less elastic and the resulting bread more dense.

Guidelines for Working with Sourdoughs The key to successful baking with sourdough starters is to limit bacterial growth and acidification, and encourage a healthy yeast population. In general, this means keeping sourdough starters relatively cool, and “refreshing” them frequently by adding new flour and water and aerating them vigorously. Here are rules of thumb to keep in mind.

Frozen and Par-baked Doughs and Breads

Bread dough can be frozen, thawed, and baked into bread, but freezing kills a large proportion of the yeast cells, which means less leavening power, a slower rise, and the spread of yeast chemicals that weaken gluten. Sweet rich doughs turn out to freeze the best.

The best stage at which to freeze bread dough is after the dough has risen and baked for 70 to 80% of its usual baking time. This frozen “par-baked” bread can be thawed and finished with just a few minutes in a hot oven. Yeast survival is no longer important, because the yeast cells have done their leavening and are killed during the initial bake.

Both yeasts and bacteria grow fastest in liquid starters, which allow the microbes easier access to nutrients; in a semisolid dough they grow more slowly and require less frequent attention. Because growing microbes consume nutrients rapidly, and produce acid and other growth-inhibiting substances, starters need to be divided and refreshed frequently, two or more times per day. Adding new water and flour dilutes the accumulated acids and other growth inhibitors, and provides a fresh supply of food. Aerating the starter — whisking a liquid one, or kneading a doughy one — supplies the oxygen that yeasts require to build cell membranes for new cells. The more frequently the starter is divided and refreshed, the better the yeasts will be able to grow, and the more leavening power the starter will have. Starters should be incorporated into a dough when they’re actively growing and at their bubbliest. While bacteria thrive at warm temperatures, 86–96ºF/30–35ºC, yeasts in an acid environment grow better at a cooler 68–78ºF/20–25ºC; so both starters and rising doughs should be kept relatively cool.

Finally, sourdoughs should be well salted. Salt limits bacterial protein-digesting enzymes, and tightens the vulnerable gluten.

Rye Breads Though a minor grain compared to wheat, rye is still found in many breads in Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe and Scandinavia. Most rye breads baked today are made from mixtures of rye and wheat flours, with rye providing its distinctive, full flavor and wheat the rising power of gluten. Rye proteins simply don’t form an elastic network like gluten, apparently because the glutenin molecules can’t link up end-to-end into long chains. Rye has another major breadmaking liability: it tends to begin sprouting before harvest, so its starch-digesting enzymes are active during baking and break down the other major source of dough structure. Nevertheless bakers in northern Europe found a way of making a unique raised bread from pure rye flour.

Pumpernickel True pumpernickel was apparently born during a famine in Westphalia in the 16th century. It starts with coarse whole-grain rye flour and a several-stage sourdough fermentation; the acidity helps limit starch breakdown and also makes the dough more elastic. The dough manages to retain some carbon dioxide bubbles thanks to its high content of gummy cell-wall materials called pentosans (p. 470). The fermented rye dough is baked in a pan at a low oven temperature, or steamed, and for a very long time: 16 to 24 hours. The loaf develops only a thin crust, and turns a dark chocolate-brown and takes on a rich flavor thanks to the long cooking time and high concentration of free sugars and amino acids, which undergo browning reactions. Because the abundant starch-digesting enzymes are active for a long time during the slow baking, pumpernickel may end up very sweet, with a sugar content of 20%.

Food Words: Pumpernickel, Bagel, Pretzel, Brioche, Panettone, Pandoro

Three of these bread names are German in origin, three from Romance languages. Pumpernickel comes from Westphalian dialect words for the devil (St. Nick) and for “fart”: this is a high-fiber bread. Bagel comes via Yiddish from a German root meaning “ring,” and pretzel directly from a German word of Latin origin meaning “little bracelet,” so both are named for their shape. Brioche is French, its root apparently broyer, meaning to grind or knead. It first appears in the 15th century to name breads enriched with butter but not yet with eggs. Panettone and pandoro are 19th-century Italian coinages meaning “grand bread” and “golden bread.”

The distinctive, complex flavor of rye bread comes largely from the grain itself, which has mushroom, potato, and green notes (from octenone, methional, nonenal). The traditional sourdough fermentation adds malty, vanilla, fried, buttery, sweaty, and vinegar notes.

Sweet and Rich Breads: Brioche, Panettone, Pandoro Bread doughs that contain substantial amounts of fat and/or sugar pose special challenges to the baker. Both fat and sugar slow gluten development and weaken it, sugar because it binds up water molecules and interrupts the gluten-water network, fat because it bonds to fat-loving portions of the gluten chains and prevents them from bonding to each other. Rich doughs are therefore relatively soft and fragile. Bakers often build them by holding back the fat and sugar and kneading these in only after developing the gluten network, and then bake the doughs in containers that support their weight and prevent them from sagging and flattening. Large amounts of sugar slow the growth of yeast by dehydrating the cells, so sweet doughs are often made with more yeast than ordinary breads, and they may take longer to rise. Sugar also makes sweet doughs prone to begin browning early in the baking, so they’re usually baked at a relatively low oven temperature to prevent the surface from browning before the interior has set.

French brioche dough is especially rich in butter and eggs. It’s often retarded (chilled, p. 539) for 6–18 hours to stiffen it, then rolled out and briefly rested. This makes the dough easier to handle and form before its final rise. Italian panettone and pandoro are remarkable holiday breads that are enriched with large quantities of sugar, egg yolks, and butter, but that keep well because they are built from a sourdough that starts with a naturally leavened sponge.

Gluten-Free Breads People whose immune systems are intolerant of gluten must avoid wheat and its close relatives, and therefore can’t eat ordinary bread, where gluten plays a major role in texture. A reasonable facsimile of raised bread can be made with gluten-free flours or starches — rice flour, for example — that are supplemented with xanthan gum and emulsifiers. The gum, which is secreted by a bacterium and purified from industrial-scale fermenters, provides a modest gluten-like elasticity, while the emulsifiers stabilize the gas bubbles and slow the diffusion of carbon dioxide from the dough during baking.

Other Breads: Flatbreads, Bagels, Steamed Breads, Quick Breads, Doughnuts

Light oven-baked loaves are the standard form of bread in Europe and North America, but there are many other versions of the staff of life. Here are brief descriptions of some of them.

Milk in Bread

Both fresh and powdered milk are sometimes included in doughs for their flavor and nutritiousness, but they can weaken the gluten of bread dough and produce a dense loaf. The culprit appears to be a whey protein, which can be inactivated by scalding the milk — bringing it just to the boil — before use. (The milk must be cooled before mixing to avoid precooking the flour and damaging the yeast.)

Flatbreads Thin flatbreads were the original breads, and are still a major source of nourishment in many countries throughout the world. The essential characteristic of flatbreads is that they cook very quickly, in as little as two minutes, on a simple hot surface, whether a pan, an oven floor or wall, or a mass of hot pebbles. The heat is often very high — pizza ovens can run at 900ºF/450ºC — and this means that tiny air-pockets in the dough are puffed up by rapidly vaporizing steam, essentially leavening the dough without the necessity of fermentation (though many flatbreads are made with leavened doughs). This puffing, and the breads’ thinness, make them tender; and since neither requires a strong gluten, flatbreads can be made from all kinds of grains. Despite the short baking time, the high temperatures develop a delicious toasted flavor across the extensive surface of flatbreads.

Flatbreads often puff to an impressive if temporary volume, and the central cavity of pita and similar breads is used as a pocket for filling with other foods. Puffing occurs when the two bread surfaces have set in the heat and become tougher than the inner layer, where steam accumulates and eventually tears the tender interior, forcing the two surfaces apart. When puffing is undesirable — in crackers, for example, which would become too fragile — the sheeted dough is “docked,” or pricked in a regular pattern with a pointed utensil — a fork, or a special stamp — to form dense gluten nodes that resist puffing.

Pretzels Pretzels are unusual for their woven shape, dark brown crust, and unusual flavor. Like crackers, they’re made from a stiff yeast dough of soft wheat flour. In manufacturing, the formed dough is sprayed for 10–15 seconds with a hot 1% solution of alkaline sodium hydroxide (lye) or sodium carbonate. The heat and moisture combine to gelate the surface starch. The dough is then salted and baked for about five minutes in a very hot oven. The starch gel hardens to a shiny finish and thanks to the alkaline conditions created by the lye, browning-reaction pigments and flavor compounds rapidly accumulate. (The lye reacts with carbon dioxide in the oven to form a harmless edible carbonate.) The final step is a long, slow bake to dry the whole pretzel out. The pretzel is crisp but fragile thanks to tiny airy bubbles and ungelated starch granules throughout, and it has a distinctive flavor from its alkaline-browned surface.

Soft and homemade pretzels may be allowed to rise before being boiled briefly in a solution of baking soda and then baked for 10 or 15 minutes in a hot oven.

Bagels The bagel is a relatively small, ring-shaped bread that arose in Eastern Europe, and was introduced to the United States by immigrants to New York in the early 20th century.

Traditionally, the bagel had a shiny, thick, chewy crust and a dense interior; after its popularity grew in the late 20th century, many bakers began to make it larger and softer. Bagels are made with strong-gluten flour, which is made into a very stiff dough (a standard bread dough has 65 parts water to 100 flour; bagel dough has only 45 to 50). Traditional bagels are made by forming the dough, allowing it to rise somewhat (an 18-hour retardation gives a good crumb), immersing it in boiling water for 1.5–3 minutes on both sides to expand the interior and develop a thick crust, and then baking it. In the modern method, which is simpler to automate and takes a fraction of the usual time, the formed dough is steamed and then baked, with no slow rise and no immersion in boiling water. The steaming puffs the dough up more than rising and boiling do, and produces a thinner crust. The result is a lighter, softer ring.

Asian Steamed Breads The Chinese have been making and eating steamed breads and buns for around 2,000 years. Asian breads are generally small, round, very white, with a smooth, shiny surface and thin skin, and a moist, springy texture that may be chewy (mantou) or tender and fluffy (bao). They are generally made from soft wheats with moderate gluten content and strength. The relatively stiff dough is fermented, rolled out several times, then cut, formed, proofed, and steamed for 10–20 minutes.

Some Flatbreads of the World

Country

Bread

Qualities

Unleavened

Israel

Matzoh

Very thin, cracker-like

Armenia

Lavash

Paper-thin, often dried and rehydrated

Italy (Sardinia)

Parchment bread, carta di musica

Semolina flour, very thin

Norway

Lefse

Flour & potatoes, often with butter, cream

Scandinavia

Various rye, oat, barley flatbreads

Many dry

Scotland

Bannocks

Oat cakes

Tibet

Barley bread

From roasted barley flour, tsampa

China

Shaobing

Flour, water, lard, folded and rolled, layered

Baobing

Hot-water dough, rolled very thin for wrappers

India

Chapati

Whole-wheat, dry-roasted on pan

Phulka

Chapati cooked, then puffed directly on coals

Paratha

Folded with ghee, rolled, layered

Puri, golegappa, lucchi

Deep-fried, puffed

Mexico

Tortillas

Wheat flour or maize

Leavened

Iran

Sangak

Whole wheat, baked on hot pebbles

Italy

Focaccia

Moderate thickness

Pizza

Thin, cooked in very hot oven (to 900ºF/450ºC)

Egypt

Baladi

Pocket bread

Ethiopia

Injera

Soured teff batter, bubbly and soft

India

Naan

Dough enriched with yogurt, baked in tandoor

United States

Soda cracker

Sourdough neutralized by baking soda

English muffin

Small diameter, thick

Pretzel

Thin knotted cylinder

Quickbreads: Biscuits, Biscotti, Scones Quickbreads are appropriately named in two ways: they are quick to prepare, being leavened with rapid-acting chemicals and mixed briefly to minimize gluten development; and they should be quickly eaten, because they stale rapidly. Batter breads are moister, richer, and keep longer (p. 554).

