A scientist’s guide to life: How to bake bread brilliantly

The Maillard Reaction is the name of the chemical reaction that happens between amino acids and sugars. This chemical reaction also requires moisture and heat in order to happen.

The brown crusty top is the result of the chemical reaction stated above. If you want your bread to have it you can do either of the two:

• spray the dough with water a few times while it is cooking; or
• fill a baking tray with ice cubes and place it in the bottom of your preheated oven.

Once your dough has doubled its size, press the dough with your finger -- if it bounces back then that means it is ready to be baked. Anything otherwise means that it needs more time to be proved.

Proving activates the yeast in the dough. You don't need proving cupboards in order to perfect making bread.

Although cupboards provide constant temperature and humidity, they can be done just by covering your dough with a tea towel. It is also possible to cold prove the dough at room temperature or you can leave your dough in a warm oven.

When you put salt in the dough that has yeast in it, it absorbs moisture that aids in controlling the fermentation process. 

The reason why salt does that is that salt is hygroscopic so it attracts water.

Bakers use one species of yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae that means "sugar-eating fungi."

Yeasts are single-celled organisms that help make the bread light and bubbly.

Bread connoisseurs prefer live yeast but dry yeast has a longer shelf life. If you're open to a yeast recommendation, instant yeast is the way to go. It's way dehydrated than dry yeast and it works on the bread quicker and has a longer shelf life than the already dry yeast.

Kneading your dough lines up the messy strands of gluten and makes your bread stronger.

If you don't want heavy and dense bread, make sure to use strong flour. Strong flour has high amounts of protein in which contains glutenin and glian that makes gluten when water is added into the mix.

The gluten gives it its elasticity and enables the dough to rise with a good structure.

Archeological artifacts that are discovered many years ago prove to us that bread has and always will be comfort food to most of us. 

Natufian hunter-gatherers were making flatbreads from wild cereals from over 12,000 years ago but it's possible that baking could have started even earlier.