In the last post, we covered eggs’ many roles in cakes, cookies, muffins, and breads. But eggs are even more versatile when we consider what they can do with air. Think about it: egg whites on their own are dense and chewy. But with air (and sugar), they become light, crisp, melt-in-your-mouth meringue cookies. Add a few more ingredients, and we can make macarons, pavlovas, cake frostings, soufflés, and sponge cakes. In this post, we’ll explore how meringue forms and how we adjust its texture for different bakes.
Tag Archives: shelf life
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.
Oil Temperature in Castella Chiffon Cake
Castella cake is a light, fluffy cake popular in East Asia, and there are two main methods to make it. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the Taiwanese version (古早味蛋糕, gǔzǎowèi dàngāo). A typical recipe starts with cake flour and cornstarch in hot oil, then adds milk, egg yolks, and an egg white meringue. In this post, we’ll focus on the ingredient that’s less common in cakes: the hot oil. We’ll bake two cakes, one with hot oil and one with oil at room temperature, and we’ll discuss the effects of the hot oil on the flour and cornstarch, the batter, and the final baked cake.
Tangzhong Method for Bread
Tangzhong (from the Chinese 湯種, tāngzhǒng) is a breadmaking method derived from the Japanese breadmaking method yukone or yudane. It’s recently gained popularity largely thanks to the Chinese cookbook 65°C Tangzhong Bread by Yvonne Chen. For the tangzhong method, a small portion of the flour and water are cooked together to 65°C (149°F), then added to the rest of the bread ingredients. Tangzhong is known to keep breads softer and moister for longer due to the gelatinized starch in the cooked flour. To taste the effects of tangzhong for ourselves, we made two sets of bread rolls with the same ingredients. Half the rolls were made with tangzhong, and half the rolls were made without.
Starch in the Kitchen: Choosing a Starch
In the last few posts, we discussed starch’s different roles in baked goods and other desserts. But some starches are better than others for certain applications. Cornstarch, for example, is useful for gelling custard pie fillings, but if we refrigerate a cornstarch fruit filling, it gets cloudy. Tapioca starch, on the other hand, won’t gel into a solid you can slice, but it remains clear once refrigerated. In this post, we’ll explore the molecular differences between different starches and their consequent effects in our desserts.
Starch in the Kitchen: Stabilizers and Thickeners
In the last post, we focused exclusively on flour and the role of its starch in baked goods. Today, we’ll explore how starch’s chemical properties make it useful in desserts such as buttercream, meringue, and custard. We’ll also consider how other ingredients affect starch in these recipes. Starch is a drier. As we discussed inContinue reading “Starch in the Kitchen: Stabilizers and Thickeners”
Starch: An Introduction
As bakers, when we think of starch, we often think of its function as a thickener in custards and sauces. Although starch is indispensable for pie fillings and pastry cream, it also plays a role in the pie crust and choux that hold them. Starch is as important as gluten for structure and texture in baked goods. It feeds yeast and interacts with proteins, sugar, and fats. We use it to form thin, crisp crusts on bread, chewy crusts on bagels, and tall shells of choux pastry. So let’s dive into the science of starch, starting with a description of what it is and an understanding of how it interacts with heat and water.
Sugar in the Kitchen: Special Applications
Over the last few posts, we discussed a lot of sugar’s roles in baked goods. It’s important for flavor, texture, structure, and color in cookies, cakes, and muffins. But sugar’s roles in baking extend further. Sugar is important in meringues as a stabilizer, in yeast breads as a source of energy for the microorganisms, and in fruit desserts to preserve the structure and texture of the fruit. In this post, we’ll explore sugar’s myriad roles in these sweets.
Sugar in the Kitchen: Partners with Water
In the introduction to sugar, we discussed the chemistry that makes sugar form crystals and attract water. That attraction gives sugar its roles in the texture and structure of baked goods. In this post, we’ll explore how sugar’s interactions with water make it such a versatile ingredient.