Ingredients and Their Function

In an endeavor such as bread baking, where a comparatively small number of ingredients are used, a change in one can have a significant impact on the results. For example, if a baker decides to increase the percentage of rye flour in a formula for naturally leavened bread from 10 to 20 percent, not only will the final taste of the bread be altered, but the dough’s rate of fermentation as well as its final volume will also be impacted by the increase. It is not so much a matter of one formula being “better” than another; rather, changes in ingredients produce changes in all aspects of the dough’s development, and therefore a thorough understanding of the function and effect of the major bread ingredients will be a large benefit to achieving consistent production results, whether for a few loaves baked in a kitchen oven, or a few hundred baked in a big hearth oven. In this chapter, we will first look at the Big Four—flour, water, salt, and yeast—and then at some of the other ingredients used in bread baking.