There’s nothing wrong with strictly following a recipe when it comes to baking, but if you want to experiment with quantities you can quickly transform a delicious treat into a food disaster. Understanding how different ingredients (and amounts), such as milk, butter and baking powder influence the process can be extremely helpful.
Photo and videos by solobo.
You could take a trip to Coles or Woolies and stock up on fluids, powders and pastes and go all mad scientist in your kitchen. Alternatively, you can ingest some of the educational materials below, produced by Instructables user “solobo”.
Solobo uses the humble biscuit as his testing ground and tries various quantities of common baking reagents. For example, here’s how milk changes the way a biscuit bakes:
Butter amounts also change things up:
As does baking powder (unsurprisingly):
He’s also put together an in-depth guide for those curious about the differences between margarine and butter, milk and water and even the effect of excessive kneading. If you’re planning on baking in the near future, it’s worth a read.
The Science of Biscuits [Instructables]
Comments
3 responses to “Everything You Should Know About Baking Ingredients”
When you’re claiming this as an Australian story (see tags) at least call them scones! Or the the CWA will hunt you down.
Pretty sure they are trying to make scones, they could have just asked the CWA!
What’s the difference between scones and damper?
Damper often has more salt in the mix and generally gets combined with more savoury flavours like cheese, onion, tomato, ham, made into a large cake sized loaf, whereas Scones are sweeter and have more butter and go better with sweet options like jam, cream and are smaller, cupcake sized.
Source: Tinkered in the baking arts. Its science for hungry people.
Normally Buzzfeed annoys me, but they nailed it with this one: http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/scones-and-jizz#.tfq2Ql8Ke
And if we’re talking scones, the real debate isn’t how much butter, but whether you use it at all. There are two schools – the ones who rub butter, and the ones who gently stir in cream or buttermilk and lemonade. I am of the latter, and find that cream/buttermilk makes a much lighter and fluffier scone with a crunchy crust, but the don’t keep as long as those with butter rubbed in. You simply *must* eat them all up while they’re still warm 🙂