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The Order of Things (Baking Steps)


Pam R

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In another topic, chefpeon posted this:

if your carrot cake is done with the creaming method, add your baking soda with the butter. That will do two things, help dsitribute the baking soda evenly and it will partially encapsulate the baking soda until the butter melts from heating.

On that note, I always add my salt and leavening during the creaming stage of any recipe, including cookies and cakes. I started doing this when I was using a 60 qt. mixer and realized that there was no way the leavening would be distributed thoroughly if I added it at the end with the flour, as is typical with most recipe instructions.

I started doing this at home on my KitchenAid also. It's quite handy as it saves you the step of sifting the leavening and salt with the flour before adding it to the recipe. If spices are involved, I include the spices in on the creaming stage too.

After doing it this way for so long, it makes me wonder why recipes want you to add in the leavening, salt and spices at the end. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me now. :unsure:

I always do the same thing. It always seemed to me that things were better distributed when they were mixed in at the creaming stage than into the flour. It's always worked and I've never had something flop because I didn't follow the steps as they were written in the recipe.

Anybody else doing this? Or are you doing something else that goes against the 'norm'?

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It's never even occurred to me to try this. I only ever bake small quantities (at most a double batch, usually just a single of whatever), so I always add the leaveners and spices to the flour and whisk them together as directed by the recipe. This is interesting though. I'm not sure I'll try it, because what I'm doing is working fine, but it's interesting.

I'm gonna go bake something…

wanna come with?

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I always do the same thing.  It always seemed to me that things were better distributed when they were mixed in at the creaming stage than into the flour.  It's always worked and I've never had something flop because I didn't follow the steps as they were written in the recipe.

Anybody else doing this?  Or are you doing something else that goes against the 'norm'?

I've been doing this for a couple of years. I started doing it because I usually don't sift dry ingredients together so I too thought that the leavening and salt would distribute better if I added them during the creaming stage. I've never noticed any problems.

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The key is to try and understand all the functions of the ingredients and how they interact with each other and the agitation of the mixer/hand

Once you understand all of that, you can look at a recipe sort of how neo looks at the matrix (in a whole new way). Your mind will seperate out the products defined as saccharides, leavening, proteins, aromatics, starch, and hydration.

Once you see that, you know that certain things are going to react to others quickly or slowly, or inhibit others in various ways.

Obviously aromatics wont have an effect (typically) on any of the other substances, and they wont get overworked or tighten anything up, so spices can be added at the very bigging.

You could probably write a whole book on the altering of ideas and recipes for different/better/efficient results.

I have staged at a lot of places and the chef gives me a recipe with no instructions. By the time I am done he/she once in a while looks at me in aw as if I changed the recipe because it has a different color, or greater quantity, or more intense flavor. For the most part its their fault for not presenting a procedure and assume I am going to do it their way, whatever that is.

One of my best examples was at a restaurant not too long ago that the chef gave me a recipe for flouless chocolate cakes in individual molds. I made roughly 40 more than his typical 110 cakes and was stunned. The reasons was because I added the cocoa powder to the meringue at the end of whipped instead of sifting it in while folding in the chocolate. The mixer could incorporate it a lot more efficiently than my hand, and clumps didn't form with the chocolate.

After I told him how I made it, he said to me he never though of that before, but now that it was done, he could understand how it would work like it did.

The only reason so many things like 'puff pastry' happen on accident is because nobody really took the time to say hey! gluten proteins hold air, and butter creates steam without absorbing into the starch in the flour, what if I layer them a few hundred times and bake it!

We can probably come up with some really neat things if we take the time to look at our ingredients the way they truly are, not they way we were instructed to use them.

Dean Anthony Anderson

"If all you have to eat is an egg, you had better know how to cook it properly" ~ Herve This

Pastry Chef: One If By Land Two If By Sea

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... It always seemed to me that things were better distributed when they were mixed in at the creaming stage than into the flour.  It's always worked and I've never had something flop because I didn't follow the steps as they were written in the recipe.

Anybody else doing this?  Or are you doing something else that goes against the 'norm'?

For me, spices are always creamed in with the butter or oil, same as you'd add them to a hot pan at the beginning instead of at the finish of a dish so they can incorporate with the fat....dry ingredients are always mixed together in a seperate bowl and hit with a hand mixer for even distribution before they're added to the batter, (unless it's cocoa or a nut flour; those get creamed), and eggs are almost always whipped seperately and folded in at the end. Makes for an awful lot of dishes but it always works for me. :wink:

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Particularly in baking cakes, there are "families" of mixing methods and this is the way they've always been done.

