 So yes, so for those of you who don't know me, I'm Krishashok on Twitter and I'm the author of Masala Lab, The Science of Indian Cooking. And so while it might seem odd that bread is seen as a very western thing, it is not. Bread is universal. Bread is something that mankind has been cooking, making for the last 5,000 years. So in fact, pretty much ever since the domestication of wheat, we've had some form of bread together. Obviously, flatbreads were probably the earliest one. And bread has its origins in this part of the world, I mean in the sense in Asia. So in Mesopotamia. And from there, it spread everywhere. In fact, even the Indus Valley is expected to have been more of a wheat and barley based civilization and not a rice based civilization, which came later. So the magical amazing thing about bread is the fact that you can take flour, water, salt and yeast, just these four things. And if you really just leave the modern story and sort of think about the past, the yeast is in fact implicit. The yeast is already there because wild yeast exists everywhere. So that's the that's the origin of sourdough, which we will talk about. So with just these four ingredients, the fact that you can turn wheat flour into this most magically delicious, just amazing rich depth of flavor, airy soft product. Especially given that flour by itself is actually completely tasteless. It has no flavor, no odor, no smell, nothing. It's just starch and protein. And then you're just able to use this microorganism called yeast to ferment it and then turn it into the most amazing thing. Then you use high temperatures and that's the Maillard reaction and a series of other reactions that we will talk about to convert just these four dead simple things that are most commonly available everywhere and turn that into bread. So that's the that's the magical thing and there are a dizzying variety of them. So normally when we say bread, we immediately think of a loaf of bread, but none is bread to kulcha or kameeri roti or paratha or chapati or puri or batura. They're all varieties of bread. So that's where we are. So as I said, there's an interesting story about the origin. Well, I really want to get down to the science, but I can't resist a little bit of history just to start with. So the fascinating aside about how the oldest evidence we have for bread or for baked bread is 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. And we kind of also know that between 5 to 10,000 years ago is when we domesticated wheat. So what does this domestication of actually mean in the context of a plant. We understand what domestication of an animal meant. So you capture the young of the animal, presumably they captured animals like wolves, wolf pups and then that's how over time we kind of have dogs. Likewise, you capture wild cattle calves and then you slowly domesticate them likewise rams and you make them goats and sheep and so on. So the context of plants is actually quite fascinating. So there are broadly in the interest of really oversimplifying here. There are two categories of plants that we're interested in. Plants that are perennial and plants that are annual. So perennial essentially means that the plant or the tree or the bush or whatever it is, puts out fruit, puts out seed and the plant doesn't die. So you can take the fruit and you know, but the plant will again give rise to more fruit. So you take an apple out of an apple tree. The tree doesn't die. So, you know, it is still put out more apples in the next season. On the other hand, annual plants are plants where you know the plant puts out all of its effort in maximizing its chances of reproduction in one single harvest season in one single season. And then the plant dies. So hopefully the grains will either disperse or animals will eat it and then you know, sort of deposited elsewhere and then it will grow elsewhere, but the plant puts out all of its efforts in that one season. So in general, when humans were looking for plants to see what's edible, what's not edible and so on, they would have focused on plants that were annuals, not plants that were perennial. Because these annual plants were likely to have more yield, larger grains, larger seeds, and more importantly, if you're going to take them, take a sapling and grow it closer to where you live, you have an opportunity to experiment with it. And then take variations from seeds, take ones that have larger grains and so on. So that's why most of our, 80% of our agriculture is on annual plants and not perennial plants. So wheat and rice, corn, you know, literally most of these things, right? And what's also fascinating is that it's annual plants and the fact that we do agriculture and we have to till the soil, right? You don't have to till the soil for perennial plants, right? They have longer roots and so on. The fact that we keep tilling the soil and we'll be doing it for the last 6000 years is one of the largest contributors to releasing carbon into the