Baking for Dummies

by Emily Nolan

  Zesting and sectioning citrus fruits

  The zest of citrus is the colored part of the skin, which contains essential oils. The pith is the white membrane between the skin and the fruit, which is bitter. You want to get the zest and not the pith when zesting citrus fruits. The most common citrus fruits used for zesting are lemons and oranges.

  There are two ways to zest a citrus fruit:

  You can use a citrus zester, a kitchen tool that removes the zest of the fruit and leaves the pith behind. Hold the fruit in one hand and the zester in the other, and run the citrus zester along the length of the fruit. The peel should come off in thin little strips. You can either dice the strips or use them whole (the recipe will call for one or the other). You can see what this looks like in Figure 5-6.

  You can also use the coarse, sharp-edged holes of a grater (not the large holes used to grate cheese). Rub the fruit against the sharp edges, rotating the fruit after a few rubs, until the peel grates off and the desired amount is grated (see Figure 5-7). Be careful of your knuckles and fingers when using a grater, because the holes are very sharp.

  Figure 5-6: A citrus zester.

  Figure 5-7: Using a grater to zest citrus fruits.

  Using a vegetable peeler to remove the zest can be tricky business and is not recommended. I speak from experience. Unless you have a very dull peeler, the chances you will remove zest and pith together are very high. Then you will have wasted the zest you did remove. Remember, the white pith is bitter and should be avoided.

  You probably won’t run into too many recipes that call for sectioned fruit, but this is a handy technique to know, and sectioned fruit always makes a nice garnish.

  Citrus fruits, particularly oranges and grapefruits, have a tough skin that can be difficult to chew. When you section a citrus fruit, you remove the fruit from the tough membrane, making it easier to eat.

  Start by cutting off the top and bottom of the fruit. Cut to the fruit and don’t leave any white pith on the fruit. Lay the fruit on its cut end. Being careful not to cut too deeply, cut away the peel and the white pith, following the shape of the fruit. Hold the fruit in one hand. It will be juicy, so you may want to do this over a bowl. You will see the membranes that hold the fruit together. Make a cut parallel and right next to the membrane, cutting toward the center to release the fruit. When you get to the center, turn the knife and cut away, next to the other membrane, following the shape and size of the section of fruit and continue cutting until the section of fruit is free. Repeat until all the sections are free. Figure 5-8 shows you how to do this.

  Figure 5-8: Sectioning an orange isn’t as difficult as you may think.

  Melting Chocolate

  There is nothing so versatile or universally welcomed as melted chocolate. You can stir it into recipes, drizzle it over finished baked goods, dip cookie bottoms into it, or stir it into frosting for a flavor burst. Melting chocolate is easy, but you do need to pay attention when you are doing it.

  Never melt chocolate directly over heat. It burns very easily and must be melted over low heat. Because quality varies from brand to brand, follow the manufacturer’s instructions for best results. If none are given, here are some guidelines:

  1.Cut the chocolate into pieces smaller than a 1-ounce square.

  2.Place the chocolate pieces in the top part of a double boiler, and set it over simmering, not boiling, water.

  3.As the chocolate melts, stir it often; remove it from the heat when almost all of it has melted.

  4.Continue stirring until all the pieces have melted and the chocolate is smooth.

  The microwave is also a great tool for melting chocolate. Chocolate melts very easily, so set your temperature to medium-low and follow the manufacturer’s directions for time (usually 1 to 2 minutes). Check the chocolate after 1 minute. It will not melt the same way it does over a double boiler, so you’ll have to stir it and keep a close eye on it, because it will burn easily. White chocolate needs particularly close attention and very low heat.

  To quickly and easily melt chocolate, place in a metal bowl and put in the oven, with the temperature turned on the lowest possible setting. Close the door. After about 5 minutes, turn the oven off. In about 10 minutes, the chocolate should be melted.

  Scalding Milk

  Scalding has fallen out of favor among many cooks because now that milk is pasteurized, it is an unnecessary step to retard the souring of milk. However, it’s also a good idea to scald milk that you use for bread baking to enhance the sugars, which will promote better texture in your breads. To scald, you heat the milk to just below its boiling point. Follow these steps:

  1.Measure the milk into a saucepan and place it over medium heat.

  2.Heat the milk, stirring occasionally.

  3.As soon as the surface of the milk begins to bubble, remove the pan from the heat.

  If the milk does boil, it might form a thick film on top. Remove the film before using the milk underneath.

  Here’s a trick that I learned at the bakery: Rub some butter along the inside edge of the pan. Even if the milk does foam up when it’s heated, it will stop foaming when it reaches the butter.