The term biscuit is an ambiguous one. It comes from the French for “twice-cooked,” and originally referred to breads and pastries that were baked until dry and hard. The Italian hard cookies called biscotti remain true to this heritage; they’re lean doughs leavened with baking powder, baked in flattish loaves, then cut crosswise into thin pieces and rebaked at a low oven temperature to dry them out. French biscuits proper, and English biskets, were long-keeping sweets, small bread-like loaves made from foamed egg whites, flour, and sugar. To this day in England, the word is used for little sweet dry cakes, what Americans call cookies. Modern French biscuits are dryish cakes made from egg foams, usually moistened with a flavored syrup or cream.

Biscuits became something entirely different in America, and early in its history (see box below). American biscuits contain no sugar and often no eggs, are made from a moist dough of milk or buttermilk, flour, pieces of solid fat, and baking soda, and are cooked briefly into a soft, tender morsel. There are two styles: one with a crusty, irregular top and tender interior; another with a flat top and flaky interior. The first is made with minimal handling to avoid gluten development, the second with just enough folding and kneading to develop a structure with alternating layers of dough and fat. The simple recipe and short cooking mean that the flavor of the flour itself is prominent.

English scones are similar to American biscuits in their simplicity, basic composition, and floury taste. Irish soda bread is made with soft whole-wheat flour and without fat.

Early American Biscuits

Despite their name, these American biscuits were cooked only once, and were rich and moist, not dry.

Biscuit

One pound flour, one ounce butter, one egg, wet with milk and break while oven is heating; and in same proportion.

Butter Biscuit

One pint each milk and emptins [liquid yeast], laid into flour, in sponge; next morning add one pound butter melted, not hot, and knead into as much flour as will with another pint of warmed milk, be of a sufficient consistence to make soft — some melt the butter in the milk.

— Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1796

Doughnuts and Fritters Doughnuts and fritters are essentially pieces of bread or pastry dough that are fried in oil rather than baked. Doughnuts have a moist interior and little or no crust, while fritters are usually fried until crisp.

The word doughnut was coined in the United States in the 19th century to name what the Dutch called olykoeks, portions of fried sweetened dough. Their great popularity flowered in the 1920s, when machinery simplified the handling of the soft, sticky doughs, which are rich in sugar, fat, and sometimes eggs. There are two main styles: yeasted doughnuts are light and fluffy, while cake doughnuts, leavened with baking powder, are denser. Light, yeasted doughnuts ride on the oil surface and must be turned, which leaves a white band around their circumference where the oil surface cooks the dough less thoroughly. Doughnuts are fried at a moderate temperature, originally in lard and now usually in a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, which solidifies when the doughnut cools to provide a dry rather than oily surface.

Thin Batter Foods:
CrÊpes, Popovers, Griddle
Cakes, Cream Puff Pastry

Batter Foods

The difference between doughs and batters is reflected in their names. Dough comes from a root meaning “to form,” while batter comes from a root meaning “to beat.” Doughs are firm enough to develop and sculpt by hand. Batters are too fluid and elusive to hold, so we contain them in a bowl, mix them by battering them repeatedly from within — by stirring — and cook them in a container to give them form and solidity.

Batters are fluid because they include two to four times more water than doughs. The water disperses the gluten proteins so widely that they form only a very loose, fluid network. When we cook a batter, the starch granules absorb much of the water, swell, gelate, leak amylose, stick to each other, and thus turn the fluid into a solid but tender, moist structure. The gluten proteins play a secondary structural role, providing an underlying cohesiveness that prevents the food from being crumbly. But if the gluten is overdeveloped, it makes the food elastic and chewy. Batters often contain eggs, and the egg proteins also contribute a nonelastic solidity when they coagulate in the cooking heat. Fluid batters can’t retain much of the gas slowly evolved by yeast, and are usually leavened either chemically, or else mechanically, by beating air into the batter or its components.

Most batter products are meant to be delicate and tender. Tenderness can be encouraged in several different ways.

The concentration of gluten proteins in the batter is reduced by the use of pastry flour, or low-or no-gluten flours (buckwheat, rice, oat), or all-purpose flour mixed with cornstarch or other pure starches.
Gluten development is minimized by minimal stirring of the ingredients.
Replacing milk or water with soured dairy products, notably buttermilk and yogurt, helps produce an especially tender texture. This is mainly an effect of their thick consistency, which means that it takes less flour to make the batter properly thick. A spoonful of the finished batter therefore contains less flour, less starch and gluten, and cooks to a more delicate structure.
Leavening the batter with gas bubbles not only divides it up into innumerable thin sheets surrounding the gas bubbles, it makes the batter more viscous (as in sauce foams, p. 595), which again means that less flour is needed to thicken it.

It’s useful to divide batter foods into two groups. Thin batters are both thin in consistency and cooked in the form of small, thin, free-standing cakes. Quickbreads and cakes are made from thicker batters, and are cooked in pans in larger, deeper masses.

Crêpes

Crêpes and their relatives (Eastern European blintzes and palaschinki), thin unleavened pancakes that are cooked on a shallow pan and folded over a filling of some kind, have been made for a thousand years from a simple batter of flour, milk and/or water, and eggs. Their delicacy comes from their thinness. The batter is carefully mixed to minimize gluten formation, allowed to stand for an hour or more to allow the proteins and damaged starch to absorb water and air bubbles to rise and escape, and then cooked for just a couple of minutes per side. In France, the milk in crêpe batter is sometimes partly replaced with beer, and wheat flour with buckwheat, especially in Brittany.

Popovers

Popovers are an American version of English Yorkshire pudding, which is cooked in the fat rendered from a beef roast. The batter is almost identical to crêpe batter, but a different cooking method transforms it into a large air pocket surrounded by a thin layer of pastry. Popover batter is vigorously beaten to incorporate air and cooked immediately, before the air bubbles have a chance to escape. The batter is poured into a preheated, liberally oiled pan and set in a hot oven. The surfaces of the batter set almost immediately. The air bubbles within the batter are trapped, expand with the rising temperature, coalesce into one large bubble, and the liquid batter balloons around it and sets into a thin blister. When cooked in a pan with many cups, popovers rise unevenly, because the cups around the outside heat faster than the ones in the middle of the pan.

Griddle Cakes: Pancakes
and Crumpets

Griddle cakes are made from a more floury, viscous batter than crêpes, popovers, and choux pastry, and can retain gas cells for the few minutes that it takes to cook them; so they rise on the hot pan surface and develop an aerated, tender structure. Pancakes may be leavened (and flavored) with yeast, or with whipped egg whites folded into the batter, or chemical leavening, or some combination of these. Russian blinis sometimes include beer, which may contribute effervescence. The batter is poured onto the griddle and allowed to cook until bubbles begin to rise and break on the upper surface; the cook then flips the cake to set the second side before the leavening gas escapes.

Crumpets are an English invention, small, flat, yeast-raised cakes with a distinctively pale, cratered top surface. They’re made from a somewhat thick pancake batter that’s allowed to become bubbly from yeast activity, then poured into ring molds to a depth of about 0.75 in/2 cm, cooked very slowly until bubbles break and set on the surface, then unmolded and turned to cook briefly on the hole-y side.

Food Words: Crêpe

The French word crêpe comes from the Latin for “curled, wavy,” and probably refers to the curling of the edge as it dries during cooking.

Griddle Cakes:
Waffles and Wafers

Waffles and wafers have two things in common: the root word for their names, and the unique method by which they’re cooked. Their flour-water mixture is spread in a thin layer and pressed between two heated and embossed metal plates, which spread them even thinner, conduct heat into them rapidly, and imprint them with an attractive and often useful pattern. The usual square indentations increase the area of crisp, browned surface and collect the butter, syrup, and other enrichments that are often added on top. The French version, the gaufre, goes back to medieval times, when street vendors would make them to order and serve them hot on religious feast days.

Today the difference between wafers and waffles is a matter of texture. Wafers are thin, dry, crisp, and when high in sugar are dense, almost hard. The most familiar wafer is the ice cream cone; there are also French cookies called gaufres that are similar to very thin, crisp tuiles. Waffles came to the United States from Holland in the 18th century and are thicker, lighter, and more delicate thanks to leavening by either yeast or a baking powder, which interrupts the cooked structure with gas bubbles. They’re served fresh and hot, their honeycomb structure filled with butter or syrup.

Modern waffle recipes are often essentially a lean pancake batter cooked in a waffle iron instead of on a griddle, and they often produce a disappointing result that is more leathery than crisp. Crispness requires a high proportion of fat, sugar, or both: otherwise the batter essentially steams rather than fries, the flour proteins and starch absorb too much softening water, and the surface ends up tough.

Cream Puff Pastry,
Pâte À Choux

Choux is the French word for “cabbage,” and choux pastry forms little irregular cabbage-like balls that are hollow inside like popovers. Unlike popovers, choux pastry becomes firm and crisp when baked. It provides the classic container for cream fillings in such pastries as cream puffs (profiteroles) and éclairs, and also makes such savory bites as cheese-flavored gougères and deep-fried beignets, whose lightness inspired the name pets de nonne, “nun’s farts.”

Choux paste was apparently invented in late medieval times, and is prepared in a very distinctive way. It’s a cross between a batter and a dough, and is cooked twice: once to prepare the paste itself, and once to transform the paste into hollow puffs. A large amount of water and some fat are brought to the boil in a pan, the flour is added, and the mixture stirred and cooked over low heat until it forms a cohesive ball of dough. Several eggs are then beaten sequentially into the dough until it becomes very soft, almost a batter. This paste is then formed into balls or other shapes and baked in a hot oven or deep-fried. As with the popover, the surface sets while the interior is still nearly liquid, so the trapped air coalesces and expands into one large bubble.

An Early French Waffle Recipe

Waffles of Milk or Cream

Put a litron [13 oz/375 g] of flour in a bowl, break in two or three eggs and mix together while adding some cream or milk and a pinch of salt. Add a piece the size of two eggs of freshly made cream cheese, or simply soft cheese from whole milk, and a quarteron [4 oz/125 g] of melted butter. If you only add a half quarteron of butter, that is enough provided that you add a half quarteron of good beef marrow crushed very small.

Mix all this together, and when it is well bound, one should put the waffle irons on the fire, and make the waffles. These waffles should be eaten while they’re hot.

— La Varenne, Le Cuisinier françois, 1651

Frying Batters

A number of foods, especially seafood, poultry, and vegetables, are sometimes coated with a layer of flour batter before deep-frying (or sometimes baking). A good batter adheres well to the food, and fries into a crust that has a long-lasting crunchiness and that readily breaks apart in the mouth without an oily residue. Problematic batters fall away during frying or produce a crust that’s greasy, chewy, and tough, or soft and mushy.

Batters include some kind of flour, a liquid that might be water, milk, or beer, sometimes a chemical leavening to provide gas bubbles and lightness, and often eggs, whose proteins promote adherence to the food and allow the use of less flour. Of all the ingredients, the flour has the largest influence on batter quality. Too much can produce a tough, bready coating; too little and it will be fragile. The gluten proteins in ordinary wheat flour are valuable for the clinginess they provide, but they form elastic gluten and absorb both moisture and fat, and so are responsible for both chewiness and oiliness in the fried crust. For these reasons, moderate-protein flours make better batters than bread flour, and some batters are made from other grains, or from a mixture of wheat flour and other flours or starches. Rice proteins don’t form gluten and absorb less moisture and fat, so batters that contain a substantial proportion of rice flour fry crisper and drier. Similarly, corn flour improves crispness because its relatively large particles are less absorbant, and its proteins dilute wheat gluten and reduce the chewiness of the crust. Adding some pure corn starch also reduces the proportion and influence of wheat gluten proteins. Root flours and starches don’t work well in batters because their starch granules gelate and disintegrate at relatively low temperatures, do so early in frying, and produce a soft crust that gets soggy quickly.

