How does knowing about chemistry help bakers

If you know that sugar browns in heat, you know that adding a sprinkle of sugar to the top of a product will give the final cooked product a nice caramelized look. If you change a cooking method, you will be able to tell if the final product is fine because you'll know which reactions no longer happened. For example, cookies baked in an oven turn golden or brown as the sugar in the dough caramelizes, but if you bake the cookies in a car seriously , the caramelizing doesn't happen, and the cookies look unbaked.

But if you're expecting that, you'll know that the looks are not a problem as long as the cookies show other signs of being done. You won't keep trying to brown the cookies because you're aware that the chemical reactions will be different. Knowing chemistry in food is also helpful when creating copycat dishes for people with special dietary requirements. If you're cooking for someone who can't have eggs, you'll know that you need to find a substitute binder for the recipe, for example.

Learning more about chemical processes in food and how one substance might affect another helps you if you're interested in cooking in the field of molecular gastronomy.

This is a field that is dedicated to playing around with the chemical properties of food. The more aware you are of what can be done chemically, the more dishes you can create. Chemistry and food also comes into play when you're trying to verify old cooking legends and advice.

Most baking is based on the use of flour, the powder form of grains, nuts and beans. Wheat flour, the most commonly used type of flour in baking, is composed largely of starch and protein, with very high levels of a class of protein known collectively as gluten. When water is added to wheat flour, the gluten forms a heavy, pliable mass.

This expands greatly under hot temperatures and sets with the desired airy texture. Leavening agents such as baking soda, baking powder and yeast give baked dough its lightness. Baking soda reacts with acids in the dough to make carbon dioxide, which helps the dough to rise.

Baking powder, which is baking soda with an additional acidic salt, releases carbon dioxide twice during the baking process, once when it hits water, and again when it reaches a certain temperature in the oven. Heat helps baking powder produce tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide, which make a cake light and fluffy.

When yeast, a single-celled fungus that feeds on starch and sugars, is added to dough, it also releases carbon dioxide bubbles, giving the dough a light, delicate texture.

Start with the science of molasses cookies and bread, then move on to other recipes from this webinar. The Science of Baking Infographic Check out this break down of baking, one ingredient at a time. Chemistry Is a Piece of Cake Baking reactants combine to give you a delicious product. Chemistry Cupcakes Mix up one batch of cupcakes, then get ready for cupcakes 2.

Hack your recipe and see the results. Are Boxed Cake Mixes Foolproof? Overmix, undermix, just right—is there actually any difference? Could be. But it's worth the light and fluffy payoff. The Chemistry of Cake Baking Love cake, but allergic to one or more of the typical ingredients? Research to the rescue. Cake-Baking Secrets Cakes falling flat?

Food Network guru Alton Brown has solutions. Just Add Chemistry This chemist chef takes cake testing to the max. Or something else? A tremor table puts the houses to the test. But under the dizzying whirr of your paddle mixer, a third component is being incorporated, air. The jagged sugar crystals cut air into the butter and the butter forms a layer around the air pockets, making the mixture lighter and fluffier.

Eggs serves three purposes in baked goods. First, the protein in the eggs forms a layer around the already butter-covered air bubble, preventing it from collapsing while baking in the oven. Second, it provides much-needed water to the batter more on that later. Lastly, it gives your baked goods that appetizing tinge of yellow.

Flour gives your baked goods structure, via gluten—a mixture of two proteins present in cereal grains. They form an elastic network around the air bubbles you worked so hard for, helping your baked good hold its shape, even through the structural stress of expansion that happens while baking.

Take care, though, not to over-beat the flour. This will result in a heavy and dense cake, that can be unpleasant to eat, because of too much gluten development. The rise in your baked goods comes from two things.