  We study the chiral expansion of the baryon octet and decuplet masses in the
isospin limit. It is illustrated that a chiral expansion of the one-loop
contributions is rapidly converging up to quark masses that generously
encompasses the mass of the physical strange quark. We express the successive
orders in terms of physical meson and baryon masses. In addition, owing to
specific correlations amongst the chiral moments, we suggest a reordering of
terms that make the convergence properties more manifest. Explicit expressions
up to chiral order five are derived for all baryon masses at the one-loop
level. The baryon masses obtained do not depend on the renormalization scale.
Our scheme is tested against QCD lattice data, where the low-energy parameters
are systematically correlated by large-Nc sum rules. A reproduction of the
baryon masses from PACS-CS, LHPC, HSC, NPLQCD, QCDSF-UKQCD and ETMC is achieved
for ensembles with pion and kaon masses smaller than 600 MeV. Predictions for
baryon masses on ensembles from CLS as well as all low-energy constants that
enter the baryon masses at N3LO are made.