Batters adhere better to moist foods when the foods are predipped in dry particles, whether seasoned flour or bread-crumbs; the dry particles stick to the moist surface, and the moist batter then clings to the rough surface created by the particles. Batters are more likely to produce crisp, tender crusts if they’re prepared just before frying, with cold liquid and little mixing to minimize water absorption and gluten development (see Japanese tempura, p. 214). If a batter stands for a long time before the food is dipped and fried, many of its air and gas bubbles can leak out, and some of the remaining chemical leavening reacts too early; the result is a dense casing rather than a light puff.

The Logic of Cream Puff Pastry

The technique for preparing cream puff pastry may seem tediously elaborate, but it’s a brilliant invention. It produces an especially rich and moist paste that the cook can shape and cook into a hollow, crisp vessel for other ingredients. Cooking the flour with water and fat tenderizes the gluten proteins, preventing them from developing elasticity, and it swells and gelates the starch to turn what would normally be a batter into a dough. The subsequent addition of raw eggs contributes the richness of the yolks and the cohesive, structure-building proteins of the whites, and thins the dough into a nearbatter so that air pockets in the interior will be able to move and coalesce during cooking. During the baking, the fat helps crisp and flavor the outer surface. And both eggs and fat contribute to a structure that resists moisture and stays crisp while holding the cream filling.

Thick Batter Foods:
Batter Breads and Cakes

Batter Breads and Muffins

Batter breads and muffins are moister, usually sweeter versions of quickbreads (p. 549). They’re leavened with baking powder or soda, and often contain moderate amounts of egg and fat in addition to sugar. They develop a dense, moist texture that accommodates nuts, dried fruits, and even such fresh fruits and vegetables as apples, blueberries, carrots and zucchini, whose moistness readily blends into the moistness of the crumb. Potatoes and bananas can be mashed to become part of the batter itself.

Muffin batters generally contain less sugar, eggs, and fat than quickbreads. The ingredients are mixed together just enough to dampen the solids, and the mix baked in small portions rather than a large loaf. Well-made muffins have an even, open, tender interior. They stale quickly because the small proportion of fat is dispersed unevenly by the minimal mixing and can’t protect much of the starch. Overmixing produces a less tender, finer interior with occasional coarse tunnels, which develop when the overly elastic batter traps the leavening gas in large pockets.

Green Blueberries and Blue Walnuts Sometimes the solid ingredients folded into bread and muffin batters turn disconcerting colors: blueberries, carrots, and sunflower seeds may go green, and walnuts blue. This happens when the mix contains too much baking soda, or when the soda isn’t evenly mixed in the batter, so that there are concentrated alkaline pockets. Because the anthocyanin and related pigments in fruits, vegetables, and nuts are sensitive to pH, and their normal surroundings are acidic, alkaline batters cause their colors to change (p. 281). Small brown spots on the surface of the finished bread or muffin are also a sign of incomplete mixing; the browning reactions proceed faster in more alkaline portions of the batter.

Cakes

The essence of most cakes is sweetness and richness. A cake is a web of flour, eggs, sugar, and butter (or shortening), a delicate structure that readily disintegrates in the mouth and fills it with easeful flavor. Cakes often contain more sugar and fat than they do flour! And they serve as a base for even sweeter and richer custards, creams, icings, jams, syrups, chocolate, and liqueurs. As suits their luxurious nature, they’re often elaborately shaped and decorated.

A cake’s structure is created mainly by flour starch and by egg proteins. The tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture comes from gas bubbles, which subdivide the batter into fragile sheets, and from the sugar and fat, which interfere with gluten formation and egg protein coagulation, and interrupt the network of gelated starch. The sugar and fat can compromise lightness if they weaken the cake structure so much that it can’t support its own weight. Of course dense, heavy cakes can be delicious in their own way. Flourless chocolate cakes, nut cakes, and fruit cakes are examples.

Traditional Cakes: Limited Sweetness and Hard Work Well into the 20th century, risen cakes were typified by the English pound cake or French quatre quarts, “four quarters,” which contain equal weights of the four major ingredients: structure-building flour and eggs, and structure-weakening butter and sugar. These proportions push the flour’s starch and the eggs’ proteins to their limit for holding the fat and sugar in a tender, light scaffolding; more butter or sugar collapses the scaffolding and makes dense, heavy cakes. And because cake batter must be filled with many small bubbles without the help of yeasts, which generate gas too slowly for the batter to hold them, traditional cake making was hard work. In 1857, Miss Leslie described a technique by which the cook could beat eggs “for an hour without fatigue” and then added: “But to stir butter and sugar is the hardest part of cake making. Have this done by a manservant.” Fannie Farmer warned in 1896 that “A cake can be made fine grained only with long beating.”

Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.

The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%.The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.

Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”

An Early English Pound Cake Recipe

In the centuries before electric mixers and preleavened shortenings, filling a dense cake batter with many fine air bubbles was hard, prolonged work!

To Make a Pound Cake

Take a pound of butter, beat it in an earthen pan, with your hand one way, till it is like a fine thick cream; then have ready twelve eggs, but half the whites, beat them well, and beat them up with the butter, a pound of flour beat in it, and a pound of sugar, and a few caraways; beat it all well together for an hour with your hand, or a great wooden spoon. Butter a pan, and put it in and bake it an hour in a quick oven.

— Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, 1747

The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10–35% compared to butter’s 3–4%; seep. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.

Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.

Cake Ingredients Cakes are generally made with flour, eggs, sugar, and either butter or shortening. Eggs are 75% water and may provide all the moisture in a recipe; or various dairy products — milk, buttermilk, sour cream — may be included to provide moisture as well as richness and flavor. Because the sugar is used to incorporate air into the mix, the preferred form is finely granulated (“Extra-Fine,” “Superfine”) so as to maximize the numbers of small sharp edges that will cut into the fat or eggs. Because they’re filled with bubbles in the mixing process, cake recipes usually call either for no chemical leavening, or for less than other batter recipes do.

Flours, Starches, Cocoa Cake bakers use low-protein pastry or cake flours to minimize the toughening that comes with gluten formation. They’re not really interchangeable; cake flours are both chlorinated and milled into very small particles to produce a fine, velvety texture. Cooks who prefer not to use cake flours can approximate their protein content and increase fineness by adding starch to all-purpose or pastry flours. Corn starch is the most commonly available starch in the United States; potato and arrowroot starches lack cornstarch’s cereal flavor and gelate at lower temperatures, which can reduce cooking times and produce a moister cake. Some cakes are made with pure starch or starchy chestnut flour only, and no wheat flour at all.

Standard Cake Proportions and Qualities

In chocolate cakes, cocoa powder takes on some of the water-absorbing and structural duties of flour; it’s around 50% carbohydrate, including starch, and 20% nongluten protein. Cocoa powders may be “natural” and acidic or “dutched” and alkaline (p. 705), a difference that affects both leavening and flavor balance; cake recipes should specify which kind to use, and the baker should not substitute one for the other. If chocolate rather than cocoa is used, it must be melted and carefully incorporated into the fat or eggs. Different chocolates contain widely varying proportions of cocoa fat, cocoa solids, and sugar (p. 704), so again, bakers and recipes should be clear about what kind of chocolate is to be used.

Fats In the standard method for making pound and layer cakes, the cook beats fat and sugar together to incorporate air bubbles, until the mixture reaches the fluffy consistency of whipped cream. Solid fats retain air bubbles thanks to their semisolid consistency: the air carried along by the sugar crystals and beater becomes immobilized in the mixture of crystalline and liquid fat. Butter is the traditional cake fat, and is still the fat of choice for bakers who value flavor more than lightness of texture.

But modern vegetable shortenings do a better job of incorporating air bubbles into the cake batter. Animal fats — butter and lard — tend to form large fat crystals that collect large air pockets, which rise in thin batter and escape. Vegetable shortenings are made to contain small fat crystals that trap small air bubbles, and these bubbles stay in the batter. Manufacturers also fill shortenings with preformed bubbles of nitrogen (around 10% of the volume), and bubble-stabilizing emulsifiers (up to 3% of the shortening weight). Butter is best aerated at a relatively cool 65ºF/18ºC, while shortening creams most effectively at a warm room temperature, between 75 and 80ºF/24–27ºC.

Fat Replacers The moistening and tenderizing effects of fat — but not its aerating abilities — can be imitated by some concentrated fruit purees, notably prune, apple, apricot, and pear. Their high levels of viscous plant carbohydrates, mainly pectins and hemicelluloses, bind water and also interrupt the gluten and starch networks. So these fruit purees can be used to replace some of the fat in cake recipes. The result is usually moist and tender, but also denser than a full-fat cake.

Techniques for Aerating Cakes

Fat-sugar aeration: Sugar beaten into butter or shortening; other ingredients then folded in

Pound cake, French quatre quarts, American butter and layer cakes, fruit cake

Egg-sugar aeration: Sugar beaten with whole eggs, or separated yolks or whites; other ingredients then folded in

Whole eggs: Génoise

Yolks and whites aerated separately: French biscuit, Black Forest cake

Yolks only: Sponge cake

Whites only: Angel food cake; chiffon cake; flourless meringue and dacquoise

All-ingredients aeration: Flour, eggs, sugar, shortening all beaten together

Commercial cake mixes

No aeration: Ingredients stirred together with minimal incorporation of air

Dissolved-sugar cakes: pain d’épices, spice cake

Mixing Cake Batters In cake making, the mixing step doesn’t just combine the ingredients into a homogeneous batter: it has the critical purpose of incorporating air bubbles into the batter, and thereby strongly influencing the final texture of the cake. The various ways of aerating the batter help define families of cakes (see box, p. 557). They involve beating the sugar and/or the flour into the fat, the eggs, or all the liquid ingredients. The fine solid particles carry tiny air pockets on their surfaces, and the particles and beating utensils carry those pockets into the fat or liquid. Flour is often added only after the foam is formed, and then by gently folding it in, not beating, to avoid popping a large fraction of the bubbles, and to avoid developing gluten. (For folding as a mixing technique, see p. 112.) Mixing the dry flour and fat together also prevents the gluten proteins from bonding strongly to each other.

Preleavened shortening and electric mixers have helped to turn cake making into a far less onerous task than it once was, but the mixing stage can still take 15 minutes or more.

Bakers often modify or combine elements of these techniques. In the “pastry-blend” method, the flour, sometimes with the sugar, is creamed with the fat, then the liquid ingredients are added and mixed long enough to augment the initial aeration.

Another alternative is a combination of the fat and egg aerations: some of the sugar is used to aerate the fat, some the eggs, and the two foams are then combined.

