Flour’s ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season.
Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.
Pretty sure any pastry chef will strongly disagree with that. If anything, baking is the cooking activity most akin to an exact science. The amounts need to be carefully measured, the temperatures need to be exactly right (e.g. Italian merengue), the baking time needs to be correct to the second for some dishes (lava cake).
Yes, the measures can change based on the flour or its substitutes (ground pistachio for example), but the processes involved require an equal amount of precision.
A lot of chefs call cooking an art, but baking a science.
I am a former pastry chef and baker. You’d think it’s very precise work but it’s actually mostly intuition based on experience. You know the recipes and tweak them as you go.
Also the batch sizes are many times bigger than a home cook ever makes so a cup of flour more or less usually makes no difference to the end product. With leavening agents the margin of error is smaller obviously.
In the industrial realm, baking is quite scientific, I’m sure. It’s a much more controlled, and measureable environment than a home baker’s.
Take our ovens (please!) - you want 450? OK, how about I give you 420 to 475 as I cycle on and off? Lol
Even in the industrial realm you’ll deal with the variability in your ingredients (e.g. moisture content of flour), but you’ll have the capability to measure that, and have systems to compensate for it automatically. (Yes, I’m jealous!)
If you know the factors that affect the flour, you can control said factors, thus predict your results based on such factors, more or less a measurable margin of error. Ergo, baking is precisely an exact science.
Random sampling flour batches. And you’d think I’m joking. But no, this is exactly how we invented cookies. Cookies were baker’s experimental tool to test their flour and, by ovserving the cookie, predict what they needed to change in their bread recipes to produce the exact result they wanted.
Flour’s ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season. Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.
Pretty sure any pastry chef will strongly disagree with that. If anything, baking is the cooking activity most akin to an exact science. The amounts need to be carefully measured, the temperatures need to be exactly right (e.g. Italian merengue), the baking time needs to be correct to the second for some dishes (lava cake).
Yes, the measures can change based on the flour or its substitutes (ground pistachio for example), but the processes involved require an equal amount of precision.
A lot of chefs call cooking an art, but baking a science.
I am a former pastry chef and baker. You’d think it’s very precise work but it’s actually mostly intuition based on experience. You know the recipes and tweak them as you go. Also the batch sizes are many times bigger than a home cook ever makes so a cup of flour more or less usually makes no difference to the end product. With leavening agents the margin of error is smaller obviously.
I am currently pursuing engineering PhD working on bakery products.
Sometimes baking is indeed an exact science :D
It’s just that the typical home baker has to guess and assume a lot of things. But then, a chance of failure is naturally expected.
In the industrial realm, baking is quite scientific, I’m sure. It’s a much more controlled, and measureable environment than a home baker’s.
Take our ovens (please!) - you want 450? OK, how about I give you 420 to 475 as I cycle on and off? Lol
Even in the industrial realm you’ll deal with the variability in your ingredients (e.g. moisture content of flour), but you’ll have the capability to measure that, and have systems to compensate for it automatically. (Yes, I’m jealous!)
If you know the factors that affect the flour, you can control said factors, thus predict your results based on such factors, more or less a measurable margin of error. Ergo, baking is precisely an exact science.
How would you find out those factors about wheat?
Random sampling flour batches. And you’d think I’m joking. But no, this is exactly how we invented cookies. Cookies were baker’s experimental tool to test their flour and, by ovserving the cookie, predict what they needed to change in their bread recipes to produce the exact result they wanted.