To make yeast bread more moist, use water in which you've boiled potatoes. As a bonus, the bread will be slightly larger; it will stay fresh longer, too. If you find it hard to knead rye, wholewheat, or pumpernickel dough, rub a little oil on your hands. The oil makes the dough more pliable. So dough won't form a crust while rising in a bowl, first grease the bowl and press the dough into it. Then, turn over the dough, greased side up, and cover it lightly with a dish towel. A nonstick cookie sheet is ideal for kneading and shaping bread dough; you won't have to cope with the powdeiy mess left by a pastry board or cloth. To check whether bread dough has risen sufficiently, press 2 fingertips into the dough; if a dent remains, the dough is ready for the oven.
To make bread extra crusty, brush the dough with an egg white beaten with a tablespoon of water. Dough rises best in a warm spot. Try putting the dough bowl on a heating pad set at medium, or on a table in front of a sunny window. Another good place is inside a gas oven where the warmth of the pilot light encourages dough to rise. Or, let your television set do double duty ifyou're making bread while watching your favorite TV show. Let the dough rise on top of the set, where heat from the picture tube will warm it. Allow a few extra minutes of baking time to brown bread crust that has been baked in a shiny metal pan. If your bread crust gets too hard while you're baking the loaves, next time place a small pan of water in the oven. Also, when the bread has just been taken from the oven, spread soft butter on the warm crust.
Home-baked bread can be cut neatly into equal slices if you cool the bread on a wire rack and then use the slight impressions left by the wires as your guide. For round-shaped homemade bread, bake your dough in 2-pound coffee tins or try a frying pan with a non-metal or detachable handle. If you allow bread to cool in the baking pan, its bottom and sides will get soggy. Cool bread on a rack instead. When making muffins, you can prevent burning by filling one of the pan's cups with water rather than batter. If you want your rolls to have a crystalline glaze, brush them with a mixture of Vi cup of milk and 1 tablespoon of sugar before sliding them into the oven. Or brush the dough with a mixture of 1 tablespoon of milk and a beaten egg.
To keep dinner rolls piping hot in a straw serving basket, place them on a napkin-covered hot ceramic tile on a trivet. You can heat the tile in the oven at the same time you're heating the rolls. If you've made and buttered slices of toast and your youngsters are slow in showing up for breakfast, keep the slices warm by wrapping them in aluminum foil. Leftover rolls that have become wrinkly can be made smooth again by placing them for a few minutes in a 350°F oven. If you need to thaw a loaf of frozen unsliced bread in a hurry, put it in a brown paper bag in a 325°F oven for about 5 minutes. Rolls will stay hot longer in a serving basket if you spread aluminum foil under the napkin they're wrapped in.
If leftover rolls have hardened, make them as soft as fresh again by sprinkling them lightly with water, covering them with foil, and heating them in the oven for a few minutes. A baking stone (available in specialty cook- ware shops) or unglazed red tiles (available at tile supply stores) simulate the old-fashioned brick ovens used by bakers. When bread or pizzas are baked directly on a preheated stone or tiles, the texture is light with a superb crisp crust. For a crisp crust on French or Italian bread, spray the loaves with a fine mist of cold water at 5- minute intervals during the first 15 minutes of baking.
When brushing puff pastry tarts with an egg wash, don't let the wash drip down the sides of the pastry. If it does, the egg wash will glue the puff pastry layers together and they won't rise properly. Allow chilled dough to stand at room tem-perature until it's pliable enough to roll out easily. To thaw unbaked puff pastry, wrap the frozen dough in a nonterry cloth towel and let it defrost for 24 hours in the refrigerator. For best results, roll out pastry dough on either a marble or a formica counter-top. The cold surface keeps the shortening in the dough from softening. If you can't roll out your pastry dough on a marble or formica surface, chill your working area by rubbing it with a plastic bag filled with ice cubes. Wipe away any excess moisture before rolling the pastry.
If you want a tender and flaky pie crust, don't overflour your pastry crust as you roll it out.
To prevent pie crust from overbrowning, place a shield of aluminum foil over the edge of your pastry crust when it's baking; remove this shield for the last 15 minutes of baking time. For best results in baking, always bring eggs to room temperature before adding them to your recipe. Inaccurate oven gauges often ruin baked goods. Use an oven thermometer to verify the oven temperature and make any adjustments before baking begins. Whenever possible, use the size of baking pan specified in the recipe. If a slightly smaller or larger pan must be substituted, adjust the baking time accordingly.
