Baking in Biology! Group 5

So we were told to make bread… Something we have never done before. We found this exciting and fun. First we needed to do some research on how the ingredients worked and how much of each we needed to add. To start, we were given a base recipe that we got to refine to our liking. Then the next day, we tested our recipe, we took a ziploc bag and added ¼ cup of flour, and ¼ teaspoon of yeast and mixed it together. Then we added 4 tablespoons of water to the mixture at 120-130 F. After that we let it rest for 10 mins then added another ¼ cup of flour and mixed that. Finally we took it out of the baggie and kneaded it for at least a minute, adding flour because it was too sticky. Then we waited for 30 mins…

When we were told to make bread we realised their was a lot of science involved. One main piece to baking bread is respiration which is the process of making energy in the mitochondria of a cell and it gives off the byproduct of CO2. This process uses oxygen and glucose to make ATP(energy), water, and CO2. In the form of an equation it is 6O2 +C6H12O6 = ATP+6CO2+6H2O. This process of cellular respiration is not used in bread making because there is no oxygen in the bread. However because their is no oxygen the yeast convert to alcoholic fermentation, a type of anaerobic respiration, which is the form of making energy in a cell when there is no oxygen available and that produces CO2 and alcohol, because CO2 is being produced, more air pockets will form making the bread raise. Alcohol plays no part in bread because even though it is produced the heat of baking burns it away. The role of plants in the bread are to help with making air pockets when they release CO2 by doing alcoholic fermentation. The difference between this anaerobic respiration in yeast versus humans is while plants and fungi do alcoholic fermentation, humans do lactic acid fermentation which produces CO2  and lactic acid, which is the main difference between anaerobic respiration in plants and fungi versus animals. This is important in bread making because the CO2 is what makes the bread rise and that is a product of alcoholic fermentation. Bread contains CO so when animals eat it they can get their required CO2 and therefore humans could eat bread instead of plants ,if needed, to get their CO2.

The next day after testing, we got to make our final bread product. Since our failure yesterday, today we are controlling how much water we put in the dough. Also we decided to add cocoa powder because, what’s better than bread? Chocolate bread. We put 3 and ½ tablespoons of water instead of 4, and the batter was already noticeable. It was less runny and more solid today.

First we followed the base recipe and added ¼ cup of flour to ¼ teaspoon yeast in a ziploc bag and mixed it a bit.

Then we heated up water to 120 - 130°F and added 3 and ½ tablespoons instead of 4 into the bag because we didn’t want ours to be too wet like the day before.

After that we allowed it to rest for 10 mins before adding the other ingredients.

Then we added the other ¼ cup of flour to the bag and our extra ingredients, which was ½ a teaspoon of salt and ½ teaspoon of cocoa powder. Then… now the dough was too dry… so we ended up adding the other ½ tablespoon of water to it. We think it was the added salt and cocoa powder that made it a bit too dry, but we got around it.

Finally we got to take the dough out of the bag and knead it, we kneaded it for a minute, we didn’t want to knead it too much.

The last step before our dough became bread was to leave it under the heat lamp for 30 mins. We examined it every 5 mins to see if there were any changes. We did notice a big change from the day before… it wasn’t a sticky mess, yay!

So we finally got to taste the bread we baked… but it wasn’t as good as we would’ve wanted but still good for a start.

Reflection: The bread in the end was not what we would have expected, it was a bit on the tough side, and was too salty. The outside looked baked nicely, and the inside looked like it had risen well. But the bread was too salty, even after just adding ½ a teaspoon to the mixture, compared to the 1 tablespoon of sugar. We didn’t think it was much of a failure, we got the texture and airiness right. If we had a little more time refining it, we think we might have had a very good loaf of chocolate bread.

Why added the things we added:

We added Cocoa Powder because we wanted our bread to look and taste unique. We added salt to make the dough less sticky during the process of making it. Salt made a big difference compared to our bread prototype yesterday. It was much less sticky.

Ingredients:

-4 tablespoons water

-1/2 cup flour

-1/4 teaspoons yeast

-1/2 teaspoons salt

-1 tablespoon sugar

-3/4 teaspoons

Procedure

1.In a zip lock bag mix 1/4 teaspoons yeast and 1/4 cup flour

2.Heat four tablespoons of water to 120-130 degrees F

3.Slowly add water to the bag and mix together

4.Let mixture sit for ten minutes

5.Mix all remaining ingredients into the bag

6.Take the dough out of the bag and place it on wax paper

7.Knead the dough on the wax paper for one minute

8.Roll the dough into a ball

9.Place dough under a heat lamp for thirty minutes and allow it to rise

10.Finally place the dough in a cupcake wrapper and bake it in an oven for fifteen minutes at 375 degrees