Definition:
"Scald" is a culinary term which means to heat a liquid until just below the boiling point, 180 degrees, or to blanch vegetables like tomatoes, for instance, to facilitate the removal of the skin.
Before pasteurization, milk used in a recipe was scalded to kill bacteria. Today, it is used to raise the temperature of milk in bread making to dissolve yeast and melt butter.
The temperature of scalded milk must be cooled to 110 degrees before the yeast is added, so the yeast is not killed. By using instant yeast (not to be confused with rapid rise yeast), dissolving yeast is no longer necessary and the scalding step can be omitted.
Examples:
I scalded the milk before I used it in the recipe.
