Hi class, welcome back to baking school. Today we are on lesson 4 of the baking
fundamentals course. Now today I really want to review with you how to read and
understand a recipe. Now you might not know this but there's actually a little
bit of skill involved in reading a recipe and understanding the way it's
written. Recipes are written using a certain formula and there's actually a
few things you need to know to properly understand what a recipe is saying. So in
order to go over this lesson I want to look at one of my recipes so that I can
illustrate some of the points in this lesson. So let's go ahead and dive in. So
to go through this lesson I would like to look at my recipe for the best
chocolate chip cookies because there are a lot of moving parts and different
things in this recipe that will really illustrate some of the points I want to
make. So the very first part of this process is I want you to get in the
habit of really reading the recipe through all the way from start to finish.
Now this goes back to our mise en place lesson but I just really want to stress
how important that is so that you can really get a good understanding of the
workflow of the recipe and all of the moving parts of a recipe especially if
you've never tried it before. And then the second part of that is I want you to
identify any words in terminology that you aren't familiar with and familiarize
yourself with them. So for instance in this recipe we are using some salted
butter that is going to be browned and then cooled. Now if you have never
browned butter before that would definitely be something that you would
want to look up, find a tutorial that would show you what browned butter is,
what it should look like, how to do it. And you might also want to look up how
to toast pecans if that's something you've never done before, I mean the best
way to do that. And then moving down into the actual recipe there might be some
techniques in the recipe that you aren't familiar with. So for instance you're
going to cream together your butter and sugar so that might be something you
would want to look up. What does creaming together actually mean? You can use some
of these things might be in the lesson all of our baking techniques and
terminology so that might be a good reference for you to just really
understand all of the components of the recipe and techniques and terminology
used in it. So after all of that it's really important to take note of the
total time of the recipe. Now you can see here I have listed that the total time
for this recipe is two hours and nine minutes. Now that is including a prep
time of two hours which some of that is just allowing our browned butter to cool
and then there is a cook time of nine minutes. Now I really try to be conscious
of including any kind of resting periods from the recipe in my total time but it
is pretty common for a recipe not to include this that it might only include
the actual mixing time in the actual cooking time as the total time. So you
would really want to look through the recipe and you can see here that it
states that at least several hours before baking the cookies you want to
brown your butter so that the butter can become solid again. Now a lot of times
recipes might not actually include that resting time in the total time of the
recipe so really take note of that so that you make sure you have enough time
to complete the recipe. And along with that you really want to plan ahead for
your ingredient temperatures so it's very common in baking recipes to use
room-temperature butter and room-temperature eggs so you really want
to allow for that time to get your ingredients to room temperature. And I
know there are a lot of techniques for bringing butter to room temperature
quickly or bringing extra room temperature quickly but those can easily
go a little bit wrong, you might accidentally get your butter a little
bit too warm and you just want to make sure that you're not rushing those
processes. It's really best if you do plan ahead. So after that I really want
you to take note of punctuation in your recipe. So there are a few instances in
this ingredient list that the punctuation is pretty important for how the
ingredients are listed. So in this first ingredient we are using nine
ounces of unsalted butter comma browned and cooled. Now if this recipe stated nine
ounces of browned and cooled unsalted butter that would actually mean
something different than nine ounces of unsalted butter comma browned and cooled. Now
in our instance here we would want to measure out nine ounces of butter and
then we're going to go ahead and brown and cool it. If it was listed the other
way around you would want to brown and cool your
butter and then measure it out. Butter actually is going to lose some of its
weight when it's browned so if it was listed the other way around it would
actually mean something very different. Now a pretty big example of this and I
see this mistake made often is if a recipe is calling for you to sift your
flour oftentimes it will state two cups of flour comma sifted. You never want to
measure your flour after it is sifted unless your recipe specifically states
two cups of sifted flour that would mean the car was sifted and then you measured
it out but it is the most common instance as you're going to measure
