Mastering baking basics involves understanding rising agents and finding the right substitutes for butter or milk. Learn how to fix a crumbly cake, avoid soggy pizza dough, and ensure your baked goods rise perfectly every time.
To a trained chef, recognizing the differences between cooking methods is second nature. They're categorized as "wet" or "dry," depending on whether water or other liquids are involved, and each of those broad categories includes several specific cooking methods.
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A typical cookie recipe calls for a mere spoonful of baking soda or baking powder, so it's tempting to underestimate their value. Don't make this mistake. Baking soda and baking powder are powerful chemical agents. Without them, the entire character of a batch of cookies changes -- usually not for the better.
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Cakes are something of a challenge for new bakers trying their wings. When they work, they're wonderful, but there are far too many ways for them to not work.
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Baking powder seems mysterious when you don't understand the science. You add a tiny amount to biscuit batter and what would have emerged as a flat, dense hockey puck comes out of the oven a fluffy treat. If you don't have any baking powder around the house, don't fret.
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While shortening is a typical ingredient in most biscuit recipes, you can whip up a batch of fluffy and delicious biscuits without shortening. Depending upon your needs, you can create delicious flaky biscuits, perfect for honey or jam, or cut the fat and calories for biscuits without the guilt to pair with soup.
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Accurate oven temperature is essential when baking bread, cakes or cookies. If your oven is set too low or does not heat to the correct temperature, it can alter the cooking time, texture and color of your cakes and other baked goods.
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Whether you bake the old-fashioned way or use a bread machine, many of your favorite bread recipes likely require butter. Melted butter is a common ingredient in yeast breads, including white and wheat breads, as well as sweet rolls.
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Though baking your own cake may seem intimidating, basic batters, such as butter cakes, actually require minimal ingredients and are fairly simple to make. One problem beginning bakers have is the formation of air bubbles in the batter when mixing.
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Firm resolutions notwithstanding, you probably haven't cleaned out your kitchen cupboards as recently as you'd like. The back corners doubtless conceal a number of things you don't remember buying, or perhaps can't even identify.
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Generally, cooking a sirloin in the oven is not as popular as cooking it on the grill, but when done properly, it can taste just as good. Searing the sirloin before baking it in the oven will ensure a succulent, mouthwatering meal.
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Pound cake is a dense and rich cake, traditionally baked in a loaf pan. The cake takes its name from the original recipe, which called for a pound each of butter, eggs, sugar and flour. Today, most pound cakes include chemical leavening like baking powder to help them rise.
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Several things can go wrong when you are baking a cake; one of the most common problems is when the outside burns. Often, even though the exterior of the cake has burnt, the batter on the inside is still not cooked. Keep the exterior of the cake from heating too quickly and ensure the interior cooks evenly.
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Baking square cakes is just a little bit trickier than baking round cakes. Square cake pans distribute the heat a little differently, letting the center of the cake rise faster than the corners.
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You can still bake a light, flavorful cake while reducing the fat and calories from your recipe. Butter, which is high is fat and calories, works together with leaveners such as baking powder, to give cake a delicate, light consistency while also giving it a rich, delicious flavor and a tender crumb.
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Buttermilk is available in almost every dairy case in every supermarket, but it remains tragically unappreciated. Too sour for use on cereal or in your morning coffee, buttermilk can take your baked goods from "good" to "great" or from "great" to "extraordinary," adding not just flavor but improving texture and color.
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If you forgot to add baking soda to your cake recipe, you may want to get out the bowl and whisk again. Baking soda is one of several types of leavening agents that allow your cake to rise in the oven, yielding a light, tender crumb.
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You're not going nuts if you've noticed that buying whole almonds and processing them yourself is cheaper than springing for ground almonds. The problem is knowing how much to purchase. Once they are processed into finer-sized pieces, almonds have more volume than they did in their whole form.
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Adding pudding makes a boxed cake mix extra moist, so each bite melts in your mouth. Try vanilla pudding with anything from a yellow cake mix to a spice cake. Even lemon pudding adds a refreshing citrus flavor to white and yellow cake mixes, while chocolate pudding goes well with any chocolate cake mix.
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Haddock is a white fish, similar to cod, that bakes quickly in the oven for a healthier option to fried fish fillets. Haddock and cod also go by the term scrod in some northeastern areas of the United States. A fresh haddock fillet has a translucent color and firm texture that holds together.
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An unfamiliar ingredient to most home bakers, lecithin is widely used in commercial baking. It's an emulsifier, an ingredient that helps other ingredients to mix more easily and remain mixed. Bakeries add lecithin to bread and other baked goods to improve doughs and batters, or to keep them from staling.
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