What is happening during baking?

Baking is a complex food process with many ingredient and process interactions. Most bakery items are made of the same ingredients: flour, water, sugar, eggs, leavening agents and fat.

The transition from raw materials to baked product is most often referred as being a change from foam to a sponge.

Browning reactions, gelatinization of starch, and denaturation of protein are some of the key biochemical processes involved in baking.

The activity of baking includes takes like mixing the batter, preheating the oven, putting the pan in the oven and taking the cake out of the oven at the right time.

Baking begin with its most elementary ingredient: wheat flour. Its special properties allow bakers to produce an astonishing array of products from pastry to cakes and cookies.

When mixing, batters and dough trap pockets of air as paddles and whips push through them. With continued mixing, large air pockets are reduced in size to many more smaller ones, providing the ‘nuclei’ that expand during baking into full-sized air cells.

A gluten structure of wheat allows dough to hold steam or expanding air bubbles, so that yeasted dough can rise and puff pastry can puff.

Salt does not only help regulate yeast fermentation but also strengthen gluten and makes it more elastic. 

Solid fats mixed into a dough or batter trap air, water and some leavening gases. When the fats, melt, these gases are released and the water turns to steam, both of which contribute to leavening.

Different fats have different melting points, but most fats used in baking melt between 32 ° and 55° C. Gases released early in baking are more likely to escape because the structure isn’t set enough to trap all of them.
What is happening during baking?