Want to pack additional flavor into bread crumbs? Mix them in your blender with broken crackers and cookies. When making a cold cuts and pickles sand¬wich, layer the pickle slices between the cold cuts, not next to the bread. This keeps the bread from getting soggy. If you make sandwiches with frozen bread, peanut butter, cream cheese, and other spreads can be smoothed more evenly and won't be likely to tear the bread. When making croutons for salads or stuffing you'll find that frozen bread is easier to cut, espe-cially with an electric knife.
Many cooks claim that the most delicious French toast is made with stale bread. Here's one sure method of getting rolled cookies of equal thickness so some won't burn before others are fully baked. Cut a yardstick in half, and place each half flat on the right and left sides of a pastry cloth close enough to each other so your rolling pin spans them. Roll your dough between the sticks until it can't be flattened further. (The dough will be precisely the thickness of the yardstick or any other pieces of wood you use).
An easy way to cut refrigerated cookie dough is with a wire cheese cutter. Beaten egg yolk thinned with water makes a shiny cookie coating. When it dries, it also forms a good surface for icing designs. You can give cookies a crisp coating by sprinkling a sugar and flour mixture on a pastiy board and rolling the dough on it. If you want your rolled cookies to be thinner and crisper, put dollops of dough on a baking sheet, and then press on each with the bottom of a water glass that has been floured or moistened and dipped in sugar.
If you separate English muffin halves before freezing them you'll be able to toast them straight from the freezer. Need another cookie sheet? Flip a baking pan over and bake your cookies on the underside of the pan. Cookies are more difficult to remove from a baking sheet after they've cooled completely. If you're having trouble lifting them, try using a greased spatula, or reheat the cookie sheet for a moment by running it over a stove burner or briefly returning it to a warm oven.
If you want your homemade cookies to retain moisture as long as possible, use honey rather than sugar when mixing the batter.
To make all-purpose flour as much like cake flour as possible, use % cup for every cup of cake flour listed in the recipe, and sift it twice to make it as light as possible. You won't have diy pockets of powder on the bottom of a bowl after stirring a cake mix ifyou put the liquid in the bowl before adding the mix. If you like your cakes more moist than crumbly, mix 2-4 tablespoons of salad oil into the batter. Fruits, nuts, and raisins often sink to the bottom of cake batter. To keep them evenly dis¬persed, try heating them or rolling them in melted butter before adding them to the batter. For a richer flavor, substitute devil's food cake mix for cocoa in frostings. Worried about cholesterol? Substitute 2 stiffly beaten egg whites for every whole egg that a cake recipe calls for.
If you want a chocolate cake that's extra moist and fluffy, add a spoonful of vinegar to the baking soda. Before you put a cake on a plate, sprinkle sugar on the plate to absorb moisture. Otherwise, the bottom of the cake may get gooey and stick to the plate. Any cake you bake or buy will stay fresh longer if you place 1/2 an apple with it in its container. Moisture released gradually by the apple will keep the cake moist. If the top of a cake is browning too quickly, place a pan of warm water on a rack above the cake. The browning will slow down. When testing to see if a cake is done, you can use a stick of uncooked spaghetti if you're out of toothpicks.
Has your fruit cake dried out? It can be freshened ifyou turn it over, poke some holes in its bottom surface, and place a dab of frozen orange juice in each hole. As the frozen juice melts, it will spread evenly throughout the cake and make it moist. When the cake is thoroughly but lightly saturated, flip it over again. It will taste fresh as new. One sure-fire way to prevent a cake from sticking to the bottom of a pan is to position a wax paper cutout on the bottom of the pan before pouring in the batter. If you want to make a quick fancy cake topping position an open-design paper doily on top of the cake. Dust on powdered sugar, which will sift through the doily and create an instant work of art. Lift off the doily and serve the cake.
A quick way to cool a cake layer is to place the cake pan on an upside-down colander. Sometimes a baked cake is reluctant to come out of its pan because it has cooled too much and the grease used to coat the pan has hardened again. Loosen it and the cake by returning the cake to a warm oven just long enough for the pan to become warm to the touch. Dust the layers of your cake lightly with powdered sugar before spreading on the cake filling to keep the filling from soaking into the cake.
