Do you ever wanna indulge in some baked deliciousness without quite so many fats?
Maybe you wanna cut animal products out of your cooking.
Well, some bakers use applesauce to replace the butter, oil, or eggs in their favorite cake recipe.
But how can the carbohydrates in applesauce replace the fats or proteins in a pastry?
Baking is just chemical reactions, so we need to understand how these ingredients work together in the first place.
When flour and water come together, two of the proteins in flour, gliadin and glutenin, unravel and combine to form long strands of gluten.
So if you're making bread, you add water to the dough to start making gluten and then you keep kneading the dough until it's full of a super stretchy gluten network.
All that gluten makes a nice, chewy bread.
But pastry chefs try to keep gluten at bay to get a light and airy texture in cakes and pies.
How did they do that?