Baking Cakes Cake baking can be divided into three stages: expansion, setting, and browning. During the first stage, the batter expands to its full volume. As the batter temperature rises, the gases in the air cells expand, chemical leavening releases carbon dioxide, and beginning around 140ºF/60ºC, water vapor begins to form and expand the air cells even further. During the second stage of cake baking, the risen batter is set into its permanent shape by the oven heat. Beginning around 180ºF/80ºC, the egg proteins coagulate, and starch granules absorb water, swell, and gelate. The actual setting temperature depends strongly on the proportion of sugar, which delays both protein coagulation and starch swelling; in a high-ratio cake, the starch may not gelate until close to 212ºF/100ºC. In the last stage, batter solidification is completed, flavor-enhancing browning reactions take place in the now-dried surface, and the cake often shrinks slightly, an indication that it should be taken out of the oven. Another test of doneness is to probe the center with a toothpick or wire cake tester, which should come out clean of any batter or crumb particles.

Baking a cake. Left: A typical cake batter includes starch granules from flour, egg proteins that coagulate when heated, and gas bubbles incorporated during mixing, all swimming in a syrup of water and sugar. (Most cakes include some form of fat, which is not shown here for the sake of clarity.) Center: When the mix is heated, the gas bubbles expand, causing the mix to rise. At the same time, the proteins begin to unfold and the starch granules begin to absorb water and swell. Right: At the end of baking, the fluid batter has set into a porous solid, thanks to the continued swelling and gelation of the starch granules and the coagulation of the egg proteins.

Cakes are generally baked at moderate oven temperatures, 350 to 375ºF/ 175–190ºC. Below this range, the batter sets slowly, expanding gas cells can coalesce to produce a coarse, heavy texture, and the upper surface sinks. Above this range, the outer portions of the batter set before the inside has finished expanding, which produces a peaked, volcano-like surface, and the surface browns excessively.

Cake Pans By affecting the rate and distribution of heating, cake pans can have an important influence on their contents. The ideal pan size is that which matches the final volume of the cake, which is usually 50–100% greater than the initial batter volume. Doughnut-shaped tube pans, with the hole at their center, provide a greater surface area and speed the penetration of heat into the batter. Bright surfaces reflect radiant heat, transmit heat poorly to the food they contain, and slow the baking process. A dull metal pan or a glass one (which also transmits radiant heat well) will cook a cake as much as 20% faster than a shiny pan, while a black surface tends to absorb heat quickly and cause rapid surface browning. Recent innovations in nonmetal baking containers include flexible silicone molds and paper molds, larger and stiffer and more elegant versions of muffin and cupcake papers.

Baking Cakes at High Altitudes

Cake recipes that work well at sea level can produce dry, dense disasters in kitchens at high altitudes. The reason for this is that the low air pressure in the mountains allows water to boil at a lower temperature than the 212ºF/100ºC characteristic of sea level. The drops in pressure and boiling point have several effects on a cake in the oven. The batter starts to lose moisture at lower temperatures, and dries out more rapidly. The air bubbles and leavening expand faster at temperatures below the setting temperature, and the protein and starch set and stabilize that structure slowly, because the batter temperature doesn’t get as hot. So a cake baked in the mountains tends to end up dry, coarse, and flat.

A cake recipe developed at sea level must be adjusted in order for it to work at several thousand feet. The loss of moisture can be compensated for by the addition of extra liquid. The overexpansion of the gas cells can be reduced by reducing the amount of leavening. And the structure-stabilizing elements can be set earlier by reducing the levels of sugar and fat and increasing the eggs and/or flour. Increasing the oven temperature also speeds the protein coagulation and starch gelation that set the structure.

Cooling and Storing Cakes Most cakes require a cooling period before they’re removed from their pans or otherwise handled. Their structures are quite delicate when still hot, but become firm as the starch molecules begin to settle back into close, orderly associations with each other. Pound and butter cakes are fairly robust, their structure coming mainly from gelated starch, and can be removed from their pans after just 10–20 minutes. The sweeter eggaerated cakes are held up largely by the coagulated egg proteins, which form a more gas-tight film around the gas cells than starch does, and therefore shrink as the gas within cools and contracts. The result can be a collapsed cake. To avoid this, angel, sponge, and chiffon cakes are cooked in tube pans that can be inverted and suspended over a bottle to cool. Gravity keeps the cake structure stretched to its maximum volume while the walls of the gas cells firm and develop cracks that allow the pressure inside and outside the cells to equalize.

Cakes keep for several days at room temperature, and they can be refrigerated or frozen. They stale more slowly than bread, thanks to the presence of emulsifiers and their high proportions of moisture, fat, and moisture-retaining sugar.

Pastries

Pastries bear little family resemblance to cakes or breads or pastas. They’re a very different expression of the nature of the wheat grain. In making other dough and batter foods, we use water to fuse the particles of wheat flour into an integrated mass of gluten and starch granules, and further knit that mass together with cooking. By contrast, pastry is an expression of the fragmentary, discontinuous, particulate qualities of wheat flour. We use just enough water to make a cohesive dough from the flour, and work in large amounts of fat to coat and separate flour particles and dough regions from each other. Cooking gelates half or less of the water-deprived starch, and produces a dry mass that readily crumbles or flakes in the mouth, releasing the fat’s complementary moist richness.

Many pastries are not prepared and eaten on their own as other dough and batter foods are. Instead they serve as a contrasting container for a moist filling, whether savory (quiche, pâté, meat pies, vegetable tarts) or sweet (fruit pies and tarts, creams, custards). The container may be open, as in tarts and open-faced pies, a closed double-crust pie, or fully enclosed turnovers — samosas, empanadas, pasties, pierogi, piroshki. We also use the term “pastry” for what are essentially sweet breads whose structure is divided by layers of fat. Croissants and Danish pastries are really bread-pastry hybrids.

Varieties of Pastry in Elizabethan Times

Beginning in the Middle Ages, one of the primary purposes of pastry was to contain and help preserve preparations of meat. Meat brought to a simmer inside a thick, durable crust would essentially be pasteurized and protected against contamination by microbes in the air, so in a cool place it would keep for many days. Other dishes to be eaten freshly baked would be made with a more delicate pastry. As Gervase Markham wrote around 1615 in The English Housewife,

our English housewife must be skilful in pastry, and know how and in what manner to bake all sorts of meat, and what paste is fit for every meat, and how to handle and compound such pastes.

Pastry making flowered in the Mediterranean region in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when puff and cream puff pastries first appeared. By the time of La Varenne in the 17th century, both crumbly and puff pastries were standard preparations. The bread-pastry hybrids are a more recent invention from the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Pastry Styles

There are several different styles of pastry, each with a different texture that is created by the kinds of particles into which they come apart when chewed.

Crumbly pastries — short pastry, pâte brisée — come apart into small, irregular particles.
Flaky pastries — American pie crusts — come apart in small, irregular, thin flakes.
Laminated pastries — puff pastry, phyllo, strudel — are constructed of large, separate, very thin layers that shatter in the mouth into small, delicate shards.
Laminated breads — croissants, Danish pastries — combine the layering of the laminated pastries with the soft chewiness of bread.

These varied structures and textures depend on two key elements: the way the fat is incorporated into the dough, and the development of the flour gluten. Pastry makers work fat in so that it either isolates very small dough particles from each other, isolates larger masses or even whole sheets of dough from each other, or both. And pastry cooks carefully control gluten development to avoid making a dough that’s hard to shape and a pastry that’s tough and chewy instead of tender and delicate.

Pastry Ingredients

Flours Pastries are made from several different kinds of flour. A crumbly texture, which requires minimal gluten development, is best obtained with a pastry flour moderately low in protein; some protein is necessary to provide continuity in the dough particles, or the pastry comes out chalky rather than crumbly. Flakiness and the laminated structure of puff pastry depend on controlled gluten development, and can be achieved with pastry flour or with flour of a higher protein content, the equivalent of U.S. national all-purpose flours (11–12%). Highly stretched strudel and phyllo can benefit from the very high protein content of bread flours and the strong gluten they form.

Pastry structures (uncooked doughs shown at bottom; cooked pastries at top). The key to pastry structure is the distribution of the fat, here shown as a light layer surrounding darker masses of dough. Left: In crumbly pastries, fat coats and separates small particles of dough. Center: In flaky pastries, fat coats and separates flattened pieces of dough. Right: In laminated pastries, fat coats and separates extended, thin sheets of dough. The sheets in laminated pastries are so light that cooking steams them apart into a light, airy structure.

Fats Much of the flavor of pastry — and much of the pleasure — comes from its fat, which may be a third or more of its weight. But pastry makers often choose a fat that has little or no flavor. This is because the fat must have the necessary consistency for producing the desired texture. Broadly speaking, any fat or oil can be worked finely into flour to make crumbly pastry, while flaky and laminated pastries require fats that are solid but malleable at cool room temperature: namely butter, lard, or vegetable shortening. Of these, shortenings are the easiest to work with, and produce the best textures.

Fat Consistency: Butter and Lard Are Demanding At any given temperature, solid fats have different consistencies that depend on what fraction of their molecules is in solid crystals, and what fraction is liquid. Above about 25% solids, fat is too hard and brittle to roll into an even layer. Below about 15% solids, fat is too soft to work; it sticks to the dough, doesn’t hold its shape, and leaks liquid oil. The ideal fat for flaky and laminated pastries is therefore one that has between 15 and 25% solids at kitchen temperature, and at the temperatures that the pastry dough reaches as it’s mixed and formed. It turns out that butter has the right consistency for making pastry in a relatively narrow temperature range, between 58 and 68ºF/15–20ºC. Lard is properly workable at only slightly warmer temperatures, up to 75ºF/25ºC. Our flavorful natural fats easily get too soft in the kitchen to make good pastry. This is why pastry makers often prechill ingredients and utensils, work on a cold marble surface that keeps the ingredients cool during the mixing and rolling out, and value assistants with constitutionally cold hands.

Fat Consistency: Shortenings Are Forgiving Manufacturers of vegetable shortenings control the consistency of their products by controlling how much of the base oil’s unsaturated fat is hydrogenated (p. 801). Standard cake shortening has the desirable 15–25% solids over a temperature range triple that of butter, from 53 to 85ºF/12–30ºC. It’s therefore much easier to make flaky pastry with shortening than with butter. Because laminated pastries and breads are especially tricky to make, professionals and manufacturers often use shortenings that have been formulated specifically for their production. Danish margarines are workable up to 95ºF/35ºC, and puff-pastry margarines to 115ºF /46ºC: they don’t melt until well into the baking process! However, high melting points have an important drawback: they mean that the fat remains solid at mouth temperature. Where butter and lard melt in the mouth and release luscious flavor, manufactured pastry shortenings can leave a pasty or waxy residue in the mouth, and have no true flavor of their own (they’re often flavored with milk solids).

Food Words: Pastry, Pasta, Pâté, Pie

The English word pastry, Italian pasta, and French pâte and pâté all go back to a suggestive group of ancient Greek words having to do with small particles and fine textures: they variously referred to powder, salt, barley porridge, cake, and an embroidered veil. A later Latin derivative, pasta, was applied to flour that had been wetted to a paste, then dried; it led to Italian pasta and to pâte meaning “dough.” Pâté is a medieval French word that was given originally to a chopped meat preparation enclosed in a dough, but eventually came to name the meat preparation itself, with or without enclosure. Pie was the near equivalent of the original pâté in medieval English, and meant a dish of any sort — meat, fish, vegetable, fruit — enclosed in pastry. The word had less to do with doughs than with odds and ends: it came from magpie, a bird with variegated coloring that collects miscellaneous objects for its nest.

Water in Pastry Fats An important difference between butter and either lard or shortening is that butter is about 15% water by weight, and therefore doesn’t separate dough layers as thoroughly as the pure fats do; water droplets in the fat can glue adjacent layers together. Pastry makers generally prefer European-style butters, which contain less water than standard American butter (p. 35). However, some water is useful for producing steam that pushes apart the dough layers of laminated pastries. Manufacturers formulate puff-pastry margarine with about 10% water.