  Toasting Nuts

  Toasting nuts helps to bring out their wonderful flavor and removes some of their raw taste. To toast nuts, place them in a shallow baking dish and bake in a 350-degree oven, stirring often, until they’re golden brown and smell toasted, about 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the nut (pine nuts take the least amount of time; almonds and hazelnuts take a bit longer). Don’t overbake them or their flavor will become bitter.

  You can also toast nuts in a dry skillet over medium heat. Stir the nuts frequently until they become golden brown and smell toasted, about 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the nut.

  If I have a small amount of nuts to toast, I use my toaster oven. I spread the nuts on the small tray and set the toaster to the lowest setting. After the nuts finish toasting, I let them sit for a few minutes and then check to see if they’re golden brown. If they aren’t, I just push down the toast button again. The second time around, I closely monitor them to make sure that they don’t brown too much.

  If you’ve burned your nuts, discard them — they’ll ruin the flavor of your baked item.

  Chapter 6

  Getting Ready to Bake

  In This Chapter

  Getting your kitchen ready for baking

  Reading and understanding recipes before you start baking

  Making sure that you have the right tools for the job

  Timing recipes correctly

  Cleaning up as you bake

  Baking, like cooking, is just a series of different techniques. Be familiar with the ingredients and know their different variables. Knowing how ingredients react together is a great way to understand baking and to prevent disaster.

  The best way to become comfortable with baking is to practice and practice some more. At first, don’t overchallenge yourself when you select recipes. Choose ones that call for familiar ingredients and involve familiar techniques. Once you’ve mastered those, move on to more challenging recipes — maybe try a recipe for which you have to pick up an unfamiliar ingredient or try one new technique. If you continue progressing in a slow and steady manner, you’ll soon become a proficient baker, and you may wonder why you ever bought a cake from a grocery store.

  Preparing Your Kitchen

  One of the best first things to do when you’re getting ready to bake is to look around your kitchen, because that’s where all your baking will take place. If you don’t spend a lot of time there, take stock of the equipment you have.

  Inspect your oven

  Take a peek in the oven — the tool without which you could not bake at all. Does it need to be cleaned?

  So how do you know if your oven needs to be cleaned? You generally can tell that your oven needs to be cleaned if lots of spilled food has burned onto the oven’s surface and smokes or gives off a burned odor when you bake.
You should clean your oven about twice a year if you use it regularly, yearly if you use it occasionally. If you can’t remember the last time you cleaned your oven or if it smells stale when you open the oven door, it’s time to clean.

  When was the last time you used your oven for baking? I know a woman who lived in her apartment for six years and never once used the oven. If you’re unfamiliar with your oven or you tried baking before and it didn’t work out, I strongly suggest that you purchase an oven thermometer to put in your oven — the problem may not have been what you made but how it baked. Ovens tend to acquire minds of their own. Just recently (thanks to my oven thermometer), I discovered that my own oven interprets just about all temperatures as 350 degrees Fahrenheit, even when I set the dial at 300 degrees. I never would have discovered this problem without the thermometer, and now I know that I have to set the oven temperature lower. For more about ovens, see Chapter 4.

  Organize your space

  Look around your kitchen. Do you have a lot of counter space or just a little? Do you have a lot of cabinet space? I have very little counter and cabinet space in my kitchen, so I have organized things to hang on the walls just about everywhere I can. A utensil or pot or pan is within reach just about anywhere I stand in the kitchen, which simplifies my baking time immensely. Think about what you use and, as you read through this book, keep in mind what you may need to make your kitchen efficient.

  Counter space is the hottest real estate in the kitchen. If you have a lot of things cluttering up your counter (spice racks, napkin holders, paper towel holders, appliances, and so on), it may be time to reorganize. Take a good look around your kitchen and decide what you can put away and what you want to leave out. If you make coffee only on the weekends, for example, tuck your coffeemaker in a cabinet so that you have more counter space during the week. If you always seem to be searching for utensils in drawers, think about organizing your most frequently used utensils in a can or small crock on the counter.

  Never store your knives with other utensils. If you reach for a spoon, you could easily cut yourself on a knife’s sharp blade.

  Take a look in your cabinets. Do you have a lot of opened, half-used bags of flour? Half-used boxes of brown sugar that are now rock hard? Store-bought cookies that you forgot about? Clean out your cabinets at least twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, to get rid of forgotten treasures — now trash — and to prevent insect infestation.

  Three-tiered hanging baskets are a huge space-saver in the kitchen. You can use them in literally hundreds of ways (and not one of them has to be food related), such as storing plastic container lids, spice jars, scraps of paper, loose pens and pencils, recipes, and so on.

  Take the time now to organize things so that later you won’t be looking for all the parts of the food processor or the bottom plate to your springform pan. Feeling comfortable in your kitchen is a huge part of feeling comfortable with baking.

  Working with Recipes

  If you know how to read, you can read a recipe. However, you need to keep a few things in mind as you select and work with recipes to make sure that you won’t experience any surprises along the way.

