Liquids in baking

Liquids in baking

Next to sugars and fats, liquids play an important role in the appearance of our bakery products. They do not however tenderise them, but influence the moistness of our products. In wafers, biscuits and crackers we would prefer to use as minimally needed to avoid excess energy cost and overly colouring while achieving that nice and crispy/sometimes brittle texture. Having an amount of 40-50 Baker’s % or more will increase the potential of the formation of a tougher texture by gluten formation, desirable in breads not so much in cakes and rotary moulded biscuits. If the liquids consist of eggs or milk the proteins in these ingredients enable the toughening and may result in an even drier product then expected. These two liquids give also more structure and emulsify our bakery product, next to adding colour and flavour. (and egg and milk products in particular) functions as a glue to hold decorations such as nuts, seeds and sugars we would like to see on our products before we start to bake.

In bread it is very much depending on the type of product we’re going to make: in European style breads we see 50-65 baker's %, where the more open coarser breads have up to 100 120 baker's % ‘hydration’. These higher amounts result in very soft doughs, machinability is a challenge, but the pore structure is more open (e.g. ciabatta, baguettes). It also results in higher oven temperatures when baking.

In cakes more liquids lead to a finer pore structure and tenderness, in cookies to increase in spread and frequently to thinner an more crispyness.

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