INGREDIENTS - Wheat Flour

Wheat flour is the most important ingredient in the bakeshop.It provides bulk and structure to most of the baker’s products,including breads,cakes,cookies, and pastries.
While the home cook depends almost entirely on a product called all-purpose flour, the professional baker has available a wide variety of flours with different qualities and characteristics. In order to select the proper flour for each product and to handle each correctly, you should understand each type of flour and how it is milled.

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MIXERS

Mixers of various types are essential tools in the bakeshop. While small quantities of doughs and batters can be mixed by hand, commercial baking in any quantity would be next to impossible without power mixers.Several types are used in baking and pastry making.

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SELECTION OF INGREDIENTS

In addition to measuring, there is another basic rule of accuracy in the bakeshop: Use the exact ingredients specified.

As you will learn,different flours,shortenings,and other ingredients do not function alike. Bakers’ formulas are balanced for specific ingredients.For example,do not substitute bread flour for pastry flour or regular shortening for emulsified shortening.They won’t work the same way.

Occasionally, a substitution may be made, such as active dry yeast for compressed yeast, but not without adjusting the quantities and rebalancing the formula.

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Formulas and Measurement

Bakers generally talk about formulas rather than recipes. If this sounds to you more like a chemistry lab than a food production facility, it is with good reason. The bakeshop is very much like a chemistry laboratory, both in the scientific accuracy of the procedures and in the complex reactions that take place during mixing and baking.

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