flour out and then sift it. A cup of flour that is measured after it has been
sifted is actually weighs much less than a cup of flour that's measured before
it's sifted. Now this is actually another point to quickly make here is this is
another reason why I'm really going to encourage you to start measuring by
weight because that actually is going to help prevent these little common
mistakes that happen. So eight and a half ounces of flour is always going to equal
eight and a half ounces of flour whether you've measured it before you sifted it
or after you sifted it, the weight will always be the same. But if you are
measuring by volume the two cups that's when you can really run into some errors
here with your commas and how their ingredients are listed. So another
ingredient that you would maybe want to take note of in this one is your chopped
pecans, we're asking for two cups of chopped pecans now that would mean that
you're measuring the and after they are chopped so either you
have chopped them yourself and then you're measuring out 2 cups or you've
purchased already chopped pecans and you're measuring 2 cups. If this were to
state 2 cups of pecans comma then chopped that would be different you would
measure them out before they were chopped and then you would chop them. So
just important to take note of your punctuations. Now after you have a good understanding of all of that then you would go ahead
and start gathering all of your mise en place. So you're going to measure out all
of these ingredients. You're going to get out any of the equipment that you need
in the recipe and get that all set up for yourself and after all of your
ingredients are measured out then you want to go in and start grouping them
together by how they will be used in the recipe. Now something maybe a lot of
people don't know is that if a recipe is written properly it's actually going to
list the ingredients in the order that you will be needing them in your recipe.
So in this recipe the butter and the pecans are listed first because in the
recipe there is some prep work that you need to do with those. We are going to
brown the butter and then we're going to toast the pecans.
Now they actually don't come into the recipe in that order but because there
is prep work I have listed those first and that is actually the way recipes
should be written. They should be written, the ingredients should be listed and the
order that they will come into use in the recipe. So that can kind of help you
with your workflow if you do take note of that.
So as we're starting to incorporate our ingredients together you'll notice that
our butter and our brown sugar are going to be mixed together first. So as I am
measuring out my ingredients I would go ahead and group together my browned
butter and then my brown sugar in kind of one little section of my area where
I'm prepping all of my ingredients. Then you'll notice in the recipe that the
next part is you're going to mix in your eggs and then your vanilla.
So as I'm measuring out my ingredients I would go ahead and put those two
together lined up behind my butter and eggs so that I know that that's the next
step in my recipe and after that you have your baking
soda, baking powder, and salt so I would go ahead and measure those out, group
those together coming in after my eggs and my vanilla. Then you have your
chocolate and pecans in a fourth grouping so this recipe does have quite
a few different steps and groupings which is why it's a good example of how
to sort of approach this. So you would group together your chocolate and your
pecans coming in after your baking powder and baking soda and then you have
for the last grouping your oat flour and your all-purpose flour so you would want
to go ahead and group those together. So you have it all kind of lined up in
order in little groupings for how they're going to be used in the recipe.
And that's just really going to set you up for success and making sure that you
have everything in order and knowing how they go into the recipe. So now that
you've set yourself up for success with your recipe then you can go ahead and
start executing it and start combining all of your ingredients together. And the
last thing I'd love to encourage you to do is to start keeping a notebook of
your recipes and your results. Take notes about when you have successes and why
you think that it might have been a success but probably more important keep
notes of when you have some failures, when your results didn't turn out
exactly how you wanted, start documenting that and then trying to figure out what
may have gone wrong so that next time when you approach that recipe you can
have more success with it. Okay so that's it for this lesson
now I want to give you your homework assignment. These are always optional
but it just helps you engage with the course a little more and connect with
some of the other classmates. Sometime in the next few days I'd love for you to
bake something completely new and utilize this approach when executing the
recipe and I'd love for you to share with us your results: did it turn out the
way you wanted or did it not turn out the way you wanted. You can share your
assignment in our private Facebook group on the discussion for this topic or you
can share it on any of your social media using the hashtag #BBbakingschool.
Thanks guys I'll see you next time.