Bread Making Machinery

This is not my intention to belittle the great good that would be derived from scientific chemistry if it is properly applied to the manufacture of bread. But who is to study and apply it? Certainly not a man who earns from 20 years. to 30s. week and work twelve, fourteen and sixteen hours a day in an overheated atmosphere. What are the hours of rest, it must be used to recover its lost vitality. Not until the scientific chemistry is taught in our schools of the board and is a component of mainstream education, a scholar, can we hope to see it used successfully with bakers in making bread.

Chemistry, I think, will play an important role in the annals of the bakery as the substitution of machinery for manual labor. But at present the number of bakers know that the decomposition of sugar produced by fermentation, fermentation destroys the sugar and produces alcohol as maltose using fermentation as starch, however obtained, has always the same characteristics, but there are different types of sources, that the dextrin is soluble in water and insoluble in alcohol that protoplasm, the basis of all life, is composed of proteins, compounds, minerals , nitrogen, etc. And do not the meaning and use of familiar terms of chemistry scientists - such as diastase, cereslin, gluten, and others - only embarrass ordinary baker, and make him believe that the least it has to do with science, the more easily he will get his life "rubbed through." It is impossible for the work of bakers to learn these things while in the bakery, and while it exists in many cities such institutions valuable free libraries, mechanics institutes, & c., they are not available regular at the bakery, as the times are so exceptional. The baker's hours of work, in fact, are shorter than in many places they were, and it is not called "white slavery." Yet the spirit of competition is so strong that the baker has to work much stronger in proportion than other working men, and his mind is not fit in the little spare time he has to study the problems of science, and nobody can expect the baker knowledge, as if by intuition, why and how of chemistry. But what he learned in the practice of his art, and what the common usage of trade has made him, he can use to his advantage more or less, according to more or less personal ability. In the case of fermentation, which can be described as the backbone of bread, a baker will find much to explore and think, from his first entry into the sponge until the bread is baked without perplexing himself on issues that he could understand little or nothing.

With time and money at his disposal, however, the study of chemistry opens a wide field in studious baker, and would probably be the reward for his trouble, and at the same time prove a great advantage in his profession, and I think there is not really the low-consuming at present to provide knowledge and help the baker who will lead eventually to an easier way to earn his daily bread.