Other Ingredients Water is essential for binding the flour particles into a dough, and the water content is especially critical in pastries because there is so little. Pastry cooks say that as little as ¹/₂ teaspoon/3 ml variation in water in 1 cup/120 gm flour can make the difference between a crumbly texture and a tough one. Eggs are often used to provide richness and added cohesiveness to crumbly pastries, and of course also contribute water. Various dairy products, including milk, cream, sour cream, crème fraîche, and cream cheese may replace some or all of the water, and at the same time provide flavor and fat as well as sugars and proteins for the browning reactions. Salt is added mainly for flavor, though it does have a tightening effect on gluten.

Cooking Pastries

Baking Pans Two portions of the same pastry dough, baked in the same oven but in different kinds of pan, will cook differently. Shiny pans reflect much of the oven’s radiant heat (p. 782) away from the crust and so are slow cooking. Black pans absorb most of the radiant heat and conduct it to the crust, and clear glass allows it to pass right through and heat the crust directly. Thin metal pans can’t hold much heat in themselves and so tend to slow heating and produce uneven browning. Heavier gauge metal pans and ceramic plates and molds can accumulate oven heat, get hotter than thin pans, and transmit the heat more evenly to the pastry.

Baking Apart from bready croissants and Danish, most pastry doughs contain very little water, not nearly enough to gelate all the starch granules. Cooking therefore partly gelates the starch and dries the gluten network well, and produces a firm, crunchy or crisp texture and a golden brown exterior. Pastry crusts in particular are cooked at relatively high oven temperatures so that the dough heats through and sets quickly. Slow heating just melts the pastry dough’s fat, and the protein-starch network slumps before the starch gets hot enough to absorb water from the gluten and set the structure.

The filling in open pies and tarts blocks oven heat from reaching the pastry surface directly, and can prevent the crust from cooking through, so that it ends up pale and soggy rather than brown and dry. This problem is prevented by precooking the crust on its own (baking it “blind,” or empty, often with dry beans or ceramic pie weights to support the dough and prevent slumping). A crisper bottom crust also results from higher oven temperatures and from putting the container on the lowest rack or directly on the oven floor. Crispness can be preserved under a moist filling by sealing the crust surface during precooking with a moisture-resistant layer of egg yolk or white, or afterwards with cooked-down jams or jellies, or chocolate, or a moisture-absorbing layer of compatible crumbs.

Crumbly Pastries:
Short Pastry, Pâte Brisée

Crumbly but firm pastries are especially prominent in French cooking, where thin but robust crusts support quiches, various savory pies, and fruit tarts. Where American pie crusts are too tender to support themselves and are served from the pan, French tarts are almost always removed from the pan and stand on their own. In the standard French version of crumbly pastry, pâte brisée, coarse pieces of butter and egg yolks are placed in the midst of the proper amount of flour, and the liquid and solids gently worked together with the fingers to form a rough dough. The dough is then kneaded by pushing it into and along the work surface with the heel of the hand, an action that disperses the butter finely into the dough. The butter separates small flour aggregates from each other and prevents them from forming a continuous, tough mass, while the egg yolks provide moisture, fats, and proteins that will coagulate during cooking and help hold the flour aggregates together. The butter may be replaced by vegetable oils, poultry fats — chicken, duck, goose — and lard and beef tallow, depending on the nature of the filling. The dough is allowed to rest in the refrigerator to firm its consistency for the subsequent rolling out and shaping.

Pâte sucrée and pâte sablée — “sugar pastry” and “sandy pastry” — are versions of crumbly pastry made with sugar. The large proportion of sugar in pâte sablée gives a distinctly grainy character to the pastry.

One simple way to make crumbly pastry crusts is to start with premade crumbs, bread or cookie crumbs moistened with fat and simply pressed into the pan before a quick baking.

Flaky Pastries:
American Pie Pastry

The methods for making American-style pie dough produce a crust that is both tender and flaky. They disperse some of the fat evenly into the dough, separating small particles from each other, and some coarsely, separating different layers of the dough from each other. There are various ways to accomplish this. One is to work the fat into the dry flour in two different stages, the first time finely, the second in pea-sized pieces. Another is to add the fat all at once, and use the fingers to fragment and gently rub the chunks down to pea size; the rubbing does the fine dispersion. (This method works better with shortening than with butter, which warm fingers can soften excessively.) A small amount of cold water, 2–4 tablespoons per cup/15–30 gm per 100 gm flour, is then added and the mixture manipulated very briefly, just until the water is absorbed and a dough forms.

Early American Pie Pastries

American pie pastry is notable for having some of its fat rubbed into the flour to tenderize, and some rolled in for flakiness. The first American recipes — Amelia Simmons’s “Puff Pastes for Tarts” — are notable for their terseness and variety. She gives several; here are three.

No. 1. Rub one pound of butter into one pound of flour, whip 2 whites and add with cold water and one yolk; make into paste, roll in six or seven times one pound of butter, flouring it each roll. This is good for any small thing.

No. 3. To any quantity of flour, rub in three fourths of its weight in butter (twelve eggs to a peck), rub in one third or half, and roll in the rest.

No. 8. Rub in one and half pound of suet to six pounds of flour, and a spoon full of salt, wet with cream, roll in, in six or eight times, two and half pounds of butter — good for a chicken or meat pie.

— American Cookery, 1796

The dough is rested in the refrigerator to rechill the fat and let the water become more evenly distributed, and then is rolled out. The rolling stretches the dough and thus develops some gluten, and flattens the fat chunks into thin sheets. The combination creates the layered texture. The rolled dough is then rested to allow the gluten sheets to relax, and shaped with minimal stretching; otherwise the gluten may rebound and the crust shrink during baking. In the oven, the sheets of fat, trapped air, and steam from the dough water (and the water in any butter) all help to separate the dough into layers and give it a flaky texture.

Shortening and lard generally produce more tender and flaky crusts than butter, which melts into the dough at a lower temperature and whose water can cause dough particles and flakes to stick to each other.

Laminated Pastries:
Puff Pastry, Pâte Feuilleté

According to the food historian Charles Perry, puff and sheet pastries appear to have been invented by the Arabs and the Turks respectively, sometime around 1500. Though the aim in both is to produce many layers of very thin pastry, they involve two very different techniques.

Making Puff Pastry Preparing puff pastry dough is elaborate and time consuming. There are several different ways to construct the dough-fat sandwich, and several different ways to make the folds; here for simplicity I’ll describe the standard one.

The cook first mixes pastry flour with ice water to make a moderately moist initial dough, with about 50 parts water per 100 parts flour. Sometimes butter and/or lemon juices are included to weaken the gluten and make the dough more easily shaped. The mixing is done with minimal manipulation to minimize gluten development, which the later rollings-out accomplish. The dough is shaped into a square.

Early Recipes for Laminated Pastry: Early English “Puff Paste”

Gervase Markham’s recipe for “puff paste” is a cross between laminated and sheet pastries.

Now for the making of puff paste of the best kind, you shall take the finest wheat flour after it hath been a little baked in a pot in the oven, and blend it well with eggs, whites and yolks all together, after the paste is well kneaded, roll out a part thereof as thin as you please, and then spread cold sweet butter over the same, then upon the same butter roll another leaf of the paste as before; and spread it with butter also; and thus roll leaf upon leaf with butter between till it be as thick as you think good: and with it either cover any baked meat, or make paste for venison, Florentine, tart or what dish else you please and so bake it.

— The English Housewife, 1615

Now the fat, traditionally butter and weighing about half the initial dough weight is pounded with a rolling pin until it warms up to about 60ºF/15ºC and becomes pliable, its consistency matching the consistency of the dough. (Firmer fat would tear the dough, softer fat would be squeezed out during the later rolling. Shortenings, with their low water content, produce a lighter and crisper puff pastry, though a less flavorful one.) The fat is formed into a flat piece, placed on the dough square, and the combination repeatedly folded onto itself and rolled out, with turns to vary the direction of rolling and rests in the refrigerator to give the fat a chance to resolidify and the gluten to relax. The sequence of turning, rolling, folding, and refrigerating is repeated several times, for a total of six “turns.” With each rolling out, the gluten becomes more developed, and the dough more elastic and difficult to shape.

The result of this work, which takes several hours, is a dough made up of 729 layers of moistened flour separated by 728 layers of fat. (The term millefeuille, or “thousand-leaf,” is applied to a pastry made by stacking two baked pieces of puff pastry, with a layer of pastry cream in between.) The dough is rested for at least an hour after the final turn, and then is rolled out for baking to a thickness of about a quarter of an inch/6 mm. This means that each layer in the dough is microscopically thin, around a thousandth of an inch or a hundredth of a millimeter. This is much thinner than paper thin, about the diameter of an individual starch granule. The dough must be cut with a very sharp knife; a dull blade will press the many layers together at the edge and restrain their expansion. When puff pastry is baked in a very hot oven, the expanding air and water vapor puff the separate layers apart from each other and cause the volume to increase by four or more times.

Quick Puff Pastry “Quick” puff pastry, also known as “flaky pastry” (England), “American” puff pastry, or demi-feuilleté, is a shortcut hybrid of true puff pastry and American flaky pie pastry. Again there are many versions. Usually some or all of the fat is cut coarsely into the flour as for pie pastry, cold water added to make a dough, any remaining fat sandwiched with the dough, and the dough then folded and rolled out two or three times, with periods of refrigeration to rechill the fat and relax the gluten.

Even quick puff pastry dough takes a couple of hours to make. Fortunately these doughs freeze well and are commercially available in frozen form.

Sheet Pastries:
Phyllo, Strudel

Unlike puff pastry doughs, sheet pastry doughs are prepared one layer at a time, and are assembled into pastries with a few dozen layers just before cooking. Charles Perry speculates that phyllo pastry was invented in Istanbul in the time of the early Ottoman empire around 1500; it’s now used to make the Eastern Mediterranean honey-nut sweet baklava, savory turnovers (Turkish boreks), and many savory pies (Greek spanakopita and others). During the period when the Ottoman Turks ruled parts of eastern Europe, the phyllo leaf was adopted in Hungary as retes and in Austria as strudel.

Food Words: Phyllo, Strudel

Phyllo is the Greek ancestor of French feuille and like it means “leaf.” Strudel reflects the unusual rolled form of this version of sheet pastry: it is German for “eddy” or “whirlpool.”

Phyllo dough is prepared by making a stiff flour-water dough (about 40 parts water to 100 flour) with a little salt and often some tenderizing acid or oil. The dough is thoroughly kneaded to develop the gluten, rested overnight, and then stretched out either in a single mass, or in small balls that are rolled out into a thin disc, sprinkled with starch, and rolled out again. The dough eventually gets thin enough to become translucent, around 5 thousandths of an inch/0.1 mm thick. This is so thin that the silken dough quickly dries out and becomes brittle, so it’s brushed with oil or melted butter to keep it supple until it’s cut, stacked into a many-layered pastry, and baked.

The variant of phyllo called strudel is made somewhat differently. The initial dough is wetter, 55–70 parts water per 100 flour, and contains a small amount of fat and often whole egg. The dough is kneaded, rested, rolled fairly thin, rested again, and then gradually stretched with the hands into one large sheet, which is then used as a wrapper to roll around a variety of savory and sweet preparations.

Both phyllo and strudel doughs are especially tricky to make, and are available refrigerated and frozen.

Pastry-Bread Hybrids:
Croissants, Danish Pastries

Croissants and Danish pastries are made in very much the same way that puff pastry is. Because the doughs for croissants and Danish pastries are essentially bread doughs, both moister and softer than puff dough, they are easily torn by cold, hard fat. The proper consistency of butter or margarine is therefore especially important in making croissants and Danish pastries.

