The right dosage of water at the start is an essential element in baking bread, according to a study

How to always obtain a very crispy baguette with a well-aerated crumb? And what is happening at the molecular level for this little miracle to occur? These questions continue to be a topic of research. Researchers from INRAE ​​in Rennes have partly succeeded in unraveling this mystery. Their results were published in the journal Journal of food engineering, Tuesday February 27. They placed a small piece of dough on a nuclear magnetic resonance measuring device, a sort of mini medical MRI, and heated it to cook the dough. This technique allowed them to confirm that to make good bread everything depends on the right dosage of water at the start, and on the baking temperature.

Even if these data could be guessed empirically, this is the first time that we have been able to confirm it in such detail, and that researchers have been able to precisely follow the dynamics of the water molecules in the dough. bread baking when baking at 200°C. This experiment confirms that part of the water contained in the crust evaporates to the outside, which makes the bread crispy on the surface, but the water must also be able to evaporate towards the inside of the bread, towards the crumb, so that it retains 45% humidity through different chemical reactions, also with the work of yeasts. This is what gives it its soft and airy side.

The know-how of bakers

This discovery will certainly not change the practices of bakers in the future for making a baguette or a loaf of traditional bread in a bakery, according to Corinne Rondeau Mouro, research director at Inrae in Rennes, one of the authors of her work. . Bakers already have know-how that has been built up empirically. But, for this researcher, this type of discovery can be useful for the food industry in order to improve bread recipes that use less traditional ingredients, such as gluten-free bread, bread with new cereals or new yeasts.