Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Breads
Use lecithin to keep your bread fresh longer
Jan 8th
Have you found that your home made bread just doesn’t stay fresh as long as the loaves you buy from the store?
It is typical for home made bread to stale faster than the store bought stuff. Commercially produced breads have many shelf life extenders added to them to keep them nice until the end of the week. These chemicals have all kinds of chemical and trademarked product names to go into, but if your bread is still soft a week after you bought it, at least a couple of them are in there.
A home baker probably couldn’t easily get their hands on them even if they wanted to, but there is one additive you you might want to use when baking your bread.
Lecithin is an extremely common and very useful substance derived from soy and found in egg yolks. It is an emulsifier, which is a substance that allows fat and water to mix. In a chocolate bar, lecithin keeps the cocoa butter and solids together. It is also what allows oil and water to mix when making mayonnaise.
Adding it to bread will keep the fats in a stable emulsion with water and keep the moisture in the crumb of the bread, thus postponing the staling. Lecithin is also a surfactant and lubricant, so it will make the dough easier to work, allow ingredients to disperse more easily, and relaxes the gluten for a chewier loaf.
To use lecithin to improve your bread dough (rather than buying some expensive dough improver product), use about 3/4 tablespoons of lecithin granules per cup of flour, and mix it in with the dry ingredients. If you have liquid lecithin, 1/2 tablespoon per cup of flour, added with the moist ingredients should do the trick.
This and other molecular gastronomy ingredients are available at Le Sanctuaire. Lecithin can also be found at GNC, as well as other nutrition and health food shops.
If you find your newly shelf stable bread is going mouldy too fast, let it cool THOROUGHLY before packing it away in any type of airtight container. Warm bread is still giving off small amounts of moisture, which if trapped in an airtight container will settle on the bread and provide the perfect breeding ground for airborne spores.
Cake flour of bread flour for scones?
Nov 25th
Q. Cake flour of bread flour for scones?
A. It depends on your recipe. If yours calls for the fat to be cut into the flour, then use the bread flour, for any other method, use the cake flour.
For perfect bread, try turning your oven into a proofer
Sep 29th
Making bread seems daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the steps with which you may be least familiar if you don’t make a lot of yeast products is proofing.
Proofing is simply putting the yeast dough in an environment to keep the yeast happy and alive. There are two main factors in this: heat and humidity.
In well-equipped professional kitchens (unlike the one I work in) there is usually a proofer. This is basically a metal box with a heating element and some sort of steam source (I’ve seen them as simple as a metal bowl sitting on the heating element). These fancy things have both adjustable heat and humidity settings and in a professional setting are very useful. However, let’s face it – they take up a lot of space and only do one thing, so most places go without.
The simplest way to proof unshaped dough is to place it in a greased bowl and cover with a moist towel. This will work perfectly fine, but depending on the ambient temperature could take a while. It also doesn’t work too well for shaped doughs such as loaves and baguettes. The best solution I’ve found for the final proof of the shaped dough is to turn your oven into a proofer.
Keeping in mind that yeast dies at 140ºF, turn your oven onto the lowest setting it can be on. This is often even before the numbers on the dial start showing anything – 100ºF works just fine. Place a bowl (preferably metal) of warm water (not boiling) on the oven floor, and place the bread, on the tray you want to bake it on, above the bowl of water, allowing enough room for the steam to circulate. Keep in mind that by the time it’s ready to bake the dough will have doubled in size, so don’t put the loaves too close together. If your oven has a dodgy thermostat, as many do, check to make sure it isn’t too hot with an oven thermometer.
To test if it’s fully proofed, when the dough is roughly doubled, press your finger ever so gently onto it. If it springs back, it still needs more time. If it slowly springs back but leaves a bit of a dent, it’s ready to go. Remove both the bread and the bowl from the oven, turn the temperature back up and bake away.
Storing and using over ripe bananas
Aug 20th
Over-ripe bananas are perfect for banana bread, but getting them just at the right stage when you want to make the banana bread can be, lets just say problematic. It seems whenever I go to the store to buy bananas, they are always greeen.
Over-ripe bananas can be saved for banana bread by peeling them, placing them in a ziploc bag and freezing them. They may go brownish, and when you defrost them they will basicaly liquify, but for banana bread this is fine.
If you like chunks of bananas in your banana bread, you can still use the frozen bananas, just mash carefully or not at all. I keep a bag in the freezer at all times and add to it whenever I have bananas too squishy to eat, when I have enough for a batch of b-bread, they are all there, perfectly ripe and waiting for me.