Croissants According to Raymond Calvel, croissants first made a splash at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, where they were one of many kinds of Wienerbrod, or Vienna goods brought from the city that specialized in rich, sweet pastries. The original croissants were enriched yeast-raised breads shaped into a crescent. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Parisian bakers had the idea of forming them from a laminated dough, thus creating a marvelous pastry that is both flaky and moistly, richly, tenderly bready.

Croissants are made by preparing a firm but malleable dough with minimal kneading from flour, milk, and yeast; the proportion of liquid is 50–70 parts to 100 flour. Some butter may be added to the dough during mixing to make the dough more extensible and easily rolled out. In earlier times, the dough was allowed an initial rise of six to seven hours; today it’s only around one hour. The more time allowed for fermentation, the fuller the flavor and the lighter the finished pastry. The risen dough is deflated and chilled, then rolled out, covered with a layer of butter or pastry margarine, and repeatedly folded, rolled out, and chilled as puff pastry is, for a total of four to six turns. The finished dough is then rolled out to around a quarter of an inch/6 mm thick, cut into triangles, the triangles rolled up into tapered cylinders and allowed a final rise of about an hour at a temperature cool enough to prevent the fat from melting. When baked, the outer layers of the dough expand and dry out to form flaky, puff pastry–like sheets, while the inner layers remain moist and bake into exquisitely delicate sheets of bread, translucent and pebbled with tiny bubbles.

Danish Pastries What Americans call “Danish” pastries also originated as Vienna goods, but were introduced to the United States via Copenhagen. In the 19th century, Danish bakers took a basic Viennese enriched bread dough and added even more layering butter, thus making a lighter, crisper pastry than the original. They also used the dough to surround a variety of fillings, notably remonce (butter creamed with sugar and often including some form of almonds). Danish pastries are made in essentially the same way as croissants. The initial dough is moister and softer, includes sugar and also whole eggs, so it’s sweeter, richer, and distinctively yellow, and it isn’t given an initial rising. Often more butter or margarine is used for the laminations, and the dough may only be turned three times, so the layers are fewer and thicker. Danish pastry dough is often used as a container for sweet or rich fillings, or rolled out, covered with a combination of nuts, raisins or flavored sugar, rolled up, and cut into spiral cross-sections. Once the final pastry is formed, it’s allowed to rise until about doubled in volume (again, at temperatures that keep the shortening solid), and then is baked.

Tender Savory Pastry:
Hot-Water Pastry,
Pâte À pâté

Hot-water pastry, or pâté pastry, is unlike the other pastries. Its original purpose in medieval times was to provide a sturdy container for meat dishes meant to be kept for some time (p. 560). Today it’s used to enclose meat pâtés, to make meat pies, and sometimes as an alternative to puff pastry that surrounds the tenderloin in beef Wellington and the salmon in coulibiac. It is easily rolled out and formed into a container, able to retain juices released during cooking, yet tender to both knife and tooth. It’s made with a relatively large amount of water — 50 parts per 100 flour — and about 35 parts lard. The water and lard are heated together near the boil, and the flour is then added, the mixture stirred just until it forms a homogeneous mass, then rested. The large proportion of fat limits gluten development, thus providing tenderness, and also acts as a kind of water repellant, thus providing a barrier against cooking juices. The precooking swells and gelates some of the flour starch, which takes up water and gives the dough a thick, workable consistency in place of an elastic gluten structure.

Cookies

Common cookies are simple pleasures, but the microcosm of all cookies is a summa of the baker’s art. Cookies include sweet bitesized baked goods of all sorts: crumbly and laminated pastries, wafers, butter and sponge cakes, biscuits, meringues, nut pastes. The term comes from the medieval Dutch for “little cake.” The French equivalent is petits fours, or “little oven goods,” and the German klein Gebäck means much the same. Their miniature size and the numerous possibilities for shaping, decorating, and flavoring have resulted in a great diversity of cookies, many of them developed by the French and named in the same spirit that gave us Italian pastas called butterflies, little worms, and priest-stranglers: hence cat’s tongues, Russian cigarettes, eyeglasses, and Nero’s ears.

Cookie Ingredients
and Textures

Most cookies are both sweet and rich, with substantial proportions of sugar and fat. They’re also tender, thanks to ingredients, proportions, and mixing techniques that minimize the formation of a gluten network. But then they may be moist or dry, crumbly or flaky or crisp or chewy. The diversity of textures arises from a handful of ingredients, and from the proportions and methods of combining them.

Flour Most cookies are made with pastry or all-purpose flour, but both bread flour and cake flour produce doughs and batters that spread less (thanks respectively to more gluten and more absorbant starch). A high proportion of flour to water, as in shortbread and pastry-dough cookies, limits both gluten development and starch gelation — as little as 20% of the starch in some dry cookies is gelated — and produces a crumbly texture. A high proportion of water to flour, as in batter-based cookies, dilutes gluten proteins, allows extensive starch gelation, and produces either a soft, cakelike texture or a crisp, crunchy one, depending on the method and how much moisture is baked out of the cookie. For doughs that need to hold their shape during baking — those rolled out and stamped with a cookie cutter — a high flour content and some gluten development are necessary. The baker gives fluid batters some solidity by chilling them, and then shapes them by extruding them through a pastry pipe or setting them in molds.

A coarser but more fragile backbone can be created by replacing some or all of the flour with ground nuts, as in classic macaroons made only with egg whites, sugar, and almonds.

Sugar Sugar makes several contributions to cookie structure and texture. When creamed with the fat, or beaten with egg, it introduces air bubbles into the mix and lightens the texture. It competes with the flour starch for water, and raises the starch gelation temperature nearly to the boiling point: so it adds hardness and crispness. A large proportion of pure table sugar, sucrose, contributes to hardness in another way. The proportion of sugar in some cookie doughs is so high that only about half the sugar dissolves in the limited amount of moisture. When the dough heats up during baking, more sugar can dissolve, and the added liquid causes the cookie to soften and spread. Then when the cookie cools, some of the sugar recrystallizes, and the initially soft cookie develops a distinctive snap — a process that may take a day or two. Other forms of sugar — honey, molasses, corn syrup — tend to absorb water rather than crystallize (chapter 12), so when heated they form a syrup that permeates the cookie, helps it to spread, and firms as it cools, making it moist and chewy.

Eggs Eggs generally provide most of the water in a cookie mix, as well as proteins that help bind the flour particles together and coagulate during baking to add solidity. The fat and emulsifiers in the yolk enrich and moisten. The higher the proportion of whole eggs or yolks in a recipe, the more cake-like the texture.

Fat Fat provides richness, moistness, and suppleness. When it melts during cooking, it lubricates the solid particles of flour and sugar and encourages the cookie to spread and thin — a quality that is sometimes desirable, sometimes not. Because butter melts at a lower temperature than margarine or shortening, it gives cookies more time to spread before the protein and starch set. Butter is about 15% water, and is the main or only source of moisture in such low-egg recipes as shortbread and tea cookies.

Leavening Leavening, whether tiny bubbles of air or of carbon dioxide, helps tenderize cookies, and encourages them to puff. Many cookies are leavened only with air bubbles incorporated when the sugar is creamed with the fat, or beaten with the eggs. Some are supplemented with chemical leavenings. Alkaline baking soda may be used when the dough includes such acid ingredients as honey, brown sugar, and cake flour.

Making and Keeping Cookies

There are as many ways to prepare cookies as there are ways to produce cakes and pastries — and then some. The standard American categories are:

Drop cookies, formed from a soft dough that is portioned by spoonfuls onto the baking sheet, where they spread out during baking. Chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies are examples.
Cut-out cookies, formed from a stiffer dough that holds its shape. The dough is rolled out and porcookietioned with a cookie cutter; baking sets the cookies in their original shape. Sugar cookies and butter cookies are examples.
Hand-shaped cookies, formed from batters that are stiffened by chilling and then carefully piped or molded for baking. Examples are ladyfingers and madeleines.
Bar cookies, shaped after baking, not before. They’re cut from the thin cake-like mass produced when the batter is baked in a shallow pan. Date and nut bars and brownies are examples.
Icebox cookies, formed by slicing cross-sections from a premade cylinder of dough kept in the refrigerator for use when needed. Many cookie doughs can be treated this way.

Thanks to their small size, thinness, and high sugar content, cookies quickly brown at oven temperatures. Their bottoms and edges may get too dark while the centers finish cooking, a problem that can be minimized by lowering the oven temperature and using light baking sheets that reflect radiant heat, rather than dark ones that absorb it. Slight underbaking helps produce a moister, chewier texture. Immediately after baking, many cookies are soft and malleable, a fact that allows the cook to shape thin wafer cookies into flower-like cups, rolled cylinders, and arched tiles that then stiffen as they cool.

Some Cookie Doughs and Batters: Ingredients and Typical Proportions

With their low water content, cookies are especially prone to losing their texture during storage. Crisp, dry cookies absorb moisture from the air and get soft; moist, chewy cookies lose moisture and become dry. Cookies are therefore best stored in an airtight container. With their low moisture and high sugar levels, they are not very hospitable to microbes, and keep well.

Pasta, Noodles,
and Dumplings

One of the simplest preparations of cereal flour gave us one of the most popular foods in the world: pasta. The word is Italian for “paste” or “dough,” and pasta is nothing more than wheat flour and water combined to make a clay-like mass, formed into small pieces, and boiled in water until cooked through — not baked, as are nearly all other doughs. Noodle comes from the German word for the same preparation, and generally refers to pasta-like preparations made outside the Italian tradition. The keys to pasta’s appeal are its moist, fine, satisfyingly substantial texture and its neutral flavor, which makes it a good partner for a broad range of other ingredients.

Two cultures in the world have thoroughly explored the possibilities of boiled grain paste: Italy and China. Their discoveries were different, and complementary. In Italy, the availability of high-gluten durum wheat led to the development of a sturdy, protein-rich pasta, one that can be dried and stored indefinitely, one that readily lent itself to industrial manufacturing, and that can be formed into hundreds of fanciful shapes. The Italians also refined the art of making fresh pastas from soft wheat flours, and evolved an entire branch of cooking based on pasta as the principal ingredient, its combination of substance and tenderness providing the foundation for flavorful sauces — usually just enough to coat the surfaces — and fillings. In China, which had soft, low-gluten wheats, cooks concentrated on simple long noodles and thin wrappers, prepared them fresh and by hand, sometimes with great panache and just moments before cooking, and served the soft, slippery results almost exclusively in large amounts of thin broth. More remarkably, Chinese cooks found ways to make noodles from many different materials, including other grains and even pure, protein-free starch from beans and root vegetables.

The History of Pasta
and Noodles

It’s a story often told, and often refuted, that the medieval traveler Marco Polo found noodles in China and introduced them to Italy. A recent book by Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban has set the record straight in authoritative and fascinating detail. China was indeed the first country to develop the art of noodle making, but there were pastas in the Mediterranean world long before Marco Polo.

Noodles in China Despite the fact that wheat was grown in the Mediterranean region long before it arrived in China, the northern Chinese appear to have been the first to develop the art of noodle making, sometime before 200 BCE. Around 300 CE, Shu Xi wrote an ode to wheat products (bing) that names several kinds of noodles and dumplings, describes how they’re made, and suggests their luxurious qualities: poets frequently likened their appearance and texture to the qualities of silk (see box, p. 572). In 544, an agricultural treatise called Important Arts for the People’s Welfare devoted an entire chapter to dough products. These included not only several different shapes of wheat noodle, most made by mixing flour with meat broth and one made with egg, but also noodles made from rice flour and even from pure starch (p. 579).

