Whether you are an amateur, at-home baker, or are looking to pursue a career as a pastry chef, everyone can benefit from some helpful baking tips that make the process easier or yield better results. As you know, baking is a precise science and small mistakes can lead to big kitchen disasters, so read on for some tasty and timely tips.
1. Read recipe backwards
Most people just read through the recipe as they are following it, but that can lead to surprises along the way. Read through your recipe backwards – from the end through the beginning – and gather the equipment you’ll need, prepare your pans, preheat the oven, and then set out and measure all your ingredients. Then go back through the recipe from start to finish as you work. This will also help prevent you from missing any steps along the way.
2. Excellent egg advice
To get a better rise from your desserts and a fluffier texture, use room temperature eggs in your batter. To get them to room temperature, sit them out for at least 30 minutes or you can place them in a bowl of warm (not too hot!) water for 5 – 10 minutes. Another helpful tip for eggs: crack with conviction. If you are too gentle when cracking your eggs, you are more likely to get pieces of shell into your batter.
3. Use unsalted butter when baking
As we mentioned, baking is a science, and when you add salt into the mix that isn’t called for, you can mess up the chemistry of a recipe or change its flavor. That’s why, especially when you are baking a cake, you want to use unsalted butter.
4. Use olive oil when measuring sticky ingredients
Ever try to use honey in a recipe? A good portion of it may end up stuck inside your measuring cup. For more accuracy, lightly coat your measuring spoons or cups with olive oil before measuring sticky ingredients like honey, molasses or corn syrup. They’ll slide right out!
5. Cool your countertops
This may come in handy the next time you decide to bake a pie. Chill your countertops or work surface first with Ziplock bags full of ice and a little cold water to keep that pie dough from sticking to the surface as you roll it out. Easy peasy!
If you love to bake, Park City Culinary Institute offers hands-on, interactive programs, including our Professional Certificate in the Culinary Arts, Cuisine Certificate or Pastry & Baking Certificate, that are open to anyone who wants to learn. Convenient to all of the Salt Lake City area, our award-winning culinary school can help your baking skills rise to a whole new level. To learn more, visit our website, give us a call at 801-413-2800, or email us today!