OR NOT! :biggrin: A great example is chiffon cake. You look at the product and looks like a typical sponge cake. But you look at the ingredients and it looks like a straight method cake. But you look at the technique and it looks like a modified creaming method cake. But what it is is a combination of all of these since it is moist/rich like a butter/creaming cake, but light like a sponge cake from the whipped whites, but terrific keeping and low saturated fat like a straight method cake. It also tastes better frozen than any of the others.

I've never been one to take mixing methods at face value -- if I think something will work better using a different technique I will always try it. This is especially valuable when scaling home recipes for quantity production, or for teaching where you will always get one person rushing ahead and adding the eggs without whipping, or something like that. :rolleyes:

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With sponge cakes made with separate yolk and white foams, that use melted butter, recipes always say fold melted butter in last. But to me, that deflates the foam. So I whisk the melted butter in at the end of beating yolks and sugar, because yolks contain fat. Then fold stiff whites, then dry last. Does anyone else do this?

Edited by Mary Elizabeth (log)
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I once made banana bread, and after adding the dry ingredients, I realized I had forgotten the leavening. I added it to the batter, and the resulting product was dense and flat. I had assumed it was because I added the leavening after. Was my assumption correct? Or was something else wrong?

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I once made banana bread, and after adding the dry ingredients, I realized I had forgotten the leavening.  I added it to the batter, and the resulting product was dense and flat.  I had assumed it was because I added the leavening after.  Was my assumption correct?  Or was something else wrong?

your assumption was 100% correct. The only way to really fix that is to make a second batch, put twice as much leavening in that one and fold together, and even then you are taking a risk but far less of one.

Dean Anthony Anderson

"If all you have to eat is an egg, you had better know how to cook it properly" ~ Herve This

Pastry Chef: One If By Land Two If By Sea

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your assumption was 100% correct.  The only way to really fix that is to make a second batch, put twice as much leavening in that one and fold together, and even then you are taking a risk but far less of one.

Do you know why it might have worked out that way? Scientifically, I mean. Or at least pseudo-scientifically. I'm just curious why it would be OK to add the leavenings to the fat portion of the batter, but not the final batter.

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oh boy, this might be difficult. I am not sure I can make sense of this without some sketch paper, so I appologize if I confuse you.

Unfortunately I have yet to grasp the project under a microscope, hopefully one day I can devote time to such things.

You problem is by adding the leavening too late the proteins and starchs have already grabbed a hold of the majority of the water. It would take considerable more agitation to help release the water content necsessary for chemical distribution, hydration and activation.

You can think of proteins as a web and water molecules as balls. As the proteins denature through agitation/heat/acidity/etc they uncoil kind of like what you do with your christmas lights during thanksgiving. Through further agitation they recoil to strengthen, upon doing so they trap in the water molecules and other particles. Over agitation tends to squeeze out those particles, which is undesireable.

The starch you can think of as a sponge, it slowly grabs a hold of water molecules and the starch walls grow larger and thinner more and more. Soon if they absorb too much through heat, or over expand during freezing they loose their retaining abilities and release the water, also undesireable except for finished baked product.

the chemicals need as much opportunity as they can to enter the proteins of starches. The salts are also hydroscopic so they pull at the escess moisture during incorporationg and synthesize with the hydrogen and oxygen negative charge. Alkali's tend to give a proton to water changing its charge from (-) to (+) and from h2o to h3o allowing for hydrogen expansion and release (gas) as well as the carbon dioxide exchange and release from the soda.

The problem with adding the salts too late is they cannot get the proper hydration and reaction needed, the dont have the time, the proper distribution or the ability to really get inside the proteins of the starchs. That may be why your cake while being flat also has a somewhat bitter off flavor, because the soda reaction never occured with hydration.

does that help?

Dean Anthony Anderson

"If all you have to eat is an egg, you had better know how to cook it properly" ~ Herve This

Pastry Chef: One If By Land Two If By Sea

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let me add about the fat. When the waters density is increased by sugar and other polysaccharides it is easy for fat to surround and outline the water molecules. Upon heating the fat runs away and the chemicals (unchanged by the fatty acids) hydrate with the water now in contact with them.

This is why saturated fat can give more shelf life in baked products if the chemicals are incorporated in them. If you are covered in fat it is hard for you your skin to hydrate or even release moisture, if not impossible. Try coating your body in vaseline or shortening and see if your body can breathe.

Once that fat softens the chemicals break free and hydrate.

Dean Anthony Anderson

"If all you have to eat is an egg, you had better know how to cook it properly" ~ Herve This

Pastry Chef: One If By Land Two If By Sea

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