Baking ingredients in baking

1. Flour – is the primary ingredient in baking.

Types of flour
a. Bread flour – it is milled from hard spring and winter wheat.
b. All purpose flour – it is premium flour selected from the best streams of flour milled from
hard spring and winter wheat.
c. Cake flour – from special grade soft flour milled from selected soft wheat.
d. Wheat flour - is the most important ingredient in the bakeshop.
e. Pastry flour - is also a weak or low-gluten flour, but it is slightly stronger than cake flour.
2. Sugar – it contributes to the good flavour, aroma and added energy value to the baked products.
Functions of sugar in baked items:
a. They add sweetness and flavor.
b. They create tenderness and fineness of texture, partly by weakening the gluten structure.
c. They give crust color.
d. They increase keeping qualities by retaining moisture.
e. They act as creaming agents with fats and as foaming agents with eggs.
f. They provide food for yeast.
3. Syrup – substitute for sugar normally used in a mix.
4. Shortening – contributes to the fluffy and tender texture of pie crusts and cookies.
Types of shortenings
a. Hog lard
b. Butter
c. Hydrogenated vegetable fat
d. Oil
e. Compound lard
f. Vegetable oils
g. Edible tallow

Functions of fats in baked items are:

a. To tenderize the product and soften the texture.
b. To add moistness and richness.
c. To increase keeping quality.
d. To add flavor.
e. To assist in leavening when used as creaming agents or when used to give flakiness to
puff pastry, pie dough, and similar products.

5. Eggs – used for added structure, richness and nutrition and good keeping quality.
Functions of eggs in baked items:
a. Structure
b. Emulsifying of fats and liquids
c. Leavening
d. Shortening Action
e. Moisture
F. Flavor
g. Nutritional Vaue
g. Color
6. Liquid – used to hold the batter or dough together and to blend all the ingredients.
 CATEGORIES OF MILK
a. Fresh Liquid Milk
b. Cream
c. Fermented Milk Products
d. Evaporated and Condensed Milk
e. Dried Milk
f. Cheese
7. Leavening agent – used to make cakes and yeast breads rise.
8. Salt – is to enhance and correct the flavour of other ingredients in the dough.
9. Flavouring agents – it is used as spices.
10. Chocolate and cocoa - are derived from cocoa or cacao beans. Cocoa is the dry powder that
remains after part of the cocoa butter is removed from chocolate liquor
Kinds of chocolate
a. Bitter Chocolate -Bitter or unsweetened contains no sugar and has a strongly bitter taste.
b. Sweet Chocolate is bitter chocolate with the addition of sugar and cocoa butter in various
proportions.
c. Milk Chocolate- is sweet chocolate to which milk solids have been added.

Quick breads – are breads leavened with the help of chemical leaveners and similarly with mechanical
leavening involving the incorporating of more air into the dough and batter by creaming and mixing
action.

Characteristics of good quick breads

1. Light texture
2. Coarse but even grain
3. Evenly sized air cells that are equally distributed
4. Golden brown crust

Four mixing factors that affect baked goods

1. The physical act of mixing
2. The tools used for mixing
3. The order the ingredients are added
4. The mixing method used

Mixing methods for pies and pastries

1. Creaming – using an electric mixer or rubbing one or two ingredients with a wooden spoon to
make a soft fluffy mixture. Applicable for quick breads, cake, muffins, and shortened type of
cakes.
2. Cutting – mixing fat to flour with the use of a pastry blender, dull knives, in scissors like manner
or tossing in flour with finger tips into the shortening to form coarse mixture or until pea-sized.
Applicable to pastry and biscuits.
3. Folding – working with two ingredients gently to retain air in the mix. This is usually done by
hand cutting through the ingredients at center of the mixture and scooping up to bring mixture
to the bottom of the bowl. Applicable to foam type cakes like chiffon and sponge so as not to
over mix the batter.
4. Kneading – pressing, folding, and stretching of dough to develop gluten for good bread structure
– applied to all types of yeast bread.