What a Daily Bread

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Hello, folks! I'm back

Today I'd like to share to you about Bread.

We know bread as they can easily be found everywhere. Moreover, lots of bakery shops are open world widely. 

Every time we walk through a bakery shop, we may smell something good inside. It's fragrant, mild, appetizing, and inviting to directly see.

Most of bread we already know is made of wheat. Despite, there are bread that's made of rye, maize, sorghum, oat, etc. Yet, wheat becomes the standard of any carbohydrate sources to bread-making flour.

Wheat quality is then determined by its milling process. We may find two kinds of bread in a store, such as ordinary bread and wholegrain bread. Ordinary bread means that the grain, which is wheat, is milled before it's used to make bread. While wholegrain bread means that the grain isn't milled or only milled partly. This milling process eliminates the germ and husk of the grain that contain high proteins, vitamins, and minerals. As the result, ordinary bread has lower level of proteins, vitamins, and minerals than wholegrain bread.

Next, what does happen during the bread-making process ?

Commonly, we know that to make bread, there are several processes to go through that are mixing, fermenting, molding, and baking. During the mixing, all of the ingredients are put together to be mixed. As we know, wheat flour contains gluten-forming proteins, which are glutenin and gliadin. Glutenin and gliadin will form gluten if there's enough water and mechanical energy during mixing process. This gluten will help to rise and define the bread's structure. Besides that, mixing will help to gather the bubbles inside dough from environmental air. This bubbles will then be trapped by viscoelastic gluten. The ingredients have to be mixed at proper time, if it's undermixing some of ingredients won't mix thoroughly, and it's overmixing the dough will fall down because of the broken structure of gluten inside.

After mixing, the dough need to be fermented. Fermentation process isn't only about the work of yeast in transferring glucose into carbon dioxide and alcohol. Fermentation is also about resting the dough in order to build its structure. During fermentation, the yeast will consume the glucose and excrete carbon dioxide and alcohol. This process is helped by the enzymes from the wheat itself that degrade starch into sugar. As the carbon dioxide is largely produced by yeasts, the air bubbles is getting bigger.  Furthermore, during fermentation, the disulfide bonds are oxidize to sulfhidril bonds which are tighter.

Last but not least,

After fermentation process, the dough is punched to release some of gases inside. However, the gases that remain inside is spread over the dough equally. Next, the dough is put into a tray to get ready to be baked. 

During baking, the heal will rise the temperature up and make the air bubbles bigger and bigger, also evaporate the alcohol. The heat constructs the outside crust of the bread and gives it brown color. The gluten will keep the air bubbles in shape. So, if you cut through the center of bread, you'll see porous structure inside. 

That's all I can share to you today.

I hope you enjoy it, and may be fruitful to you.

Thank you.

Reference:

Rosell, Christina M. 2011. "The Science of Doughs and Bread Quality". Flour and Breads and Their Fortification in Health and Disease Prevention, pp. 3 - 14.