Baking

cooking · heat · bread · chemistry

Dry heat magic. When you bake, heat slowly moves from the outside of your food to the inside, making the outside golden and crispy while keeping the middle soft and fluffy. This happens at temperatures above 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bread is the star. Bread is the most common thing people bake, and baking transforms simple dough into something completely different with a firm crust and a tender center.

Browning and caramelizing. The dry heat of baking does something special: it browns the surface of food and makes sugars caramelize, which gives baked goods their rich, delicious taste and golden color.

Ancient cooking method. Before modern ovens, people baked food in hot ashes or on hot stones, and this ancient technique is still used in some places today.

Related to barbecuing. Baking and barbecuing are cousins because both use the ideas of cooking with heat in a special chamber, whether it's a masonry oven or a smoke pit.