Cookie Baking - The Basics

Most cookie recipes are made up of two parts-the wet ingredients and the dry ones. elect two bowls. All ingredients will end up in the larger, wet ingredients bowl. These wet items include butter and sugar (sugar liquifies when baked), eggs, milk, sour cream, extracts and syrups like honey or molasses. Butter and sugar are the tenderizers of most cookie recipes. They are creamed together to pump air into them. The longer you mix them, the more air is pumped in and the more tender the cookie. Cream at 2-3 minutes to lighten the dough.

Eggs bind all the ingredients together. If you have ever wondered why instructions propose room temperature eggs, it is because cold eggs will burst the air bubbles you just spent the last three minutes pumping into the butter and sugar. You can hurry this warming process along by letting the eggs sit in warm water for 15 minutes, while preparation the rest of the ingredients and getting your cookie sheets and other tools out. It is all the time best to beat an egg first, before adding it to the creamed mixture. Again, it is a matter of pumping in more air. Extracts are ordinarily added to the wet ingredients after creaming and after adding the eggs.

Cookie Bake

The dominant dry ingredient is flour, which is the toughener or buildings of the cookie. Think of a honeycomb. The pockets of honey are the air-filled creamed butter and sugar of a cookie. The combs themselves are the flour or buildings of the cookie. The egg is the glue that holds them all together.

Cookie Baking - The Basics

Flour is ordinarily the single largest ingredient in a cookie recipe. Unlike the wet ingredients, over handling or over beating flour can toughen a cookie, especially if you use a butter substitute with a lower fat content. No need to sift the flour. But if it has been sitting in a box for quite a while, fluff it up (stir it) with a whisk before measuring it. When measuring ingredients, all the time level off the measuring cup.

Other dry ingredients are insignificant in their size, but grand in determining not only texture, but taste. If baking a bar type cookie that falls in the center, it ordinarily means you have added too much of a leavening agent (baking powder or baking soda). If your batter puffs up, you need to increase your leavening agent. Spices, on the other hand, have tiny effect on the texture of the cookie or bar, but have all things to do with flavor. Salt acts as a flavor enhancer. If you are using a salted butter or spread, you need not add more salt to the recipe. To ensure a good blending all the time whisk leavening agents and spices into the flour.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ones. Fruits and nuts are ordinarily stirred or folded in by hand as the final step. Chilling a cookie dough is ordinarily a good idea. It makes it easier to cope for scooping and it allows the spices and flavorings that you added to saturate the dough-more saturation means more flavor.

These are the basics when it comes to cookie baking. There is a delicate balance in the middle of wet and dry ingredients. Sometimes ignorance is bliss and you do not have to understand chemistry to bake a cookie. It all appears uncomplicated when you see that cookies are made up primarily of butter, sugar and flour. But when you start experimenting with a method on your own and tip the dry and wet balance, it is then that you appreciate the fine balance and chemistry that makes each seemingly uncomplicated method work.

Cookie Baking - The Basics

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