Before you begin follow these steps. These will help you to avert any disaster that may occur while baking. Before you start make sure that you go through the recipe thoroughly. This makes sure that you have all the required ingredients at hand before you start. It is important that you use only fresh supplies. The next important step is to have the oven preheated to the required temperature for perfect baking. Liquids which are used in the recipe need to be measured accurately by placing them at eye level. Dry ingredients need to be measured by using a flat knife to level them. It is important that you bake with extreme care as it can cause the recipe to be ruined when done in a hurry.

There are different kinds of flour which are not entirely the same. When making yeast breads it is important to use wheat flour. For yeast loaves use bread flour and the same when used in yeast bread will make it a heavy cake instead. Cake flour on the other hand is very fine. You can use all purpose flour for any type of baking. Bleached and unbleached flours can also be used. Flour can be stored in an airtight container away from moisture and direct sunlight for up to six months.

You cannot interchange baking powder with baking soda. The ingredients of baking powder include baking soda and an acid that causes the flour to leaven and rise when mixed with wet ingredients and baked. Baking soda on the other hand constitutes sodium bicarbonate. When mixed with an acidic ingredient like yogurt, molasses or buttermilk causes the flour to rise making it light and spongy.

Here are some tips while handling chocolate while cooking. First you must be aware that there are various types of chocolate that can be used for cooking. Unsweetened chocolate is chocolate liquor which contains fifty percent coca butter without any sugar. Depending upon the various amounts of sugar which is added to the coca butter, you will get the various varieties like bittersweet, semi sweet, and dark chocolate. Milk chocolate on the other hand is made up of dried milk powder, cocoa butter and sugar while white chocolate is made from cocoa butter instead of chocolate liquor. To make unsweetened cocoa you will need to use chocolate liquor in which 75 percent cocoa butter has been removed and then dried and made into a paste. It is easy to burn the chocolate while melting so it has to be done over a small flame. The various methods which can be used for melting chocolate are the double boiler method, direct heat method or simply use the microwave oven

Answer: Rye-bread lovers do it for the tangy flavor, chewy texture and those tasty caraway seeds. They do it because baking one’s own bread is satisfying. Just as gardening does, bread-baking connects us to the food we eat.

I’ve been baking bread at least once a week for 36 years, but I’m a late convert to making rye bread, which I loved to eat even as a child. My mother wasn’t a baker. She bought the bread at the local bakery.

I learned about souring bread from “The Tassajara Bread Book,” a standard text among us back-to-the-landers in the 1970s. Tassajara No. 1 taught the sponge method of baking, which called for making up a sponge with all the liquid but only half the flour, letting that rise overnight and completing the process in the morning.

There are rye bread recipes that call for incremental steps over a 48-hour period, but that seems extreme. A 24-hour process will make a good sour rye loaf.

Because rye bread doesn’t rise as much as wheat bread, it doesn’t dry out as fast either. That gives rye bread the edge for still-fresh second-day eating.

Don’t seal crusty bread up in a plastic container or plastic wrap until after the second day. You’ll ruin the texture of the crust and you won’t help the interior texture either. The traditional bread bag made of paper works better.

The great rye breads of my youth were a mixture of white rye flour and white wheat flour. White rye flour can be mail-ordered from King Arthur at www.kingarthurflour.com, but the cost is high.

My recipe, making a loaf both darker and denser, uses roughly 60 percent Hodgson Mill wholegrain rye flour and 40 percent unbleached white (wheat) flour.

I’m presuming I’m not the only person baking rye bread in Charleston. Kroger wouldn’t give rye flour shelf space at several local stores if someone wasn’t buying.

For years, I baked all my bread at 350 degrees. That was wrong, wrong, wrong, as the Gazette’s editorial writers used to say. Artisan breads, it turns out, get their great crusts by starting at 425 or 450 degrees, then scaling back to 375.

If you bake bread regularly, buy yeast by the half-pound or one-pound package. If you use the sponge method, it takes only the tiniest bit of yeast to get the process started. Give yeast moisture, flour and time, and it multiplies quickly.

Source: http://sundaygazettemail.com/Food/200809230809

The subject of additives is a very technical one and covers a broad spectrum of products ranging from emulsifiers, gelling agents, sweeteners, cake and dough improvers, flavor enhancers, and others. I do not claim to be an expert in these areas nor is this blog posting intended to be an exhaustive discussion on all the additives used by professionals. My objective is, based on some of the additives that I have used in the past, to provide a brief insight into how pastry chefs achieve professioal results using some of these additives.

Pastry chefs use many types of additives to enhance flavor, extend shelf life, and improve texture. Some of the more commonly known additives that are easily obtainable in the retail market are items like flavoring oils, liquid glucose, sheet gelatin, bread softeners and dough improvers. Very common within professional pastry kitchens but very difficult to find in the retail market are items such as trimoline, ice cream and sorbet stabilizers, atomized glucose, and pectin NH. A more obscure additive that I have used in the past that is not a common sight even within professional kitchens is an emulsifier called Peco 50.

As you can imagine, different additives are used in different situations to obtain specific results. Additives are generally used to obtain results that will typically fall within these three categories:

- Extend product shelf life
- Improve product texture and volume
- Enhance taste

Trimoline is a very common and extremely versatile sweetening additive that is used in confectionary, cake, and ice cream making to add sweetness and to help retain moisture which, in turn, extends the shelf life of the product.

Products like cake improvers will help to retard moisture loss and increase the volume of sponge cake batters. Emulsifiers such as Peco 50 will help to reduce mixing times, retard moisture loss, extend shelf life and homogenize cake batters for better stability and tolerance.

Very high quality flavoring products like those from Sevarome can elevate the taste of the finished product and provide that “X-factor” that could otherwise not be achieved with more mediocre flavoring agents.

Unless you are operating a pastry business, you will not need many of these additives if you are baking at home and will be consuming your goods within a very short timeframe. Many of the additives are designed to be used in very high volume production environments where goods produced will eventually be stored for sale over an extended period of time. Also, restaurant pastry kitchens will use additives to produce certain effects for their plated creations that are typically not feasible or practical to be reproduced at home. Molecular gastronomy is one such practice that comes to mind.

When used properly, I do believe that pastry and baking additives are essential ingredients that can lift a product from mediocrity to excellence. Ultimately, the end result is to use the right balance of ingredients to produce goods that are highly palatable and visually appealing at the same time.

I’ve provided a list of a few vendors who supply additives to the professional market:

Danisco
Danisco A/S
Langebrogade 1
1001 Copenhagen
Denmark
Tel: +45 3266 2000
Email: info@danisco.com
Web: Danisco
Presence in more than 40 countries

Sevarome
Z.A La Guide 1 43200
Yssingeaux Z.I. La Guide
France
Tél : +33 4 71 59 04 78
Fax : +33 4 71 65 54 24
Email: info@sevarome.com
Web: Sevarome

Patisfrance
Parc d’affaires SILIC
46 Rue de Montlhery- BP 80179
F 94563 Rungis Cedex
France
Tel: +33 (0)1 45 60 83 95
Fax: +33 (0)1 45 60 41 44
Email: info-export@puratos.com
Web: Patisfrance

Aromatic
Bryggvägen 12-14
SE-117 68 Stockholm
Sweden
Tel: +46-8-681 56 00
Fax: +46-8-18 29 79
Email: info@aromatic.se
Web:Aromatic

Source: http://stickofachef.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/baking-and-pastry-additives-for-the-professional/