Baking
[1] Heat is gradually transferred from the surface of cakes, cookies, and pieces of bread to their center, typically conducted at elevated temperatures surpassing 300°F.
As heat travels through, it transforms batters and doughs into baked goods and more with a firm dry crust and a softer center.
In addition to bread, baking is used to prepare cakes, pastries, pies, tarts, quiches, cookies, scones, crackers, pretzels, and more.
The cooked parcel of food is sometimes served unopened, allowing diners to discover the contents for themselves which adds an element of surprise.
Baked custards, such as crème caramel, are among the items that need protection from an oven's direct heat, and the bain-marie method serves this purpose.
The cooking container is half-submerged in water in another, larger one so that the heat in the oven is more gently applied during the baking process.
The earliest known form of baking occurred when humans took wild grass grains, soaked them in water, and mashed the mixture into a kind of broth-like paste.
[4] The book Bread for the Wilderness states that "Ovens and worktables have been discovered in archaeological digs from Turkey (Hacilar) to Palestine (Jericho (Tell es-Sultan)) and date back to 5600 BC.
Around 1 AD, there were more than three hundred pastry chefs in Rome, and Cato wrote about how they created all sorts of diverse foods and flourished professionally and socially because of their creations.
Cato speaks of an enormous number of breads including; libum (cakes made with flour and honey, often sacrificed to gods[7]), placenta (groats and cress),[8] spira (modern day flour pretzels), scibilata (tortes), savillum (sweet cake), and globus apherica (fritters).
This scene was so common that Rembrandt, among others, painted a pastry chef selling pancakes in the streets of Germany, with children clamoring for a sample.
Mrs Beeton (1861)[12]Baking eventually developed into a commercial industry using automated machinery which enabled more goods to be produced for widespread distribution.
In the United States, the baking industry "was built on marketing methods used during feudal times and production techniques developed by the Romans.
[citation needed] The aroma and texture of baked goods as they come out of the oven are strongly appealing but is a quality that is quickly lost.
Since the flavour and appeal largely depend on freshness, commercial producers have to compensate by using food additives as well as imaginative labeling.
As more and more baked goods are purchased from commercial suppliers, producers try to capture that original appeal by adding the label "home-baked."
Such attempts seek to make an emotional link to the remembered freshness of baked goods as well as to attach positive associations the purchaser has with the idea of "home" to the bought product.
For example, scones at The Ritz London Hotel "are not baked until early afternoon on the day they are to be served, to make sure they are as fresh as possible.
"[15] Asian cultures have adopted steam baskets to produce the effect of baking while reducing the amount of fat needed.
[21] The dry heat of baking changes the form of starches in the food and causes its outer surfaces to brown, giving it an attractive appearance and taste.
Higher levels of fat such as margarine, butter, lard, or vegetable shortening will cause an item to spread out during the baking process.
This is not primarily due to moisture being lost from the baked products, but more a reorganization of the way in which the water and starch are associated over time.
In the Eastern Christian tradition, baked bread in the form of birds is given to children to carry to the fields in a spring ceremony that celebrates the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.
In Hebrew, Bethlehem means "the house of bread", and Christians see in the fact that Jesus was born (before moving to Nazareth) in a city of that name, the significance of his sacrifice via the Eucharist.