  Consider your skill level

  If you want to improve your baking skills, the best thing to do is practice. Start out with an easy recipe — one that doesn’t require a lot of ingredients or involve numerous steps. Practice beating butter and cream together. Get used to mixing, measuring, scooping, and timing. (For basic techniques, see Chapter 5.) Once you master basic techniques, try recipes with longer lists of ingredients. Then move on to intermediate recipes, which may involve slightly more difficult techniques, such as whipping egg whites. When you feel comfortable with what you’re doing, move on to even more challenging recipes. Before you know it, you’ll be baking like a pro.

  Understand the instructions

  What’s crystal clear to recipe writers may not be so easy for you to understand, especially if you aren’t an experienced baker. If you run across any unfamiliar words as you read a recipe, be sure to look them up. Use the Glossary of Baking Terms at the back of this book or use a dictionary.

  Recipe writers follow certain rules that sometimes confound beginning bakers. For example, if a recipe calls for “1 cup walnuts, chopped,” you may wonder whether that means to chop the walnuts and then measure them or to measure out 1 cup of walnuts and then chop them. The answer is simple. When you’re supposed to do something to an ingredient after you measure it, the action is listed after the ingredient; if you’re supposed to do something to the ingredient before you measure it, the action is listed before the ingredient. Therefore, “1 cup walnuts, chopped” means that you should measure the whole walnuts and then chop them. If you were supposed to chop the nuts before measuring them, the recipe would have called for “1 cup chopped walnuts.”

  Read the recipe all the way through before you start

  When you find a recipe you want to try, read all the way through it carefully before you start baking. You want to preview a recipe . . .

  To make sure that you’re familiar with all the terminology used in the instructions.

  To know how much prep work you will have to do before you begin.

  To get a sense of how much time it will take you to make it.

  To familiarize yourself with all the necessary ingredients and methods the recipe requires.

  Look up what you don’t know before you start baking. Leafing through a book is harder when you’re up to your elbows in batter!

  Keep in mind that many times it’s easier for recipe writers to shorten the main recipe by including some steps in the ingredient list. For example, a recipe may call for “3 apples, peeled, cored, and diced,” so you have some work to do to the apples before you get started. I’ve been caught in the middle of a recipe without nuts chopped, pasta cooked, or vegetables peeled and chopped because I didn’t read the recipe fully — I just read it quickly to make sure that I had the necessary ingredients. Similarly, if you read through once, you’ll know whether the ingredients need to be chilled or marinated, which may determine whether you can do the recipe now or later. If you develop one good habit of baking, make it this one. You’ll thank me later.

  Keeping your recipes out of harm’s way

  The kitchen can be a dangerous place for papers, recipes, and even books. A cookbook can get into a lot of trouble on a kitchen countertop. Place the cookbook you’re using in a convenient place, but not in direct contact with ingredients, especially liquids. Read the recipe several times before you start, place the book a few steps away from the action, and go back and forth to read the recipe. You can tape recipe note cards onto cabinets, at eye level, so that they’re always in view but not in harm’s way.

  Check how many people it serves

  As you’re deciding what to make, be sure to take the number of servings into account. It’s easy enough to figure out whether 4 dozen cookies are enough for your needs, but you may not be sure about how many people a given pie or cake will serve. Table 6-1 gives you some guidelines.

  Table 6-1How Many People Your Goodies Will Serve Baked Good Yield

  8-inch layer cake 8 to 10 people or more

  8-inch cheesecake 10 to 12 people

  9-inch layer cake 10 to 12 people

  9-inch cheesecake 12 to 14 people

  9-inch pie 8 to 12 people

  To slice your cakes and pies so that you get an accurate yield, see Chapter 18.

  Generally, the richer the dessert, the smaller the slices you want to cut. Of course, you must take your guests into consideration when choosing a dessert. If you know that someone has a particularly sweet tooth, she may want seconds. Better to have too much than too little.

  If you’re attending a potluck or expecting a crowd for dessert, think about making something with a high yield, like a sheet cake or cupcakes. Almost all cake recipes can be made into sheet cakes or cupcakes, which feed between 16 and 24 people.

 
Take inventory

  After you’ve read through your chosen recipe, it’s time to assemble all your ingredients and equipment. You don’t want to remember halfway through a recipe that you polished off the brown sugar last week and forgot to pick up more at the market. You can avoid last-minute dashes to the market by doing a quick inventory check before you start baking to ensure that you have an adequate supply of all the necessary ingredients.

  If you bake infrequently, your flour supply may be lower than you remember. I’m always thinking that I have more eggs and butter in the refrigerator than I really do. It takes only a second to check, and doing so will save you a lot of time in the long run. Start composing a shopping list if you need one.

  Premeasuring: Make it easy on yourself!