atmosphere. So that's a separate story. So there's a fascinating podcast that you can perhaps listen to. So on that note, let's start with bread, right? So there are broadly two categories of breads, breads that are leavened versus unleavened. Unleavened, obviously the older one, unleavened is, it's not filled with air bubbles, right? And so it's denser. So, so therefore, by definition, that's to be thin, right? If you make something thick, and it does not have air bubbles, it's going to be very hard to eat. So chapati is exactly, if the chapati isn't thin, it's really hard to eat, right? And so, so leavened breads typically tend to be flat breads, right? So or flaky in some sense, like your Malabar parotta or things like that, right? So that is, sorry, these are unleavened breads. Leavened breads involve the use of either microorganisms like yeast or the use of chemical leaveners like baking soda or baking powder to create air bubbles in the door, right? So that those air bubbles are trapped in that door. And then when you bake it, so it's easier in area, right? So once the starch inside cooks, so those air bubbles stay and you get something that is easy, you can dip it into some gravy. And it's generally a more, far more edible and delicious product. And I think we have evidence from the Egyptians that they knew about sourdough baking as far as, you know, easily about, you know, 2000 PCS. So, as I said, all you need is flour, water, salt and yeast that gives you the most basic bread. And with just these four things, you can actually make bread that is, that will be tastier than any bread that you buy in a large store, right? Any industrially made bread. And I want to clarify that so obviously because a bakery, a good bakery will still make better bread because they have better ovens. And if it's a good bakery, you know, the processes are more artisanal. But any industrially made bread is going to involve the use of a ton of stabilizers and chemicals and also things that accelerate fermentation because, you know, speed is efficiency and efficiency is money and so on, right? So that's, that's the thing, right? So that's, that's sort of like the basic introduction, right? So let's start with what I'm going to do is talk you through each of these individual elements that go into baking to start with. And then we're going to switch to the kitchen and kind of show you the things that go, that you need to understand what kind of tools do you need. I know Nadika sort of promised that we're going to bake something, but it takes a very minimum of three hours to bake anything. So, so in that sense, we probably won't be able to bake something life, but we'll kind of get that process going so that you'll be able to do to repeat it yourself, right? And not only that, and then we'll come back and standardize all of that so that you are sort of armed with a series of algorithms to really think about different kinds of bread so that you don't have to rely on recipes, right? That's it. It's important. Most people kind of know that baking is a far more precise endeavor than cooking. With cooking, you can be rough, you know, you don't really, if you're really reasonably experienced cook, you can sort of find your way around, you can fix mistakes and so on. Baking is slightly more unforgiving in that you have one shot at getting everything right and then that's it, right? So the next time you want to improve something, you have to do it the next step. So you can't fix something. So if you forget something, if you put less salt or if you don't add enough yeast or there's not enough rice, there's nothing you can do to salvage it. It's not unforgiving in that sense, but it doesn't mean that you have to be tethered to recipes either. If you understand the broad ratios and some broad principles, you can make 15, 20 different kinds of bread whenever you feel like it without having to rely on these recipes, right? And there's just too many recipes, there are too many conflicting methods and some will say 180 Celsius, one will say 190 Celsius, you're wondering whether it makes a difference and so on, and we'll kind of walk you through all of that so that you know you don't have to worry about all of that. So let's start with the very first thing which is flour, right? So the flour, typically if you're making, we will only discuss gluten-based breads in this session. Non-gluten is a whole different world altogether that requires some special techniques and so on. Even after that it doesn't taste very great, but for those of you with the gluten allergies and want to eat a gluten-free diet, it's possible. So if necessary, maybe in the Q&A we can address it, right? So we're going to focus only on gluten-based floors. So what is gluten? So gluten, and I wrote about this in my mid column that was published last week. So gluten is actually a structure formed from two proteins that are present in wheat. Two protein, these are gliadin and glutenin are the two predominant