Our favorite breads and pastries have arrived at their distinctive flavors and textures through years of experimentation in the kitchen, finding the right ingredients and sequence of handling to get to the right crumb or bite. With modern food science research, growers, manufacturers, and cooks can hone in on the building blocks of ingredients that do exactly what they’re looking for. Bakery science is one example of how understanding food chemistry can help fine-tune beloved recipes and also forge technologies to develop new foods.

On today’s PNM, guest Audrey Girard guides us through wheat varieties optimized for different foods, why your whole-wheat bread doesn’t rise up as fluffy as white bread can, how polyphenols can give plant-based meats a meatier bite, and more.

Dr. Girard is an assistant professor of food science at UW Madison, where her lab researches protein chemistry.

 

Image: FranHogan, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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