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.
When you want to bring the kids running, there are few things more effective than a pan of cookies fresh out of the oven. Ideally, there will always be a wire rack nearby to cool them on. However, that's not always the case. Sometimes you might be baking in an unfamiliar location, where such niceties aren't available.
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Some treasured family recipes prepare a quantity of cake or cookies that made perfect sense in the age of large families. For modern households of two or three, however, heating your oven and preparing massive quantities of baked goods can be overkill.
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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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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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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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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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Just about the only thing better than a ripe, fresh, juicy apple is that same apple and a few of its friends baked into a pie. Of course, much of that fresh juice will cook out of the apples as your pie bakes and will need to be thickened to prevent the pie from boiling over or developing a soggy crust.
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If you're already a health-conscious diner, eating better is usually about small incremental changes rather than a radical alteration of your diet. For example, replacing the butter in your cookies with vegetable oil can become part of your larger strategy to cut saturated fats.
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