The heat 🔥 is on!

Ask any professional chef or baker if they were stranded on an island, al la Tom Hanks and Wilson, and could possess one specific spice or ingredient what would it be. The answer is nearly unanimously salt as it should be. Salt is a multifaceted ingredient that enhances flavors, never spoils, and is an essential component to curing meats. Salt is the 1st ballot Hall-of-famer of the Hall-of-Fame spices. It’s that important.

But something that is almost always overlooked but is equally (perhaps even more important) as salt is heat.

“Heat as an ingredient ?” you may ask. Sure! Why not ?! Heat has to be applied with variations of intensity and duration and given those two variables together a nearly endless array of transformative potentials exist. Heat literally transforms food products. Without heat we’d never have the mysterious but deliciously wonderful event called the Maillard process that is an actual chemical reaction process that involves heat above 270°F and sugars. Without it we wouldn’t get those amazing caramelization and browning that takes place on bread crusts, cheeses, and meats. This reaction literally transforms the ingredients it acts upon. Heat matters!

Heat is so amazing that when applied in low intensity levels but over long periods of time it can break down tough fibrous meat tissue into soft, melt-in-your-mouth moments of savory bliss. But apply heat in a smack-yo-mama-so-hot intensity that it turns eyebrows into rapid fire briquets and an entirely different transformative event occurs. This kind of heat is used with meats and breads.

“Breads ?!” you may ask incredulously . ‘Yes’ breads. You see there’s a baker’s term called “hydration level” where at secretive behind closed doors meetings held at midnight on each winter solstice bakers speak in whispered hushes about the precious levels of hydration their specific bread doughs hold. One anonymous bakers speaks of his “52% bagel dough” and the another shadowy baker scoffs and speaks of his “100% dough”. It’s a meeting of whose percentages are the biggest. It’s a weird thing.

But in seriousness the hydration level of a dough just means how much water the dough itself is hoarding. This is important because the amount of water being held inside the starches of a dough will determine just how much oven spring potential a bread loaf could have. If you have ever stood in front of a bakery window, drooling as you stared longingly at that big bulging browned dome of bread with the flayed open and seared San Andreas Fault line looking cut that traces across the top that whole thing occurs because of the water in the dough. And when that bread dough was placed into the moist hot environment of the brick oven stove all that water in the starches gets turned into steam and that steam starts a prison-break process that pushes the dough upward. IF there was no searing hot heat . . . . there’d be no bulging dough. It'd be a pathetic brick that’d be used as a door stop. Heat is pretty important and amazing!