proteins, there are other proteins as well, but these are the two predominant protein molecules in wheat. It's also present in rye and a few other kinds of glutinous floors, but wheat is what we were talking about, right? And in the presence of water, they form this elastic structure called gluten. Now, so why do they form that? It's again because proteins are large complex molecules and there are parts of them that like water, hydrophilic, and there are parts of them that don't like water, so hydrophobic. So what happens is that when you work water into the dough, so all of the protein molecules want to turn all of their water loving parts towards the water and water hating parts away from the water. So when you apply this at scale, so it forms a single long elastic structure. The more you need, the more you're trying to force water into the dough and the better the alignment of gluten, so the stronger the gluten structure. So that's really what it is you're doing. So that's why they say, the more you need, the better the texture of the dough and so on. But if you just put water and let the dough sit for half an hour, it will do exactly the same thing that you can do with like 10 or 15 minutes of kneading. So that's called autolysis. So we'll talk about that. So this structure essentially ends up means that all the water loving parts are on the inside of the water, all the water hating parts on the outside, which is why you're able to knead that dough and create sort of like the structure that can trap air molecules. So provided you put yeast inside and the yeast is eating all the sugars and in the starches in the wheat and it's starting to sort of burp out carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide gas wants to escape but it can't escape because the gluten structure forms this elastic so it expands and without cracking it just simply stretches. So that's why dough rises. So this is in the presence of yeast the dough will rise. So this is exact. So it's east eating the sugars burping out carbon dioxide and that then is not able to escape simply because it almost forms a waterproof air proof covering. The gluten structure forms that are only the dough. So that's essentially how this entire process was right. There are a couple of things that you perhaps need to sort of remember in the context of how do you pick and choose your floors right. Again, I'm going to assume that the audience is largely India based but I know that there are perhaps people living in Europe and other parts of the world so I will kind of address that as well. In India life is much simpler because you're largely going to either talk about Maida or Rata. That's pretty much it. Whereas in the West you're going to have a dizzying array of floors and we'll kind of talk about how to understand this right. The very first distinction is whether the wheat was is it a winter wheat or a spring wheat. So there's an interesting story about this right. So the colder the winter, the higher the protein content in the wheat because the plant really make sure that it conserves all of its energies during the really cold parts of the winter. This is in fact the reason why England which does not have very cold winters does not have great quality wheat, while countries like Italy and France have fantastic high quality wheat because they have colder winters. So there are two, this is one distinction. For most part again depending on what use you're putting different kinds of wheat will be used but typically winter wheat tends to be used for bread baking. So this is one. And so the second sort of this thing is that there are ancient varieties of wheat, the varieties of wheat called emmer wheat that was originally domesticated in Mesopotamia. And largely not under cultivation anymore because you know, over the last 100 years, 100 or so years, we use more genetically modified, more pest tolerant, higher yield varieties of wheat. And so there are these distinctions for most part, as people will tell you that one tastes better than the other, but for most part, most of the wheat that you're going to be using is modern wheat. That said, in Maharashtra, there is something called chapli atta which is made from this ancient variety of wheat. A lot of pseudoscience around the fact that oh it's nutritionally amazing, it's ancient, unchanged, not genetically modified, none of those are actually positive things in general. So in general, don't fall for those things but use anything you want so it doesn't really matter from a point of view of making a baking bread. Now comes the important part. So let's start with Maida. Maida is basically the flour that you get from just the endosperm of the wheat grain. So endosperm is the interior part which is mostly starch and protein. Then there is the wheat bran which has a lot of micronutrients, vitamins, it also has fats and so on. And then the wheat germ which also has a ton of micronutrients and minerals and so on. Wheat germ is the