China also invented filled pasta, the original ravioli, in which the dough surrounds and encloses a mass of other ingredients. Both small, thin-skinned, delicate hundun or wontons, now usually served in southern soups, and the thicker chiao-tzu or pot sticker, often steamed and fried in the north, are mentioned in written records before 700 CE, and archaeologists have found well-preserved specimens that date to the 9th century. Over the next few hundred years, recipes describe making thin noodles by slicing a rolled dough sheet and by repeatedly pulling and folding a dough rope; and the doughs themselves are made with a variety of liquids, including radish and leaf juices, vegetable purees, juice pressed from raw shrimp (which makes the noodles pink), and sheep’s blood.

Noodles — mian or mein — and filled dumplings began in the north as luxury foods for the ruling class. They gradually became staples of the working class, with dumplings retaining the suggestion of prosperity, and spread to the south around the 12th century. Noodles made their way to Japan by the 7th or 8th century, where several kinds of men evolved (p. 578).

Pasta in the Middle East and Mediterranean Far to the west of China, in the homeland of wheat, the earliest indications of pasta-like preparations come in the 6th century. A 9th century Syrian text gives the Arabic name itriya to a preparation of semolina dough shaped into strings and dried. In 11th-century Paris, mention is made of vermicelli, or “little worms.” In the 12th century — around 200 years before Marco Polo’s travels — the Arab geographer Idrisi reported that the Sicilians made thread-like itriya and exported them. The Italian term macaroni first appeared in the 13th century and was applied to various shapes, from flat to lumpy. Medieval cooks made some pastas from fermented doughs; they cooked pasta for an hour or more until it was very moist and soft; they frequently paired it with cheese, and used it to wrap around fillings.

Dumplings and Noodles in Early China

Flour sifted twice,

Flying snow of white powder,

In a stretchy, sticky dough

Kneaded with water or broth, it becomes shiny.

…

Then water is set to boil over the fire,

Waiting for the steam to rise,

We hitch up our clothes,

we roll up our sleeves,

And we knead, and we shape, and we smooth, and we stretch.

Finally the dough detaches from our fingers,

Under the palm it is perfectly rolled out in all directions

And without a break in the haste and hurry

The stars separate and the hailstones fall.

In the basket, no spattered stuffing.

On the bing not a trace of extra dough.

Perfectly lined up, of great beauty,

Without breaking, the dough is fine and thin.

It swells so that one can guess at the stuffing below,

Soft as silk floss in the springtime,

White as autumn silk, cooked just in time.

— Shu Xi, “Ode to Bing,” ca. 300, transl. Antony Shugaar

The postmedieval evolution of pasta took place largely in Italy. Pasta makers formed guilds and made fresh types from soft wheat flour throughout Italy, dried types from durum semolina in the south and in Sicily. Italian cooks developed the distinctive preparation style called pastasciutta or “dry pasta,” pasta served as the main component of the dish, moistened with sauce but not drowning in it or dispersed in a soup or stew. With its ideal climate for drying raw noodles, a tricky process that took one to four weeks, Naples became the center of durum pasta manufacturing.

Thanks to the mechanization of dough kneading and extrusion, by the 18th century durum pasta had become street food in Naples, and common in much of Italy. Perhaps because street vendors minimized cooking and open-air consumers enjoyed chewing on something substantial, it was in Naples that people began to prefer pasta cooked for minutes rather than hours, so that it retains some firmness. This practice spread to the rest of the country in the late 19th century, and the term al dente, or cooked “to the tooth,” appeared after World War I. Subsequent decades brought effective artificial drying and the machinery and understanding necessary to turn pasta making from a batch-by-batch process to a continuous one. Dried durum pasta is now made on an industrial scale in many countries. In addition, modern heat treatments and vacuum-packing have also made it possible to keep fresh pasta for several weeks in the refrigerator.

Recent decades have brought a revival in Italy of small-scale manufacturing using selected wheat varieties, old-fashioned extrusion dies that produce a rough, sauce-holding surface, and longer-time, low-temperature drying that is said to produce a finer flavor.

Making Pasta and Noodle Doughs

Basic Ingredients and Methods The aim in making pasta and noodle dough is to transform dry flour particles into a cohesive mass that is malleable enough to be shaped into thin strips, but strong enough to stay intact when boiled. With wheat flours, the cohesiveness is provided by the gluten proteins. Durum wheats have the advantage of a high gluten content, and a gluten that is less elastic than bread-wheat gluten and so easier to roll out. Water normally makes up around 30% of the dough weight, compared to 40% or more for bread doughs.

Pasta, Cheese, and Wine Without End

By the time of the great storyteller Giovanni Boccaccio, who died in 1375, pasta was familiar enough in Italy to be part of a glutton’s paradise:

in a country called Bengodi…there was a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese, on which lived people who did nothing but make macaroni and ravioli and cook them in capon broth. And then they threw them down, and the more of them you took, the more you had. And nearby ran a rivulet of white wine whose better was never drunk, and without a drop of water in it.

— Decameron, Day 8, Tale 3

After the ingredients are mixed and briefly kneaded into a homogenous but stiff mass, pasta dough is rested to allow the flour particles to absorb the water and the gluten network to develop. With time the dough becomes noticeably easier to work, and the finished noodles end up with a cohesive consistency rather than a crumbly one. The dough is then rolled gently and repeatedly to form an ever thinner sheet. This gradual sheeting presses out air bubbles that weaken the dough structure, and organizes the gluten network, compressing and aligning the protein fibers, but also spreading them out so that the dough becomes more easily stretched without snapping back.

Egg Pasta and Fresh Pasta Noodles made from standard bread wheat and eggs are preferred in much of northern Europe, and most fresh pastas sold in the United States are of this type. Eggs perform two functions in noodles. One is to enhance color and richness. Here the yolk is the primary factor, and yolks alone can be used; their fat content also makes the dough more delicate and the noodles tender. The second function is to provide additional protein for moderate-protein flours used in both home and industrial production. The egg white proteins make the dough and noodles more cohesive and firm, reduce the gelation and leaking of starch granules, and reduce cooking losses. In U.S. commercial noodles, dried egg is added at 5–10% of the weight of the flour. In Italy, Alsace, Germany, and in specialty and homemade noodles in the United States, fresh eggs are used, and in larger proportions. They may be the only source of water in the dough. Some pastas from the Piedmont region in northwest Italy contain as many as 18 yolks per pound of flour/40 yolks per kg.

To make egg pasta, the ingredients are mixed in proportions that give a stiff dough; the dough is kneaded until smooth, allowed to rest and relax, rolled out, and then cut into the desired shapes. The fresh pasta is perishable, and if made with eggs carries a slight possibility of salmonella contamination; it should be cooked immediately or wrapped and refrigerated. Prolonged drying at kitchen temperature may allow microbes to multiply to hazardous levels. Fresh pasta cooks quickly, in a few seconds or minutes depending on thickness.

Dried Durum Pasta The standard Italian pastas, and Italian-style pastas from around the world, are made from durum wheat, with its distinctive flavor, attractive yellow color, and abundant gluten proteins. Durum pastas are seldom made with eggs. Their gluten proteins give the dried noodles a hard, glassy interior; during cooking they limit the loss of dissolved proteins and gelated starch, and make a firm noodle.

Making Durum Pasta Dough and Shapes Durum pasta is made from semolina, which is milled durum endosperm with a characteristically coarse particle size, 0.15–0.5 mm across, thanks to the hard nature of durum endosperm (finer grinding causes excessive damage to starch granules). Flat pasta shapes are punched from out of a sheet of dough. Long noodles and short thick ones are formed by extruding the dough through the holes of a die at high pressure. The movement, pressure, and heat of extrusion change the structure of the dough by shearing the protein network apart, mixing it more intimately with starch granules that have been partly gelated by the heat and pressure, and allowing broken protein bonds to re-form and stabilize the new network. Noodles extruded through modern low-friction Teflon dies end up with a glossier, smoother surface, with fewer pores and cracks through which hot water can leak in and dissolved starch can leak out. They generally lose less starch to the cooking water, absorb less cooking water, and therefore have a firmer texture than the same noodle extruded through a traditional bronze die. Proponents of traditional dies prefer the rougher surface, which they say better retains the sauce in the finished dish.

Drying Durum Pasta Before the invention of mechanical driers, manufacturers held the new pasta at ambient temperatures and humidities for days or weeks. Early industrial driers operated at 100–140ºF/ 40–60ºC and took about a day. Modern drying takes only two to five hours and involves rapid predrying at or above 185ºF/84ºC, and then a more extended phase of drying and resting periods. The modern high-temperature method rapidly inactivates enzymes that can destroy the yellow xanthophyll pigments and cause brown discoloration, and it cross-links some of the gluten protein and produces a firmer, less sticky cooked noodle. However, proponents of slow drying say that high heat also damages flavor.

Cooking Pasta and Noodles

When pasta is cooked in water, the protein network and starch granules absorb water and expand, the outer protein layer is ruptured, and the dissolving starch escapes into the cooking water. Deeper within the noodle there’s less water available, so the starch granules aren’t completely disrupted: the center of the noodle therefore stays more intact than the surface. Cooking pasta al dente means stopping the cooking when the center of the noodle still remains slightly underdone and offers some resistance to chewing; at this point, the noodle surface is 80–90% water, the center 40–60% (somewhat moister than freshly baked bread). Pasta is sometimes cooked just short of this point and then finished in the sauce that will dress it.

Cooking Water It’s generally recommended that pasta be cooked in 10 or more times its weight of vigorously boiling water (around 5 quarts or liters water per pound/500 gm). This allows for the pasta’s absorption of 1.6–1.8 times its weight, and leaves plenty to dilute the starch that escapes during cooking, and to separate the noodles from each other so that they cook evenly and without sticking. Hard water — water that is alkaline and contains calcium and magnesium ions — increases both cooking losses and stickiness in noodles (it probably weakens the protein-starch film at the noodle surface, and the ions act as a glue to bond noodle surfaces to each other). Most city tap water has been made alkaline to reduce pipe corrosion, so pasta cooking water can often be improved by adding some form of acid (lemon juice, cream of tartar, citric acid) to adjust the pH to a slightly acidic 6.

Cooking pasta. Left: Uncooked pasta dough consists of raw starch granules embedded in a matrix of gluten protein. Right: When pasta is cooked in water, starch granules at and near the noodle surface absorb water, swell, soften, and release some dissolved starch into the cooking water. In pasta done al dente, hot water has penetrated to the center of the noodle, but the starch granules there have absorbed relatively little, and the starch-gluten matrix remains firm.

Stickiness Noodles stick to each other during cooking when they’re allowed to rest close to each other just after they’re added to the cooking water. Their dry surfaces absorb the small amount of water between them so there’s none left for lubrication, and the partly gelated surface starch glues the noodles together. Sticking can be minimized by constantly stirring the noodles for the first few minutes of cooking, or by adding a spoonful or two of oil to the pot and then lifting the noodles through the water surface a few times to lubricate them. Salt in the cooking water not only flavors the noodles, but limits starch gelation and so reduces cooking losses and stickiness.

Stickiness after cooking is caused by surface starch that dries out and cools down after the noodles have been drained, and develops a gluey consistency. It can be minimized by rinsing the drained noodles, or moistening them with some sauce, cooled cooking water, oil, or butter.

