The secret of good bread was revealed by French researchers

What if the secret to good bread, with an airy crumb, was just a few grams of water? French researchers from INRAE have succeeded in unraveling the secret of baking success a little better, by carefully measuring the water transfers that occur in the dough during baking.

We can imagine that we in France, the land of baguettes, know all the secrets of good bread. To date, there are no studies on the biochemical phenomena that control the transformation of dough into crumbs. So how do you always get a crispy baguette with an airy crumb? This is the question that has just been answered by researchers from INRAE in Rennes.

Measuring the dynamics of water molecules during cooking

Their results were published February 27, 2024 in the journal Food Engineering JournalHe showed that to make good bread, everything depends on the correct dose of water at the beginning and on the baking temperature. Even if this data can be guessed experimentally, this is the first time that researchers have confirmed it in such detail.

Use a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measuring device – which is a fairly small device Medical MRI With a small piece of bread dough, Tiffin Lucas, a scientist at the INRAE Institute in Rennes, and her team were able to precisely follow the dynamics of water molecules in Bread dough Cooking when cooking at 200°C.

Traditional analysis methods require stopping the cooking process, followed by chopping in the open air – at the risk of generating large experimental errors. “We have successfully developed a methodology to locally determine the amount of water in bread dough, which can be applied throughout the process… It is very unusual!“, assigned Science and the future Tevin Lucas.

Using this technique, the researchers were able to monitor the movement of water within the dough in real time, without changing the samples. Thus, hitherto unexplored molecular dynamics are revealed.

To make good bread, everything depends on the correct dose of water to start with and the baking temperature. Credits: Agence France-Presse.