next generation, the baby wheat, which is inside the seed. When you make Maida, you skip the bran and the germ and you use only the endosperm and you get a white flour. So that is essentially what Maida is. Ata is where you mix some of the germ and some of the bran, not all of it, otherwise it will be very hard and very fibrous. Some of it so that you get a slightly yellow, which is why Ata looks slightly yellow and Maida looks like plain white. But there's more to it than that. So when you think about it, the Indian subcontinent uses Ata largely to make unleavened breads, chapatis and so on. And for those of you who've lived outside India, you know the frustration of trying to make chapati with anything other than Ata. So I'm sure many of you would have tried to buy something called whole wheat flour and think, oh, this must be Ata. It isn't. The reason is, is that it's whole wheat flour but with a fair amount of damaged starch and protein and it's damaged deliberately. It's damaged deliberately so that the chapati is not ultra chewy. If you've ever tried to make chapati with Maida, you'll realize that it's ridiculously hard to roll. It's just too stretchy and chewy and really hard to eat. On the other hand, Ata is just that right texture where a little bit of chew but mostly flaky and does not form very strong gluten structures. So it comes from the fact that you grind the wheat between these two giant stones called the chakki, which then really damages a fair amount, generates a lot of heat. Damages a lot of the starch, a fair amount of starch and protein in the wheat and that's why you actually get a floor that's perfect for parathas and chapati but utterly terrible for any kind of baking because the gluten is all damaged. So any actual bread, leavened bread that you try to make with Ata will be a little bit dense and never be as airy and soft as what you make with Maida. So that's the aspect. Now in the West, Maida tends to be called all-purpose flour. The funny thing is actually Baida is more all-purpose than all-purpose flour. The reason for that is that all-purpose flour is slightly coarsely milk and it also has more protein, which makes it suitable for a wide range of baking use cases but not necessarily cakes. Whereas Maida is okay for both cakes as well as breads. The distinction is that when you want to make a cake, you don't want too much gluten formation. Why? Because you don't want your cake to be chewy, you want it to be flaky and soft. On the other hand, when you make bread, you don't want the gluten structure to fall apart so essentially you need higher protein content. So cake flour is a variety of Maida that has even less protein than Maida and it's very finely milled so that it's easy to make cakes. So whole wheat is the Western equivalent of Aata except without these damaged starch and protein. Far more suitable for doing sourdough baking or traditional bread baking where you want a whole wheat kind of a flavor. Especially if you are a very heavy bread eater where you eat it as a staple daily, there's some nutritional benefit to eating whole wheat as opposed to only the all-purpose or what you call refined wheat flour. So the thing you need to keep in mind is what is the amount of protein which generally measured as a percentage of the amount of starch and so on. So generally for example and we'll show you so Maida in India varies between 9 and 11, 9 and 11 sometimes even 12% protein. Then there is a variety of flour called bread flour which is much higher, 13, 14% extra protein which is very ideal makes bread baking a lot easier. Bread flour is not as commonly available in India. You can buy it from Amazon, slightly expensive. If you're someone who bakes on a very regular basis and don't mind the expense, I think it's worthwhile buying bread flour as well. Then there's something called pizza flour which is again largely Maida but extra protein but very finely milled sort of like cake flour with extra protein. So these are all the different variations of floors that you're likely to come across. Now the next thing is obviously you need to understand is water. So how bakers normally measure this is something called hydration. Hydration meaning that depending on the kind of floor and depending on the kind of bread you want to bake, the amount of water you will use in the dough is going to vary. Ata for instance is a slightly more thirstier flour. So in the sense that you will need to add a lot more water. Whereas Maida is not as thirsty. That's based on the kind of flour. Second is the kind of bread. So general rule of thumb is that the more water you add, the better the final product. But the more water you add, that harder and stickier and more complicated it is for you to need and all of that. So it gets slushy and it sticks all over the place and it's messy for beginners. So the idea is to hit that sweet spot where you are comfortable adding the amount of water that makes it easier for you. But in general remember