To decorate white frosting on a cake, top it with gum drops shaved paper thin. They 11 curl up like tiny flowers. For an unusual, delectable frosting, add several drops of chocolate syrup to a prepared whipped topping. If you like fudge frosting but find that it hardens too quickly as you apply it, mix in a tea¬spoon of cornstarch and keep the bowl in a pan of hot water. Spreading it on the cake will be as easy as buttering a slice of toast.
To frost a very crumbly cake, apply a thin layer of icing and let it harden completely. When this coat is set, spread a second layer of icing it will go on easily, with no crumbs. If you wrap a cake in wax paper that's been sprinkled with powdered sugar, the frosting won't cling to the paper. Cake icings won't crystallize if you add a dash of salt to the sugar. If the tiers of a multilayer cake slip as you frost it, try taming them by inserting strands of dry spaghetti. Carefully pull out the spaghetti when you're finished.
You can fashion your own cake decorating tube by rolling an ordinary piece of paper into a cone, open just slightly at the tip. Fill the cone with the icing fold over the large end, and squeeze, holding the large end closed. If you want chocolate slivers to decorate a fancy cake, make your own by shaving them from a candy bar with a potato peeler. If you need to cut a cake when it's hot, use unwaxed dental floss. It won't damage the cake as much as a knife would.
You'll be able to slice cleanly through cake icing if you first dip the knife blade in boiling water. You can slice an angel food cake neatly and without crumbs if you freeze it and then thaw it before cutting. If you want to cut a cake into decorative party shapes, freeze it first. You'll find it much less messy to handle the frozen cake, andyou'll be able to make even the most intricate shapes more easily. So that frozen cheesecake won't lose its butter-smooth texture, thaw it slowly in your refrigerator, not at room temperature.
A spillproof way to pour cupcake batter into muffin tins is to pour it first into a squeaky clean Vz-gallon milk carton. The carton s spout lets you pour with precision. To prevent doughnuts from burning add potato slices to the grease. For instant bakery treats, deep-fry refrigerator biscuit dough. You can pull the biscuits into a long-john shape, twist them like the French twists, or cut holes for doughnuts. Roll the hot biscuits in sugar or frost them; for bismarks, slit them and push in a spoonful of jelly. Served hot, they're delicious.
To make bread extra crusty, brush the dough with an egg white beaten with a tablespoon of water. Dough rises best in a warm spot. Try putting the dough bowl on a heating pad set at medium, or on a table in front of a sunny window. Another good place is inside a gas oven where the warmth of the pilot light encourages dough to rise. Or, let your television set do double duty ifyou're making bread while watching your favorite TV show. Let the dough rise on top of the set, where heat from the picture tube will warm it. Allow a few extra minutes of baking time to brown bread crust that has been baked in a shiny metal pan. If your bread crust gets too hard while you're baking the loaves, next time place a small pan of water in the oven. Also, when the bread has just been taken from the oven, spread soft butter on the warm crust.
Home-baked bread can be cut neatly into equal slices if you cool the bread on a wire rack and then use the slight impressions left by the wires as your guide. For round-shaped homemade bread, bake your dough in 2-pound coffee tins or try a frying pan with a non-metal or detachable handle. If you allow bread to cool in the baking pan, its bottom and sides will get soggy. Cool bread on a rack instead. When making muffins, you can prevent burning by filling one of the pan's cups with water rather than batter. If you want your rolls to have a crystalline glaze, brush them with a mixture of Vi cup of milk and 1 tablespoon of sugar before sliding them into the oven. Or brush the dough with a mixture of 1 tablespoon of milk and a beaten egg.
To keep dinner rolls piping hot in a straw serving basket, place them on a napkin-covered hot ceramic tile on a trivet. You can heat the tile in the oven at the same time you're heating the rolls. If you've made and buttered slices of toast and your youngsters are slow in showing up for breakfast, keep the slices warm by wrapping them in aluminum foil. Leftover rolls that have become wrinkly can be made smooth again by placing them for a few minutes in a 350°F oven. If you need to thaw a loaf of frozen unsliced bread in a hurry, put it in a brown paper bag in a 325°F oven for about 5 minutes. Rolls will stay hot longer in a serving basket if you spread aluminum foil under the napkin they're wrapped in.
