Five tips every beginning baker should know but no one ever tells them...
Recently, I was doing some research on Pinterest for an article I was writing, and I came across a graphic that listed ten tips for beginner bakers. It listed ten ways to improve your pate e choux so your pastries came out more.. French. WHAT? I’ve been a baker for most of my life and I couldn’t understand what half of these tips meant! How would someone new to baking stand a chance? I thought about the things I wish I’d known when I first began baking professionally, and what I’d tell myself if I had a time machine and could go back to the beginning… and, while I don’t have a time machine, I do have a keyboard.. and today - that’s gonna be just as good.
So, past Heidi — here are my five tips for a successful bake in your kitchen…
Read ingredients list AND recipe in its entirety BEFORE starting. Make sure you have everything you need first. You don’t want to get your eggs added and then find out you have no butter. Trust me on that.
Mise en place. It’s French, yall. It means get it all sorted before you start. Measure your ingredients, put them in bowls. Get your eggs out. Have your butter chilling. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with number 1.
Bring cold ingredients to room temperature. While this rule isn’t applicable 100% of the time, it does hold true for most home bake recipes. When you’re baking cakes or cookies, you don’t want to add cold ingredients. It does weird things to the molecules of the other ingredients and you can either end up with a soupy mess or find yourself looking at unsalvageable dessert mud. To bring butter to room temperature, I usually take sticks out about an hour before I’ll use them; for eggs, I get them out of the fridge about a half hour before using them; the same is true when I am using milk or cream, about a half hour ahead of time.
Crack the eggs in a separate bowl. This one, I can’t stress enough. DONT CRACK YOUR EGG ON THE SIDE OF THE BOWL YOU’RE USING TO MIX YOUR INGREDIENTS. You will get shells in there. Shells are gross. Don’t do it. Crack them (and then usually beat them slightly) in a small, separate bowl.
Preheat the oven and prepare the baking pans correctly. What does this mean, exactly? Let’s start with the oven. Not only do you want to bring the oven to correct temperature before you put your baking pan or dish in there, but really.. you want to give the inside of the oven time to heat evenly before putting your pan or dish in. That means let it go for 10 minutes after it beeps to notify you it’s at the right temp, then put your dish/pan on the rack. Speaking of baking dish/pan, let’s talk about how to prep them correctly. As a baker, I am a HUGE fan of parchment paper. I use it under all of my bakes, save for pies. If I’m baking a cake, I will spray cooking spray first, then lay down parchment. For cookies, I just place the parchment onto the cookie sheet, and the cookie dough right onto the parchment. You can also use a silicone liner, but those are pricey to only use once in a while. If you’re not sure how to prep your pan, follow the directions on the recipe. Your bake has a better chance of success AND cleanup is usually much easier. It’s a double win.
There you have them… the five things I wish old me had known back then. Woulda saved myself a LOT of disastrous attempts and wasted dollars.
Are you a baker? What are some pearls of wisdom you wish you would’ve known when you started? Let me know in the comments.