Home baking

(published november 2001)

Before the arrival of cheap and affordable domestic ovens, there was a clear division between the types of baked goods that were made at home, and those that were purchased from the local baker.

We had our trade goods that formed the core of our production, tin loaves and Vienna breads, fruit and Madeira cakes, finger and penny buns, and women encouraged to stay at home would bake more for reasons of economy than necessity. But now we live in a world where the work of home-maker is not valued, and indeed labouring work of any kind is foolishly scorned as lowly and worthless.

We still purchase our domestic ovens as if we will bake with them daily, choose home kitchen equipment as if we were setting up a business, yet fill the cupboards and fridges with ready-meals and frozen prepared foods.

Baking books are sold for the home baker, yet are often purchased as culinary travelogues. These aspiring bakers flick through the pages with awe, perhaps attempt a recipe rushed through one week-end, then the book remains closed and it’s spine adds colour to their designer kitchen shelves.

These recipes are desired, the images of breads and cakes lusted after, yet given our industry’s reticence to move beyond the old bakery goods that form the core of our production, the products these recipes represent will never be made available to a wider public. That’s a shame.

Baking books are not really produced for the working commercial baker, and we rely on ingredient manufacturers to supply us with new ideas and recipes. Yet, there is a cheap and readily available supply of inspiring recipes out there that could help create new ideas for products in the bakery – the home baking book.

The complaint is often made that books designed for the domestic cook are not written in percentages, therefore cannot be of use in the bakery. Now, I would argue that a baker that cannot do the arithmetic and convert a recipe into percentages would probably have difficulty with any recipe in the bakery. And given the common practice of pouring un-weighed quantities of flour or water into the dough when it doesn’t look right, I’m never sure that percentages are ever rigorously followed.

However, assuming some bakers were away the day percentages were explained by the maths teacher at school, here’s a very quick primer. Copy the recipe from the cookbook on to a blank sheet of paper, and weigh every cup, tablespoon and teaspoon, so that you have a recipe with metric weights next to ingredients. Leave eggs until the recipe is scaled large enough to warrant weighing them. Next add together the weights of all of the ingredients, so that you have a total dough or mixture weight. Next, multiply each ingredient weight by 100, and then divide by the total dough weight.

This will give you the ingredient as a percentage of the total recipe. Then scale the recipe to a quantity large enough to be realistically tested, and then modify the recipe according to your taste or opinion of the result.

These books are a very good indicator of the way consumer taste is moving, and can help us realign our industry with the desires of our consumers. We only add to our excellence by allowing our bakeries to be innovative and evolving, and we must resist the temptation to become stuck in our ways.