What Does the Baker Do?
A baker’s business is to make bread by first making a dough with flour, water, salt, and yeast (with or without sugar, malt extract, milk, lard, etc.), allowing this dough to ferment, and then placing this fermented dough in an oven to bake it into bread. In general the following amounts of ingredients are used per barrel of flour: Flour 196 pounds, water 118 pounds, salt 8 pounds, sugar 6 pounds, yeast 2 pounds. Besides these essential ingredients some bakers add 2 to 3 pounds malt extract, 2 to 4 pounds milk or milk products and 3 to 4 pounds of lard or other shortening. A barrel of flour made into dough containing most of these ingredients will make about 282 to 290 one-pound loaves of bread when baked. Baking is quite a diversified business. There are many kinds of bakers or, rather it might be said, that bakers make many different kinds of products, e. g., bread, pies, cakes, crackers, etc. The term “baker,” as generally used, however, refers to bread bakers.