Fluffy and soft crumb, golden and crispy crust, an unmistakable aroma of baked bread, this is freshly made bread, a simple but unmatched delicacy. For their part, sweet or salty, with chocolate chips, nuts or seeds, or filled with cream, that is how varied the presentation of cookies is.
Bread and cookies, cookies and bread, two essential foods on our table that hide endless flavors, textures and cultural meanings. Although they have basically the same ingredients (flour, water, salt and yeast), their production processes are different.
Bread dough is prepared with more water than cookie dough, which is why its texture is more tender and soft. On the other hand, because cookies contain less water, they tend to be more rigid and crunchy than bread.
This also conditions his old age. We have all been able to see that after opening the package the cookies are crunchy, to the point that we have to dip them in coffee or milk to soften them, but after a few days out of the bag their texture becomes much softer and less crunchy.
The opposite happens with bread, when it is freshly made it is soft, but over time the dough becomes hard as a stone.
The key is in the humidity
The explanation for this apparent contradiction is found in the different degree of humidity that exists between the masses. Bread has a high degree of moisture that is lost when it comes into contact with air; somehow, when it comes out of the oven, it begins its inexorable “aging” process.
The crumb undergoes a retrogradation process that results in hardening: during cooking the amylose and amylopetin molecules have been disordered, but as the days go by they are reorganized, a crystallization process takes place that results in hardening.
To this we must add that the water in the crumb moves towards the crust, so the innermost area is more dehydrated and, therefore, harder, while the outer area remains softer.
In the case of cookies, there is very little humidity and over time they are able to capture water from the environment, acquiring a softer texture. It achieves this, fundamentally, thanks to sucrose.
To extend the half-life of bread and cookies, simply cover them with a bag or cloth or place them in a hermetically sealed container to avoid contact with air.
Surely more than one person will have noticed that nowadays the loaf of bread hardens more quickly than it did in the past, this is because the cooking time to which bread is subjected today is less than that of decades ago. .
This is mainly due to the fact that less flour and more water are used, the latter being responsible for making it harden and dry at a faster rate.
And the cake… twice baked
The basis of the sailor’s diet during the 15th and 16th centuries were flour cakes baked up to two and three times in order to remain very hard and dry so that they could withstand long voyages stored in the holds of the ships.
They were so hard that to eat them they had to be softened in water.
These biscuits – from the Latin bis coctusdouble cooked – also known as sea biscuits, were a cheap and resistant food that allowed the kings of the House of Austria to create an enormous imperial fabric in which the sun didn’t set.
#bread #hard #cookies #soft
