Learn to Improve Your Baking Skills

Are you passionate about baking? Has your baking reached a point where you're ready to take it to the next level? Here are 10 tips to help you improve your baking skills in below.

Follow the Recipe  

Everything from preheating the oven to whether you should grease the pan is already in the recipe. Yes, you will often need to grease your pan. But sometimes you shouldn't do this. The same is true when using room temperature butter versus cold butter. But instead of cramming all of this knowledge and the various exceptions to each rule, and the exceptions to the exceptions, into your head, just make sure to follow the recipe.

Correctly Measure Your Ingredients 

To get your ingredients right, that means weighing them. This refers mostly to flour, since it's the main ingredient in baking, and it's notoriously difficult to get it right using volumetric measuring devices like cups. Therefore, look for recipes that list ingredients in grams rather than volume. Of course, you can convert, but the recipe would probably work better if that's how it was written in the first place.

Use Fresh Ingredients 

The top priority here is chemical leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda, as they lose most of their potency after six months or so, which means your baked goods won't leaven the way they should. But spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves can also lose their potency, especially if you buy them pre-ground, so it's important to use fresh ingredients.

Use Unsalted Butter  

The recipe will almost certainly specify this, so follow the recipe. But use unsalted butter if it's not specified. Not only does the added salt affect the taste, but the salt also changes how gluten is formed in the flour, which also affects the consistency of the dough.

Scrape the Mixing Bowl 

Recipes usually remind you to do this, but when you're mixing batter in the stand mixer, you're trying to get everything together as thoroughly as possible, and if an important parts of the mixture, like butter, eggs or sugar, gets stuck to the sides of the bowl, this does not happen. So make sure to stop the mixer every 30 seconds or so and scrape the mixing bowl.

To Be Continued…