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Bake to good health

A few baking basics just to make your breakfast better

GOOD TO EAT healthy and nutritious

Baking is among the oldest of cooking techniques, and it is probably the best at conserving nutrition. Baking involves cooking food in an oven by the application of dry heat. The earliest ovens used wood and coal fires; modern ovens use gas and electricity.

Thousands of years ago, baking evolved as a technique not just for making bread but also for making bricks. Five thousand years ago, every house in the Indus valley had its own oven. The Egyptians discovered yeast and leavened bread, but it was the Greeks who turned bread making into an art form. The Greeks also invented the pastry and the wedding cake. Baking soon developed as a profession, and 4,000 years ago communities in Greece, Egypt and Israel were dependent on the local baker for their daily bread.

In northern India, the tandoor, a clay oven, became the primary tool for cooking long flat breads and naans. The earliest tandoor ovens were discovered in the Harappa and Mohenjadaro settlements. Tandoori chicken is a Mughal dish, and despite its popularity the cooking of meat in an oven is the exception rather than the rule in India.

Bread, pastries, cakes, and meat are the most commonly baked foods. `Baked beans on toast' is a classic breakfast in the West. Baked vegetables are more healthful than fried vegetables, but they are not necessarily more healthful than boiled vegetables.

Rich colour

Why do baked foods look brown? The dry heat changes the structure of starches in the outer layers of food: this creates the brown look, and this caramelised layer also seals in some of the food's natural juices. The browning involves a chemical reaction, the Maillard reaction, between an amino acid and a reducing sugar and it requires heat to take place. The type of amino acid determines the resulting flavour.

Cooking in an oven causes food to lose moisture. This is desirable in many cases, for example in the cooking of vegetables. However, it may not be so desirable while cooking meat. Basting the meat with butter or oil preserves most of the moisture in the food.

Baked foods go stale by hardening, a process that involves recrystallisation reactions between the sugar and water in the food rather than by simple loss of moisture.

RAJIV M

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