that you probably almost always need more water than you think you do. That's number one. The second thing is that it's measured as a percentage of the amount of flow. So if a recipe calls for 100 grams of flow and it says 60% hydration, then you need 60 grams of water. Remember one thing in baking, it's almost always better to operate only in terms of weights and not in terms of volume. So don't use milliliters, liters, use grams, use a weighing machine. You'll get way, way more consistent results. So that's called hydration percentage and we'll use this hydration percentage in the subsequent. The second other thing you have to keep in mind is that again, depending on where you are, if you're in India, there's a good chance you probably are using a reverse osmosis filter. And so the water in that is perfect. Actually, it's non-chlorinated. It does not have any dissolved salts. I think it's just perfect. On the other hand, if you are abroad, if you are in a place where the tap water is drinkable, is portable, but also tends to be chlorinated to kill germs and so on, that chlorinated water will slow down your yeast activity because it's just the chlorine doing its job of killing microbes. So you might want to keep that in mind. Again, and if you have hard versus soft water, hard water also impedes gluten development and also slows down yeast activity. So you might want to keep this in mind. So generally soft water, non-chlorinated filtered water is what is typically good. So the other thing that you keep in mind here is the temperature of the water. So if you're living in a place, if you're generally living in India, the room temperature water is perfect, et cetera. But if you're living in a really cold place and it's winter and so on, if the water is freezing, remember that yeast is going to take a lot more time to get active in really, really cold conditions. So you might want to adjust for that. So it's not uncommon for people to slightly warm up their water, but not too hot. Anything over 45 Celsius will kill the yeast. So you might want to keep that in mind. And also remember that when we talk about hydration, it sometimes includes other things that you add when you actually make bread that also have water. So just because it's 60% hydration doesn't mean that you add the recipe calls for milk also. Doesn't mean that you add 60 grams of water and then you add milk also. Then you just be slush. So milk is 88% water. So keep that in mind. So think in terms of these percentages. Eggs are 75% water. Yogurt is again, 88% water. Butter is about 20% water depending on the kind of butter. But rest assured it's about 20% water. Rest is fat. So eggs also have fat protein and water. Yogurt is protein carbs and water and fat. Milk is again a fat carbohydrate and water. So and butter is just fat and water. So you keep in mind that when you add all of these things, you're also adding more water. So just keep that in mind. So that's water. So the third thing we'll kind of discuss is salt. Now salt obviously is absolutely critical in baking. I would actually argue so and by the way, so we're only discussing baking breads, not cakes. So that's a whole separate thing. And I would actually argue that even in deserts, a tiny amount of salt is actually required. The best tasting brownies, for example, have a tiny pinch of salt because salt elevates all other flavors. And it makes other sweet flavors come out more strongly as well, even when you're making deserts. If you don't put enough salt in your dough, and by the way, you can't, unlike cooking, in cooking, you can fix less salt. You can't fix more salt. In baking, you can't fix anything. And so you have to get the salt right. And so in general, keep 1.5% to 2% of the weight of the dough as the amount of salt that you might add. Start with 1.5. If you don't think that's enough, you can always add a little bit more. That's the range in which you need to add salt for flavor. It also tightens gluten. So that's why in certain kinds of breads where you need to knead a lot and so on, it's not uncommon for the dough to sit in water for a while, half an hour or so. And then you work the salt in so that you've let gluten develop before you add the salt because the salt will tighten the gluten a little bit. The last thing that's important here that I sort of forgot to put a bullet for is avoid using iodized salt. And I'll tell you why. So the history of adding sodium iodide to salt is a public health decision that was made in the middle of the century, probably earlier, I guess, as a way of making sure that we don't have goiter that we don't have hyperthyroidism. And so on. So it just seemed like a simple way of just adding it to the salt. Everyone needs salt every day. So you absolutely make sure everyone in the population gets there. You know, quote how iodine, right? Now, you can get iodine from a ton of other sources from meat, from fish, from milk, and so on. But again, the argument there was that a ton