Couscous, Dumplings,
Spätzle, Gnocchi

Couscous Couscous is an elegantly simple pasta that appears to have been invented by the Berber peoples of northern Algeria and Morocco between the 11th and 13th centuries. It remains a staple dish in North Africa, the Middle East, and Sicily. In its traditional form, couscous is made by sprinkling salted water into a bowl containing whole wheat flour, then stirring with the fingers to form little bits of dough. The bits are rubbed between the hands and sieved to obtain granules of uniform size, usually 1–3 mm in diameter. There is no kneading and therefore no gluten development, so this gentle technique can be and is applied to many other grains. Couscous granules are small enough that they can be cooked not in a large excess of water but in steam (traditionally over the fragrant stew that it will accompany), which allows them to develop a uniquely light, delicate texture. Couscous works best with thin sauces that spread easily over the large surface area of the small granules.

“Israeli” or “large” couscous is actually an extruded pasta invented in Israel in the 1950s. It’s made from a dough of hard wheat flour formed into balls a few millimeters in diameter and lightly toasted in an oven to add depth to the flavor. It’s cooked and served in the same ways as pasta and rice.

Dumplings and Spätzle Western dumplings and Spätzle (a word in a Bavarian dialect meaning “clod, clump,” not “sparrow” as is often said) are essentially coarse, informal portions of dough or batter that are dropped into a pot of boiling water and cooked through, and served as is in a stew or braise or sautéed to accompany a meat dish. Unlike pasta doughs, dumpling doughs are minimally kneaded to maximize tenderness, and benefit from the inclusion of tiny air pockets, which provide lightness. The progress of cooking is judged by the position of the dumpling in the pot; when it rises to the top, it’s considered almost done, given another minute or so, and then scooped out. This tendency to rise with cooking is due to the expansion of the dough’s air pockets, which fill with vaporized water as the dumpling interior approaches the boiling point and make the dough less dense than the surrounding water.

Gnocchi Gnocchi — the word is Italian and means “lumps” — got their start in the 1300s as ordinary dumplings made from bread crumbs or flour (Roman gnocchi are still made by baking squares of a cooked dough of milk and semolina). But with the arrival of the New World’s potato, Italian cooks transformed gnocchi into a form of dumpling with an unusually light texture. The starchy potato flesh became the main, tender ingredient, with just enough flour added to absorb moisture and provide gluten to hold it together into a formable dough. Eggs are sometimes added to provide additional binding and yolky richness, though they also add a springy quality. Old potatoes, and mealy rather than waxy varieties, are preferred for their lower water and higher starch contents, which means that less flour is needed to make the dough, so less gluten forms and the dumpling is more tender. The potatoes are cooked, peeled, and riced immediately to allow as much moisture as possible to evaporate; then cooled or even chilled, and kneaded into a dough with just as much flour as necessary, usually less than 1 cup/120 gm per lb/500 gm potatoes. The dough is formed into a thin rope and cut into small pieces, the pieces shaped, and then boiled in water until they rise to the top of the pot. Gnocchi can also be made by replacing the potato with other starchy vegetables or with ricotta cheese.

Asian Wheat Noodles
and Dumplings

Two very different families of noodles are made in Asia. Starch noodles are described below. Asian wheat noodles — Chinese mian — bear some resemblance to European pastas made from bread wheat. They’re typically made from low-or moderate-protein flours, and are formed not by extrusion but by sheeting and cutting or by stretching. The most spectacular form of noodle production is that of Shanghai’s hand-pulled noodles, la mian, for which the maker starts with a thick rope of dough, swings, twists, and stretches it to arms’ length, brings the ends together to make the one strand into two — and repeats the stretching and folding as many as eleven times to make up to 4,096 thin noodles! Asian noodles are both elastic and soft, their texture created by both their weak gluten and by amylopectin-rich starch granules. Salt, usually at around 2% of the noodle weight, is an important ingredient in Asian noodles. It tightens the gluten network and stabilizes the starch granules, keeping them intact even as they absorb water and swell.

Soba: Japanese Buckwheat Noodles

Buckwheat noodles were made in northern China in the 14th century, and had become a popular food in Japan by around 1600. It’s difficult to make noodles exclusively with buckwheat flour because the buckwheat proteins do not form a cohesive gluten. Japanese soba noodles may be from 10% to 90% buckwheat, the remainder wheat. They’re traditionally made from freshly milled flour, which is mixed very quickly with the water and worked until the water is evenly absorbed and the dough firm and smooth. Salt is omitted because it interferes with the proteins and mucilage that help bind the dough (p. 483). The dough is rested, then rolled out to about 3 mm thick and rested again, then cut into fine noodles. The noodles are cooked fresh, and when done, are washed and firmed in a container of ice water, drained, and served either in a hot broth or cold, accompanied by a dipping sauce.

Chinese Wheat Noodles
and Dumplings

White and Yellow Noodles Salted white noodles arose in northern China and are now most widely known in their Japanese version, udon (below). Yellow noodles, which are made with alkaline salts, appear to have originated in southeast China sometime before 1600, and then spread with Chinese migrants to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. The yellowness of the traditional noodles (modern ones are sometimes colored with egg yolks) is caused by phenolic compounds in the flour called flavones, which are normally colorless but become yellow in alkaline conditions. The flavones are especially concentrated in the bran and germ, so less refined flours develop a deeper color. Because they’re based on harder wheats, southern yellow noodles have a firmer texture than white salted noodles, and alkalinity (pH 9–11, the equivalent of old egg whites) increases this firmness. The alkaline salts (sodium and potassium carbonates at 0.5–1% of noodle weight) also cause the noodles to take longer to cook and absorb more water, and they contribute a characteristic aroma and taste.

Dumplings The Chinese version of filled pasta is thin sheets of wheat-flour dough enclosing seasoned morsels of meat, shellfish, or vegetables. Some doughs are simply made from flour and water, but robust pot-sticker dough is made by boiling part of the water before adding the flour, so that some of the starch is gelated and contributes to the dough’s cohesiveness. The formed dumplings may be steamed, boiled, fried, or deep-fried.

Japanese Wheat Noodles The standard thick Japanese noodles (2–4 mm in diameter), called udon, are descendents of the Chinese white salted noodle. They’re white and soft and made from soft wheat flour, water, and salt. Ra-men noodles are light yellow and somewhat stiff, and are made from hard wheat flour, water, and alkaline salts (kansui). Very thin noodles (around 1 mm) are called so-men. Japanese noodles are usually cooked in water of pH 5.5–6, which is often adjusted by adding some acid. After cooking, the noodles are drained and washed and cooled in running water, which causes the surface starch to set into a moist, slippery, nonsticky layer.

Tapioca

Tapioca pearls, which are widely used to absorb moisture and flavor, thicken puddings and pie fillings, and nowadays to provide chewy “bubbles” in teas and other drinks, are translucent, glossy, and elastic, and based on the same principle as the starch noodle. They are spheres 1–6 mm across made up of tapioca starch granules held together by a matrix of gelatinized tapioca starch (about 17% amylose). A wet mass of the starch granules (40–50% water by weight) is broken up into coarse grains, and the grains then fed into rotating pans, where they roll around and gradually agglomerate into little balls. They’re then steamed until a little more than half the starch is gelated, mostly in the outer layer, and then are dried, so that a firm retrograded starch matrix forms. When cooked in liquid, they soak up water and the rest of their starch gelates while the retrograded matrix maintains their structure.

The Japanese instant version of Chinese-style noodles, ra-men, was born in1958. They’re manufactured by making thin, quickly rehydrated noodles, then steaming them, frying them at 280ºF/ 140ºC, and air-drying at 180ºF/80ºC.

Asian Starch
and Rice Noodles

All the pastas we’ve looked at so far are held together by the gluten proteins of wheat flour. Starch and rice noodles contain no gluten whatsoever. Starch noodles in particular are a remarkable, even startling invention: unlike all other noodles, they’re translucent. They’re often called glass or cellophane noodles, and in Japan are given the lovely name harusame, “spring rain” noodles.

Starch Noodles Dried noodles made out of pure starch — usually from mung beans (China), rice (Japan), or sweet potato — are prized for several qualities: their clarity and glossy brilliance, their slippery, firm texture, and their readiness for eating after just a few minutes of soaking in hot liquid, whether plain hot water or a soup or braised dish.

The firmest noodles are made from starches high in the straight-chain amylose form (p. 457). Where ordinary long-grain rice is 21–23% amylose, special noodle rices are 30–36%, and mung-bean starch is 35–40% amylose. Starch noodles are made by first cooking a small amount of dry starch with water to make a sticky paste that will bind the rest of the starch into a cohesive dough. The paste is mixed with the rest of the dry starch and more water to make a dough with 35–45% moisture, and the dough is then extruded through small holes in a metal plate to form noodles. The noodles are immediately boiled to gelate all the starch and form a continuous network of starch molecules throughout, and then are drained and held at the ambient temperature or chilled for 12–48 hours before being air-dried. During the holding period, the gelated starch molecules fall into a more orderly arrangement, or retrograde (p. 458). The smaller amylose molecules cluster together to form junctions in the network, crystalline regions that resist disruption even by boiling temperatures. The dried noodles are thus firm and strong, but the less orderly parts of the network readily absorb hot liquid and swell to become tender without the need for active cooking.

Starch noodles are translucent because they’re a uniform mixture of starch and water, with no particles of insoluble protein or intact starch granules to scatter light rays.

Rice Noodles and Wrappers Like starch noodles, rice noodles are held together by amylose, not gluten; but because they contain protein and cell-wall particles that scatter light, they’re opaque rather than translucent. Rice noodles are made by soaking high-amylose rice in water, grinding it into a paste, cooking the paste so that much but not all of the starch is gelated, kneading the paste into a dough and extruding it to form noodles, steaming the noodles to finish the gelation process, cooling and holding for 12 hours or more, and drying with hot air or by frying them in oil. Again, the holding and drying cause starch retrogradation and the formation of a structure that stands up to rehydration in hot water. Fresh rice noodles, chow fun, need no rehydration before being stir-fried.

Rice papers, banh trang in Vietnamese, are thin, parchment-like discs that are used as wrappers for southeast Asian versions of the spring roll. They’re made by soaking and grinding rice, soaking it again, pounding it into a paste and spreading it into a thin layer, steaming it and then drying it. Rice papers are rehydrated briefly in lukewarm water, then used immediately as wrappers that can be eaten fresh or fried.

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Chapter 10

Cereal Doughs and Batters

Bread, Cakes, Pastry, Pasta

The Evolution of Bread

Prehistoric Times

Greece and Rome

The Middle Ages

Early Modern Times

The Decline and Revival Of Traditional Breads

The Basic Structure of Doughs, Batters, and Their Products

Gluten

Starch

Gas Bubbles

Fats: Shortening

Dough and Batter Ingredients: Wheat Flours

Kinds of Wheat

Turning Wheat into Flour

Minor Flour Components

Kinds of Flour

Dough and Batter Ingredients: Yeasts and Chemical Leavenings

Yeasts

Baking Powders and Other Chemical Leaveners

Breads

The Choice of Ingredients

Preparing The Dough: Mixing and Kneading

Fermentation, or Rising

Baking

Cooling

The Staling Process; Storing and Refreshing Bread

Bread Flavor

Mass-Produced Breads

Special Kinds of Loaf Breads: Sourdough, Rye, Sweet, Gluten-Free

Other Breads: Flatbreads, Bagels, Steamed Breads, Quick Breads, Doughnuts

Thin Batter Foods: CrÊpes, Popovers, Griddle Cakes, Cream Puff Pastry

Batter Foods

Crêpes

Popovers

Griddle Cakes: Pancakes and Crumpets

Griddle Cakes: Waffles and Wafers

Cream Puff Pastry, Pâte À Choux