Baked products
What baked products are, how they differ from one another, and why each behaves the way it does.
Products are grouped by the physical state of the mixture before heat, because that predicts behaviour far better than any other classification. A brioche and a white sandwich loaf share almost every ingredient and behave completely differently; a brioche and a Danish share a mixing logic and almost no shape.
Bread
Baked goods built on a developed gluten network that traps fermentation gas, giving an open, chewy structure.
Sourdough bread
Bread leavened by a maintained culture of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria rather than by added commercial yeast.
SourdoughadvancedWhite bread
A lean loaf of white wheat flour, water, salt and commercial yeast — the reference point against which other breads are usefully understood.
Lean doughbeginnerPizza dough
A lean, well-developed dough baked at high temperature, where extensibility rather than strength alone determines whether it can be shaped.
Lean doughintermediateGluten-free bread
A loaf built without a gluten network: structure from gelatinised starch, gas retention from a hydrocolloid, and a batter rather than a dough.
Lean doughadvancedFocaccia
A very wet, oil-rich flatbread whose open, custardy crumb is a direct consequence of a hydration most doughs could not hold.
Lean doughbeginnerBrioche
An enriched bread carrying so much butter and egg that the fat competes with the gluten it needs — which is why the method is about order rather than ingredients.
Enriched doughadvancedBagel
A very stiff, low-hydration dough that is boiled before it is baked — the boil being what makes a bagel a bagel rather than a roll with a hole.
Lean doughintermediatePretzel
A bread whose defining flavour and colour come from an alkaline dip, not from the dough — the clearest everyday demonstration of pH driving the Maillard reaction.
Lean doughintermediateBaguette
A lean bread of four ingredients where every characteristic comes from fermentation, shaping and steam rather than from anything added.
Lean doughadvancedChallah
An enriched, egg-rich bread leavened with yeast and enriched without dairy — a constraint that shapes the whole formula rather than being incidental to it.
Enriched doughintermediateCornbread
A chemically leavened batter bread with almost no gluten to speak of — which makes nearly every intuition from yeasted baking the wrong one.
Pourable batterbeginnerNaan
A leavened flatbread cooked in minutes against a very hot surface — a heat regime domestic ovens cannot reproduce, which explains most of what goes wrong with it.
Enriched doughbeginnerCiabatta
A very wet, slack, minimally shaped loaf whose open irregular crumb is a direct consequence of a hydration most doughs could not hold — and of being handled as little as possible.
Lean doughadvancedRye bread
A bread whose structure comes from pentosans and gelatinised starch rather than from gluten — which is why almost every wheat instruction is wrong for it.
SourdoughadvancedSoda bread
Bread without fermentation: bicarbonate of soda, an acid, and a dough that must go into the oven before the reaction finishes.
Rubbed-in mixturebeginnerPita bread
A thin leavened flatbread that inflates into a hollow pocket, and does so only if the heat is fierce enough to set the outside before the steam escapes.
Lean doughintermediateHot cross buns
An enriched, spiced, fruited bun whose two hardest problems — slow fermentation and a crumb the fruit fights — are both consequences of what is in it.
Enriched doughintermediateBread rolls
Small breads where the surface-to-volume ratio changes everything: they prove faster, bake faster, dry out faster, and are shaped more times than a loaf.
Enriched doughbeginnerMilk bread
An enriched soft loaf whose characteristic pillowy crumb comes from a cooked-flour paste that lets the dough carry more water than it otherwise could.
Enriched doughintermediate
Cake
Sweet baked goods built on an aerated batter, where tenderness is achieved by limiting gluten development rather than encouraging it.
Chocolate cake
A creamed or blended cake containing cocoa solids, whose acidity and starch content change how the batter is leavened and how the crumb sets.
Creamed batterbeginnerBrownie
A dense chocolate bake positioned deliberately between a cake and a confection, where minimal leavening and high fat prevent an open crumb.
Pourable batterbeginnerMuffin
A chemically leavened quick bread mixed by combining wet and dry ingredients only until just moistened, because further mixing is visibly punished.
Pourable batterbeginnerSponge cake
A cake raised principally by air whisked into egg, which makes it the category where technique matters more than formulation.