of people are too poor. They're probably not getting enough of those other things on a daily basis. So salt is the best thing to put this and it's a tiny amount and so on. So the interesting thing is that what happens to when you're regularly cooking on a stuff, the temperatures you're operating are generally around 100 Celsius around the boiling point of water. If you're making any gravies, as long as there is water, the temperature is under 100. If the temperature was over 100, the water would have boiled. So at that temperature, iodized salt is perfectly fine. But baking happens at 200 Celsius and much higher, double that. And at that temperature, the sodium iodide breaks down and it produces some very nasty metallic tastes. So you, in general, if you're serious about baking, you want, at least for baking, have either a rock salt. If you're in India, Senda Namak or, you know, or pink salt or anything that's non-iodized, but still reasonably powdered enough, not like the big crystals. And we'll kind of see that in the kitchen. Or if you're in the West, kosher salt. I found that Senda Namak in India, powdered Senda Namak in India is the closest to kosher salt. And since most baking recipes will ask for kosher salt, which is slightly less salty than your regular table salt, it's a good batch. So this is a try and avoid using iodized salt when you actually do baking. In fact, you should also not use iodized salt when you're deep frying because the temperatures are 175 and it will lend a slightly metallic taste to anything that you're actually deep frying. And as I said, between 1 to 2% is a good starting point, 1.5 to 2% or so in terms of how you estimate salt. If you're not sure, if the recipe just says salt to taste, how do you, and if you're a beginner, this is how you estimate. So 1.1 to 2% of the weight of the dough. So the next thing is obviously yeast. So yeast is a microorganism, it's a fungi that's literally everywhere. So Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the name of the species that we are specifically interested in, it's all over the place. So obviously, along with lactobacillic, which kind of turn milk into yogurt, yeast is all over the place. So yeast, the difference between bacterial fermentation and yeast based fermentation is the fact that yeast produces alcohol and the bacteria produces lactic acid. So lactic acid is sour, which is why yogurt is sour and yeast produces alcohol, which is why it makes delicious things. So you used to make wine or beer and also bread. Now, two distinctions. So there's wild yeast everywhere. It is actually on most food items that you buy. The skin of most food items will have wild yeast. Ginger, skin has yeast. So that's how you make ginger ale and so on. The skin of urad dal has yeast. And by the way, the yeast plays a role in idli fermentation also along with the bacteria. And so likewise, it's all over the place. So that's wild yeast. It's also naturally there in wheat flour, atta or maida, it already has it. It's largely inactivated in the presence of water. In fact, if you just take any kind of floor, add water and let it sit in room temperature in seven days and you keep feeding it more floor every day and discard and keep discarding, etc. In seven days, you will have something called a wild yeast starter called a sourdough starter, right, which is essentially your, it is your houses yeast that you have cultivated. So which you can then use to bake instead of using industrial yeast, right. Remember that wild yeast or sourdough yeast is much slower. It's not very fast. The fermentation time can take several hours, sometimes overnight, sometimes 24 hours and so on. But as industrial yeast is much faster because it's been, you know, it's been carefully genetically modified so that you know it's ultra fast acting and it's very hardy and so on, right. And wild yeast is tremendously temperamental, unlike industrial yeast, which is very, very, very reliable, right. So active dry yeast is what you would normally use and that's, so the second thing is that wild yeast almost always does not exist in isolation, right. It's unlike, unlike baking with industrial yeast where you're only using yeast, where you use a sourdough starter, it's almost always what's called a scoby scoby is an acronym for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. So it's actually a mix of some lactobacilli and yeast, which is why your sourdough starter actually smells like yogurt because it's all the lactobacilli and the lactic acid that it generates, right. So what happens is that the lactic acid bacteria make the pH or make the entire starter culture quite acidic and so that keeps out all the other dangerous fungi like the mold, those hairy molds and all that come. It prevents those because that means it cannot operate in an acidic environment while yeast can operate in a mild acidic environment. So it's a very symbiotic relationship where the bacteria sort of acts like a club bouncer if