Types of flour and their substitutions
Jul 14th
Lately, Culinary Tips has been getting a lot of searches for types of flour, substitutions of flour types, and uses of flour, so I’ve expanded the entry here on flour. Hopefully this helps answer some questions. If not, as always, drop us a comment below or email a question.
Firstly, to understand flour, it helps to understand its source, wheat. There are several varieties of wheat, which I won’t delve into here. They vary in colour, protein content, and texture. The seed of which, has three distinct parts: the hull or bran, the endosperm, and the embryo or germ. In whole wheat flour, the husk of the wheat grain is left on and ground, hence the term whole wheat. In white flour is it removed, and only the endosperm and embryo are ground.
Inside flour are two important proteins that make baking possible – glutenin and gliadin. When these are kneaded together in the presence of water, they interlink and form a network called gluten. Gluten gives baked goods a chewy/firm texture, and captures the gases released from yeast during fermentation, and the carbon dioxide released from chemical leaveners in baking.
For many baking projects the right type of flour can make all the difference, but how do you know what the right type is? First lets discuss the types of flour, and what they are used for. The four basic types of wheat flour on the market are:
- All Purpose
- Cake and Pastry
- Bread
- and Self-Raising
Apart from self-raising, which has a chemical leavener (baking powder) already added, the others differ from each other in respect to how much protein is left in during the milling process.
Though there are many different proteins found in flour, the ones that are of concern to bakers are gliadin and glutenin. These proteins form gluten. Gluten is what makes dough elastic. When making bread you want maximum gluten formation, so the CO2 from the yeast will have a place to stay, but when you’re making say, scones or pie dough, the less gluten the better so the product will not be chewy.
Strong / Hard / Bread Flour
Bread flour has the highest protein content of them all, and though it varies from brand to brand and place to place, the protein content is 12-14%. It is often made using a type of wheat called Durum. Due to the high protein content, when worked with water, the most gluten is formed resulting in a chewier product. Strong flour is typically used for making pasta, bread, and other yeast leavened baked goods. Strong flour is also the type that should be used when dusting a workbench because of the large particle size. Unless you are using yeast in your product, or making pasta, consider another type of flour.
All Purpose Flour
Next in strength comes all purpose, which has an 8-10% protein content, putting it basically in the middle of the road when it comes to gluten forming potential. It is a blend of hard and soft flours. If you are going to be making a variety of products, but only want to buy one type of flour, this is the one for you.
Cake Flour / Pasty Flour
At the grocery store, you will often see a single product called Cake and Pastry Flour, with generally the lowest protein content of around 7-10%. Cake and pastry flour has the lowest protein content of all common types of flour, and should be used in making products with a light texture as gluten development is to be avoided. For example, using a high protein flour will make your cake tough, causing it to not rise when baked.
If you only have bread flour and you want some scones tonight, by all means use it, but be extra aware that the potential for chewy scones is higher with bread flour than cake flour. If you are making bread, and you only have cake flour, you may be in for a little more trouble. Soft bread depends on proper gluten development to trap the gases from the yeast, creating leavening, and therefore a nice soft crumb. With cake flour, there is only about half the protein in bread flour, so the potential for gluten development is lesser. To get fully developed dough, you may have to knead for so long that the heat from the friction in the bowl kills the yeast, leaving you with a big sticky pile of mess.
Quite a few British recipes call for self-raising flour because in the UK, self raising flour is roughly the same price as regular flour. For each cup of unleavened flour, add 1 1/2 tsp baking powder. If you only have self-raising flour, and your recipe calls for regular, omit the baking powder and/or salt (if your flour already has it mixed in).
Refreshing crusty bread
Jul 6th
Crusty bread, whether it’s bought or homemade has a tendency to stale faster than regular loaves. To refresh the bread if it’s a day or two old, simply place it in a 300 degree oven with a shallow pan or oven-safe pot of water (a brownie pan works well) of hot water for 5-10 minutes until the bread is soft and too hot to touch. If you get warm bread at a restaurant, chances are this is how it was done.
For better cheese bread use cubes
Jun 2nd
Cheesy quick breads and yeast breads can be awesome. What’s better than a spicy cheese corn bread, or a tasty crusty cheese loaf? But, they can also be lacking in cheese flavour.
Many recipes I’ve seen call for grated cheese. Grated cheese is a great addition to lots of things(pizzas, chilli, pastas etc), however it is not a good addition to breads and muffins. You can use twice or even 3 times as much as the recipe calls for and still not give you a good, cheesy taste, increasing the cost and calories of an otherwise nice item.
The trick to deliciously cheesy baked goods is to cut the cheese into roughly 1-2 cm cubes, and add these as called for in the recipe. They will stay relatively whole during baking, and will leave melted cheese nuggets in your final product.