If leftover rolls have hardened, make them as soft as fresh again by sprinkling them lightly with water, covering them with foil, and heating them in the oven for a few minutes. A baking stone (available in specialty cook- ware shops) or unglazed red tiles (available at tile supply stores) simulate the old-fashioned brick ovens used by bakers. When bread or pizzas are baked directly on a preheated stone or tiles, the texture is light with a superb crisp crust. For a crisp crust on French or Italian bread, spray the loaves with a fine mist of cold water at 5- minute intervals during the first 15 minutes of baking.
When brushing puff pastry tarts with an egg wash, don't let the wash drip down the sides of the pastry. If it does, the egg wash will glue the puff pastry layers together and they won't rise properly. Allow chilled dough to stand at room tem-perature until it's pliable enough to roll out easily. To thaw unbaked puff pastry, wrap the frozen dough in a nonterry cloth towel and let it defrost for 24 hours in the refrigerator. For best results, roll out pastry dough on either a marble or a formica counter-top. The cold surface keeps the shortening in the dough from softening. If you can't roll out your pastry dough on a marble or formica surface, chill your working area by rubbing it with a plastic bag filled with ice cubes. Wipe away any excess moisture before rolling the pastry.
If you want a tender and flaky pie crust, don't overflour your pastry crust as you roll it out.
To prevent pie crust from overbrowning, place a shield of aluminum foil over the edge of your pastry crust when it's baking; remove this shield for the last 15 minutes of baking time. For best results in baking, always bring eggs to room temperature before adding them to your recipe. Inaccurate oven gauges often ruin baked goods. Use an oven thermometer to verify the oven temperature and make any adjustments before baking begins. Whenever possible, use the size of baking pan specified in the recipe. If a slightly smaller or larger pan must be substituted, adjust the baking time accordingly.
Want to pack additional flavor into bread crumbs? Mix them in your blender with broken crackers and cookies. When making a cold cuts and pickles sand¬wich, layer the pickle slices between the cold cuts, not next to the bread. This keeps the bread from getting soggy. If you make sandwiches with frozen bread, peanut butter, cream cheese, and other spreads can be smoothed more evenly and won't be likely to tear the bread. When making croutons for salads or stuffing you'll find that frozen bread is easier to cut, espe-cially with an electric knife.
Many cooks claim that the most delicious French toast is made with stale bread. Here's one sure method of getting rolled cookies of equal thickness so some won't burn before others are fully baked. Cut a yardstick in half, and place each half flat on the right and left sides of a pastry cloth close enough to each other so your rolling pin spans them. Roll your dough between the sticks until it can't be flattened further. (The dough will be precisely the thickness of the yardstick or any other pieces of wood you use).
An easy way to cut refrigerated cookie dough is with a wire cheese cutter. Beaten egg yolk thinned with water makes a shiny cookie coating. When it dries, it also forms a good surface for icing designs. You can give cookies a crisp coating by sprinkling a sugar and flour mixture on a pastiy board and rolling the dough on it. If you want your rolled cookies to be thinner and crisper, put dollops of dough on a baking sheet, and then press on each with the bottom of a water glass that has been floured or moistened and dipped in sugar.
If you separate English muffin halves before freezing them you'll be able to toast them straight from the freezer. Need another cookie sheet? Flip a baking pan over and bake your cookies on the underside of the pan. Cookies are more difficult to remove from a baking sheet after they've cooled completely. If you're having trouble lifting them, try using a greased spatula, or reheat the cookie sheet for a moment by running it over a stove burner or briefly returning it to a warm oven.
If you want your homemade cookies to retain moisture as long as possible, use honey rather than sugar when mixing the batter.
To make all-purpose flour as much like cake flour as possible, use % cup for every cup of cake flour listed in the recipe, and sift it twice to make it as light as possible. You won't have diy pockets of powder on the bottom of a bowl after stirring a cake mix ifyou put the liquid in the bowl before adding the mix. If you like your cakes more moist than crumbly, mix 2-4 tablespoons of salad oil into the batter. Fruits, nuts, and raisins often sink to the bottom of cake batter. To keep them evenly dis¬persed, try heating them or rolling them in melted butter before adding them to the batter. For a richer flavor, substitute devil's food cake mix for cocoa in frostings. Worried about cholesterol? Substitute 2 stiffly beaten egg whites for every whole egg that a cake recipe calls for.