you will so that the party can go on inside. So that's basically what the sourdough culture serves. So the same philosophy works when you make kombucha or for that matter or for that matter actually an idli. So most people don't realize that idli is also, it's not just lacto fermentation, there's also yeast involved. Now, two things. So there are two kinds of yeast. So there's brewers yeast and baker's yeast. So there's a fascinating story behind why these are two different things, right. Along with baking bread, we've also been making wine or making some kind of alcoholic beverages as far as mankind has existed, right. So you basically take any source of carbohydrates and you expose it to the air. It's going to turn into something vaguely alcoholic or sour at some point of time. Now, obviously, we discovered that if you take grape juice and then you introduce, you know, you let it ferment and you introduce these yeast and then it will turn the grape juice into wine, right. There is a problem, right. So we spoke about the scoby, which is the symbiotic relationship between the lacto bacteria and yeast. But when it comes to brewers yeast, there is this really nasty, unfriendly bacteria called acetobacter, which turns alcohol, which eats alcohol and turns it into acetic acid, which is vinegar. So that's how actually you get vinegar. Vinegar is just sour wine. But if you have someone who makes wine, vinegar is actually a complete disaster, right, because it's inedible, right. So wine is way, way more expensive than vinegar is. So what mankind has actually figured out is that the acetobacter needs a higher temperature to operate. It operates in the 25 to 30 Celsius. So we've engineered by careful selection a variety of yeast that works in exceedingly cold temperatures like 5 to 15 Celsius. So in fact, when beer is brewed or wine is brewed, they're brewed underground or in exceedingly cold conditions, right. Why? Because if the temperature was any higher, the acetobacter is all over the place, it's going to completely turn your beer or your wine into vinegar. And that just completely destroys the whole thing. So that's why brewers yeast and baker's yeast are different. Brewer's yeast operates at a lower temperature, baker's yeast operates at a higher temperature. So between the 25 to 30 Celsius, right. Because when you're baking bread, your acetobacter is not a concern at all. Because one, not enough alcohol is produced. And number two, all the alcohol is burnt off when you put the thing in the oven. So we don't have to worry about it. So obviously one last thing before we kind of, we won't spend too much time on this, chemical leaveners. Chemical leaveners are essentially if you don't have yeast, if you run out of yeast or if your yeast is expired and so on, and you still want to make bread. Yes, you can. You could use baking soda and baking powder, right. So baking soda, sodium bicarbonate and baking powder is sodium bicarbonate plus some kind of dry acid. If you are using baking soda, you will also need to use some kind of acid, right. So it's baking soda as a base when you add an acid, it will produce carbon dioxide and that leavens the bread. And chemical leaveners are not sensitive to temperature as much. They're also not temperamental and they act really, really fast. So the idea is that you add baking soda and baking powder right at the very end and you don't give it more than half an hour because it dries pretty quickly and then you can bake it. Now, obviously the, what's the difference is just that the fermentation reactions that yeast produces produces a ton of complex flavors, a lot of umami, a lot of high depth of flavors. That plus the Maillard reaction really creates bread that is delicious, whereas soda bread based bread is not going to have that kind of depth of flavor, right. But yeah, as an emergency, I think it's, I think it's perfectly fine. So, so this is floor water salt yeast and the last thing obviously is that obviously you will run into recipes where there's more than these four added to bread of some kind of bread, right. So we call these enrichment, right. So enrichment can be in the form of fats. So why do we add fats to any kind of bread. So it could be butter, oil, milk, yogurt, eggs, whatever, right. So fats, general rule is that they add softness and flakiness. So softness is that the texture of your final bread and when you eat it will be much softer if you work some butter into your dough. That said, if you add too much, right, fats will shorten gluten strengths, right. So that's why in fact fats are called shortening in England. And in fact, when you when you work so much butter, don't use water at all and you use dough, you get what you call shortbread, shortbread is like biscuit. So it's got no chew at all. It's just all flaky. So that's how biscuits are made, right. So that's why they're called shortbread. So when you add fats, it adds flakiness, which means that the gluten strands are shorter, right. They're