Foam batterintermediateBanana bread
A chemically leavened quick bread whose defining ingredient is also the reason it goes wrong — fruit purée is a liquid, and most people do not weigh it.
Pourable batterbeginnerCheesecake
Structurally a baked custard rather than a cake, which is why it cracks instead of sinking and why it is baked gently.
Pourable batterintermediateCarrot cake
An oil-based, vegetable-loaded batter cake that behaves nothing like a creamed sponge — moist by construction, and dense for reasons a sponge never has.
Pourable batterbeginnerPound cake
The reference creamed cake: equal weights of the four ingredients, no chemical leavening in its original form, and a crumb that shows every mixing error.
Creamed batterbeginnerFruit cake
A cake where the batter is a minority ingredient, the fruit is a structural and water problem, and the bake is long, low and slow for reasons that follow from both.
Creamed batterintermediateCupcake
A creamed cake in a very small case, where the same batter behaves differently because heat reaches the middle in a fraction of the time.
Creamed batterbeginnerRed velvet cake
A lightly cocoa’d acidic butter cake whose colour is now added and was once partly chemical — and whose texture claim is about acid, not about the dye.
Creamed batterbeginnerSwiss roll
A thin foam sponge that must be rolled while it is still hot and flexible, because a cooled one has set into the shape it will crack in.
Foam batterintermediateAngel food cake
A fat-free egg-white foam cake that depends on an ungreased tin to climb, and is cooled upside down because its own weight would otherwise collapse it.
Foam batteradvanced
Pastry
Flour-and-fat constructions where the distribution of solid fat, not fermentation, determines the texture.
Croissant
A laminated, yeasted pastry that rises from two independent mechanisms at once: fermentation gas and steam released between butter layers.
Laminated doughadvancedShortcrust pastry
A pastry in which fat is dispersed through flour to interrupt gluten development, producing a crumbling rather than a flaking texture.
Short pastebeginnerChoux pastry
A cooked paste raised entirely by steam, and the one pastry where the flour is gelatinised before it goes anywhere near the oven.
Choux pasteadvancedPuff pastry
Hundreds of alternating layers of dough and fat, lifted apart by steam — the same mechanism as a croissant without the fermentation.
Laminated doughadvancedQuiche
A pastry case holding a baked custard — two structures with incompatible requirements, which is the whole of what makes it difficult.
Short pasteintermediateTart
A shallow open pastry case with its filling exposed, where nearly every fault is about the base cooking on a different schedule from everything above it.
Short pasteintermediatePie
A covered or double-crusted bake where the lid changes the physics: steam that a tart would lose is trapped, and the base pays for it.
Short pasteintermediateFilo pastry
Layers built by stacking paper-thin sheets with fat between them rather than by folding — the other way to make a laminated texture, and a much older one.
Laminated doughadvancedDanish pastry
A yeasted laminated dough enriched with egg and sugar, which ferments and laminates at the same time — two processes with opposite temperature preferences.
Laminated doughadvanced
Biscuits and cookies
Small, low-moisture bakes where spread and final texture are governed by fat, sugar and dough temperature.
Chocolate chip cookie
A creamed biscuit dough whose final texture is decided almost entirely by fat temperature, sugar type and how far it spreads before setting.
Biscuit doughbeginnerScone
A rubbed-in, chemically leavened bake that rises in distinct layers when handled minimally and forms a tough, flat disc when it is not.
Rubbed-in mixturebeginnerShortbread
Three ingredients and no leavening, no liquid and no egg — which makes fat the only variable and shortness the entire point.
Biscuit doughbeginnerMacaron
An almond-meringue shell whose every characteristic feature — the smooth top, the foot, the hollow — is decided by how far the batter was deflated on purpose.
Foam batteradvancedFlapjack
A British oat bar bound by boiled sugar syrup rather than by gluten or egg — which is why it sets on cooling and why cutting it hot destroys it.
Biscuit doughbeginnerGingerbread
One word for two different products — a firm spiced biscuit and a soft treacly cake — and a syrup-heavy formula that behaves like neither of its neighbours.
Biscuit doughbeginnerBiscotti
Twice-baked by definition: a log is baked, sliced and baked again, and the second bake is what drives out the water that would otherwise make it a cake.
Biscuit doughintermediate