Category Archives: fats

Butter Temperature in Cupcakes

In the last post, we explored the importance of creaming time for volume and texture in cupcakes. This step forms the foundation for the cupcake’s rise when it bakes. Another important factor for creaming is the temperature of the butter. Just like creaming time, butter temperature affects the amount of air in the batter. Today, we’ll explore how butter temperature affects cupcake rise and texture.

Adjusting Oven Temperature for Cookie Dough Temperature

In the last couple posts, we’ve seen how both oven temperature and dough temperature affect a cookie’s spread and texture. Cookie recipes usually give clear instructions for both. But when we don’t have time to refrigerate the dough, or if we forget to thaw it, can we adjust the oven temperature to compensate?

Chilling Cookie Dough

Many cookie recipes ask us to chill the dough before baking. Sometimes this makes the dough easier to handle and shape. But in other cases, chilling just seems like more time to wait before we can get to our cookies. How much of a difference does it actually make? In this post, we’re exploring how the temperature of cookie dough affects its bake.

Oven Temperature for Cookies

In my Maple Walnut Snapdoodle recipe, I suggest two oven temperatures for two different cookie textures. A low 325°F produces a crisp, gingersnap-like cookie, while a moderate 350°F makes a thicker, chewier snickerdoodle-style cookie. In this experiment, we’re baking chocolate chip cookies at three different temperatures to explore the effects of oven temperature on cookie shape and texture.

Fats in the Kitchen: Flavor

Over the last few posts, we’ve discussed some different textures fats can create, such as tenderness and flakiness. But we haven’t yet explored one of the most important functions of fat. As my grandmother told me, “有油才會香！” You need fat for flavor! Fats like butter and olive oil have a unique taste, but more importantly, all fats carry flavor in our food. They’re also responsible for textures such as creaminess and moistness. And of course, we can’t forget the distinctive taste of fried foods. Today, we’re going to break down the many flavors of fat.

Fats in the Kitchen: Spread and Consistency

Over the last few posts, we explored how fats create tenderness and flakiness in our bakes. These functions mainly result from fats’ tendency to repel water, but other applications of fats come from their greasiness. By lubricating the ingredients in our mixing bowls, fats can affect bread rise, cookie spread, and fudge texture. They’re also essential for making sure our bakes come out of the pan. In this post, we’ll focus on the roles of fats that stem from their greasiness.

Oil in Muffins

Fats get a bad rap for being unhealthy, but they determine texture in our bakes. They’re also an integral part of our diets. Nevertheless, we often minimize the fat in recipes for health reasons. But how low can we go? In this post, we’re reducing the fat in muffins and exploring the subsequent effects on shape, texture, and shelf life.

Liquid Fat in Muffins

Many muffin and quick bread recipes use oil for a moist, tender crumb. But butter has a superior flavor, and it can melt into an easy substitute for oil. Although both butter and oil are fats, they differ at the molecular level, so a direct substitution won’t create the same exact bake. To learn more about the effects of substituting oil with melted butter, we compared the texture and taste of muffins made with both types of fat.

Fats in the Kitchen: Flakiness

We’ve seen that fats add tenderness to many of our baked goods, both by preventing tough structural molecules from forming and by contributing to leavening. But in bakes like pie crust, biscuits, croissants, scallion pancakes, and baklava, fat has another function: flakiness. In this post, we’re exploring how fats add flake to gain a better understanding of how to work with them.