If you want a chocolate cake that's extra moist and fluffy, add a spoonful of vinegar to the baking soda. Before you put a cake on a plate, sprinkle sugar on the plate to absorb moisture. Otherwise, the bottom of the cake may get gooey and stick to the plate. Any cake you bake or buy will stay fresh longer if you place 1/2 an apple with it in its container. Moisture released gradually by the apple will keep the cake moist. If the top of a cake is browning too quickly, place a pan of warm water on a rack above the cake. The browning will slow down. When testing to see if a cake is done, you can use a stick of uncooked spaghetti if you're out of toothpicks.
Has your fruit cake dried out? It can be freshened ifyou turn it over, poke some holes in its bottom surface, and place a dab of frozen orange juice in each hole. As the frozen juice melts, it will spread evenly throughout the cake and make it moist. When the cake is thoroughly but lightly saturated, flip it over again. It will taste fresh as new. One sure-fire way to prevent a cake from sticking to the bottom of a pan is to position a wax paper cutout on the bottom of the pan before pouring in the batter. If you want to make a quick fancy cake topping position an open-design paper doily on top of the cake. Dust on powdered sugar, which will sift through the doily and create an instant work of art. Lift off the doily and serve the cake.
A quick way to cool a cake layer is to place the cake pan on an upside-down colander. Sometimes a baked cake is reluctant to come out of its pan because it has cooled too much and the grease used to coat the pan has hardened again. Loosen it and the cake by returning the cake to a warm oven just long enough for the pan to become warm to the touch. Dust the layers of your cake lightly with powdered sugar before spreading on the cake filling to keep the filling from soaking into the cake.
To decorate white frosting on a cake, top it with gum drops shaved paper thin. They 11 curl up like tiny flowers. For an unusual, delectable frosting, add several drops of chocolate syrup to a prepared whipped topping. If you like fudge frosting but find that it hardens too quickly as you apply it, mix in a tea¬spoon of cornstarch and keep the bowl in a pan of hot water. Spreading it on the cake will be as easy as buttering a slice of toast.
To frost a very crumbly cake, apply a thin layer of icing and let it harden completely. When this coat is set, spread a second layer of icing it will go on easily, with no crumbs. If you wrap a cake in wax paper that's been sprinkled with powdered sugar, the frosting won't cling to the paper. Cake icings won't crystallize if you add a dash of salt to the sugar. If the tiers of a multilayer cake slip as you frost it, try taming them by inserting strands of dry spaghetti. Carefully pull out the spaghetti when you're finished.
You can fashion your own cake decorating tube by rolling an ordinary piece of paper into a cone, open just slightly at the tip. Fill the cone with the icing fold over the large end, and squeeze, holding the large end closed. If you want chocolate slivers to decorate a fancy cake, make your own by shaving them from a candy bar with a potato peeler. If you need to cut a cake when it's hot, use unwaxed dental floss. It won't damage the cake as much as a knife would.
You'll be able to slice cleanly through cake icing if you first dip the knife blade in boiling water. You can slice an angel food cake neatly and without crumbs if you freeze it and then thaw it before cutting. If you want to cut a cake into decorative party shapes, freeze it first. You'll find it much less messy to handle the frozen cake, andyou'll be able to make even the most intricate shapes more easily. So that frozen cheesecake won't lose its butter-smooth texture, thaw it slowly in your refrigerator, not at room temperature.
A spillproof way to pour cupcake batter into muffin tins is to pour it first into a squeaky clean Vz-gallon milk carton. The carton s spout lets you pour with precision. To prevent doughnuts from burning add potato slices to the grease. For instant bakery treats, deep-fry refrigerator biscuit dough. You can pull the biscuits into a long-john shape, twist them like the French twists, or cut holes for doughnuts. Roll the hot biscuits in sugar or frost them; for bismarks, slit them and push in a spoonful of jelly. Served hot, they're delicious.
No comments:
Post a Comment