Baking to perfection, with a pinch of chemistry

It’s often said that baking is just chemistry. Katarina Cermelj took this more literally than most when she completed her inorganic chemistry PhD and became a recipe developer and cookbook author. Her first book, Baked to Perfection, published in 2021, focuses on gluten-free baking. Cermelj not only presents an array of delicious gluten-free goodies, but unlike your average pastry chef, provides the scientific rationale for the baking methods and ingredients used.

Cermelj grew up in the idyllic Slovenian countryside, with a childhood full of fresh produce and, of course, cooking and baking. But she was also a naturally talented chemist and was selected to participate in the International Chemistry Olympiad in high school, which allowed her to visit her local university. ‘I actually got to experience a proper chemistry lab [and] I immediately knew I wanted to [study] chemistry,’ says Cermelj. She was accepted as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, UK, and subsequently began an inorganic synthetic chemistry doctorate, researching new layered materials for photocatalytic applications.