not big and strong. So that's all. So if you add too much fat, it's hard to get a solid structure, but a little bit of fat adds tremendously improves softness. And you can get fats from butter from oil from milk, yogurt or eggs. So that's why eggs by themselves add softness and also rice. So eggs by themselves act like leaveners. So in fact, if you don't have yeast, right. So in fact, in cakes, we don't use yeast, we use eggs, right. So you whip the eggs, you whip air into eggs and then you fold in the floor and then you bake it. So the the egg, the egg structure is what holds the air inside. So there is no baking soda or any of these things. So in fact, till baking soda was invented, eggs is how you bake cakes, right. So baking soda is a very modern invention, right. So far, but we've been making cakes for thousands of years. So it's just just by using eggs. So there's no other way to make cakes without without. So eggs also contribute to rice if you whisk them and they also add softness because eggs also have fat. They have proteins as well, right. Now, sugar is another critical ingredient again, especially if you're making certain kinds of bread, it adds flavor, it adds a little bit of sweetness to contrast with that. And the other thing that's often commonly used is milk powder, which is mostly just sugars and fats. So it's just dried milk powder, which is sugar and fat. And that is a tremendous amount of flavor and you will find that very regularly recipes that you call for adding milk powder, right. But if you don't have it, you can just keep it. And the last thing before we kind of get to some more practical knowledge of how to get started about thinking about this is understanding ovens and understanding because, you know, when you don't necessarily just bake all bread, when you're making, say, naans or kulchas or kamiri roti, you're going to use the taba, right. So let's first understand distinctions between what is a convection oven toaster grill air fryer, right. So all of these operate on the same principle of convection. So an air fryer is a very small convection oven and OTG is a slightly larger convection oven and a convection oven is the full sized one. So that's really what it is. These all operate under the principle of heating air and then having the hot air be able to cook food, right. You can heat air up to so the temperature of the air inside an oven can go up to 230 Celsius, right. To put things in context, a tandoor oven or a wood fire pizza oven, right. The temperature inside goes up to 450 to 500 Celsius, which is sometimes required for those kinds of breads to make. So it's a tandoori roti or a tandoori naan is very tough to make in a home oven because the temperatures are not high enough. So you might probably want to use a tawa and then, you know, use a direct flame to actually make it. So we'll kind of talk about that, right. Now, this is convection oven. So you're using hot air to eat something. So the second kind of oven you're likely to have is what's quite common. It's called a combi oven. Chances are you're probably just calling it a microwave oven. But nowadays, most slightly higher range microwave ovens have a convection function also, right. So you have to be careful. The microwave function and the convection function work very, very differently. So for example, in convection, most of the things you're going to put inside a metal. You don't want to do that in the microwave setting because that will cause parking. So you want to keep that in mind. Most microwave ovens now have a convection function also, right. Another thing that you will remember is the so the oven toaster grill or the boiler, the toasting or broiling is another way of cooking, right. Convection is using hot air to cook something. Broiler or a toaster is to use radiation to cook something, right. So in this case, infrared radiation. So there'll be a bulb on top and it'll glow bright red and the infrared radiation will actually cook something. And it's a way for you to quickly get sort of nice coloring and charring or some kind of, you know, brown coloring because the radiation directly hits just the surface. So broiling or toasting is not a good way to cook anything inside. Only to cook the outer surface, right. So often bread toasting works the same way because you don't want to cook the bread inside because then it'll become chewy. You just want to cook the surface of the bread. That's what a toaster or a broiler is, right. So with this, with this kind of introduction, what we're going to do is that I'm going to have maybe Amogh or someone run a few polls and I'm going to then switch to the kitchen setup so we can, you know, start to get our hands wet and sort of understand what all of these things are. And then we'll come back and generalize the whole philosophy of algorithm for baking anything that you want with whatever you saw in the kitchen. Alright, so I'm going to quickly stop sharing and switch to the kitchen so.