About
How this library is built
Scientific Baking is a reference library, not a recipe blog. Its job is to explain why baking works and to show the evidence, so a reader can predict what a change will do before the oven does.
What this is
Each article treats its subject as a functional system: what it's made of, what job it does in a formula, and the chemistry or craft that explains both. Articles are written to stand alone and to cross-link, so you can follow a thread from one ingredient out to a finished technique. The library is organized into six disciplines (Foundations, Pâtisserie, Specialist Crafts, the Category Atlases, Presentation, and the Professional layer), publishing in sequence.
The source ladder
Factual and scientific claims are cited, and sources are chosen in a deliberate order of preference:
- Peer-reviewed and scientific literature: journals such as PNAS, Nature, Cereal Chemistry, Crystal Growth & Design, and the food-hydrocolloid and sensory literature.
- The profession's canonical texts: McGee's On Food and Cooking, Figoni's How Baking Works, Gisslen, Friberg, Migoya, Michel Roux, Reinhart, and Modernist Cuisine / Modernist Bread.
- Technical and industry bodies: BAKERpedia, the American Society of Baking, non-university extension services, and the manufacturer academies (Valrhona, Callebaut).
- Reputable encyclopedic and archival sources, used for historical and contextual material.
Inline citations follow an author-date style; each article closes with its full source list. Where the strongest available support is a single source rather than a body of evidence, the article says so.
Contested claims
Where the evidence is mixed or a popular belief isn't well supported, the article flags it rather than picking a side and moving on. These flags appear as marked callouts in the text. The point is to be clear about the edge of what's known: a claim everyone repeats isn't the same as a claim the literature supports.
How claims are checked
Every checkable statement in every article, from a temperature to a date to a sentence about mechanism, is entered in a claim register and checked blind: the checker sees the claim but not the article's citation, finds what the literature actually says, and only then is the article's source compared with the finding. Safety and health claims are checked twice, by two checkers working independently. A third reviewer then tries to break the result, looking for a newer standard, a narrower source, a misattributed figure or an arithmetic slip, and anything it proves is corrected. Every claim ends in one of a small set of verdicts: verified; verified but cited to the wrong source; overstated and restated to what the source supports; contested and flagged; or unsupported or contradicted and removed.
Mechanical checks run on every change: every DOI is matched against Crossref, every in-text citation against the reference list, every unit conversion and derived figure is recomputed, and figures shared between articles, calculators and the Diagnose pages must agree. A change to an audited section cannot be published until it has been re-checked, and statements that are only true until a date (a regulation taking effect, a rule under review) carry a review date.
Food safety
Every sentence on the site that touches food safety, allergens, non-edible decoration or health is held to the regulator, not to practice: the current FDA Food Code (2026), USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service guidance, the Code of Federal Regulations for labelling and additives, and peer-reviewed food microbiology. Each one has been reviewed against those authorities, and a new or edited safety sentence is reviewed before it goes live. Where a preparation carries a known hazard (raw or lightly cooked eggs, eating raw dough, custard and cream fillings left out, garlic held in oil, decorations that are not food, liquid nitrogen), the page says so where the preparation is described.
This library explains the science; it is not a substitute for the food-safety rules that apply where you cook or sell. Commercial and cottage-food producers should follow the version of the Food Code their state or county has adopted and their local health department's requirements. When cooking for young children, older adults, pregnant people or anyone immunocompromised, use pasteurized eggs for anything not fully cooked.
Corrections
When an audit finds an error, the article is corrected in place, the review month in its byline is updated, and the change is recorded in the claim register with the source that showed it. Contested claims are not quietly settled: they keep their flag until the evidence settles them.
Units & terms
Measurements are given imperial-first with metric in parentheses. Technical terms and acronyms are defined on first use.
The full library
Live now, all six disciplines and all 27 articles: the seven Foundations (the five core articles, the chemical-leavening reference, 25, and the weights-and-measures reference, 27); the four Pâtisserie articles (doughs, creams and meringues, entremets, setting agents); the four Specialist Crafts (chocolate and confectionery, frozen desserts, aeration, and the sugar syrup physics reference, 26); the five Category Atlases (bread, viennoiserie, cakes, cookies and macarons, pies and tarts); the three Presentation articles (decoration and finishing, plated desserts, flavor and sensory science); and the four Professional articles (production and food safety, troubleshooting, dietary adaptation, grain nutrition science). The library is complete against its source corpus, which grows by reference documents from September 2026; articles are reviewed and updated in place, and the review month is stated in each byline.