Bread
Sixteen hours at 4C: what a cold retard does to a loaf
The fridge is not just a pause button. It changes which organisms are working, what they produce and how the dough handles the next…
Prerna Chandak
Contributing writer, Bakemens
Prerna writes about cakes and can explain creaming without making it mystical.
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21 articles
Bread
Scoring a loaf is a controlled failure, and the angle does the work
The blade is not decoration. It chooses where the loaf will burst so the expansion goes where you want it rather than where the…
Bread
Enriched dough behaves differently because fat gets between the strands
Butter, eggs and sugar do not simply make bread richer. Each one interferes with gluten and yeast in a specific way that changes…
Bread
Poolish, biga and sponge do three different things to the same flour
A preferment is a portion of the dough fermented in advance. The hydration and the length of that head start decide whether you get…
Cakes & Sponges
Curdled cake batter is a broken emulsion and it costs you volume
The split you see when eggs go in too fast is fat and water separating. The cake still bakes, but with a coarser crumb and less…
Cakes & Sponges
Cake flour at 8 per cent protein versus plain at 11: what changes
Protein content sets how much gluten can form, and in cake, gluten is the enemy of tenderness rather than the source of structure.
Cakes & Sponges
Sugar in a cake is structure and moisture before it is sweetness
Cut the sugar by a third to make a cake healthier and you will also cut its tenderness, its keeping quality and most of its…
Cakes & Sponges
Egg white foam is doing all the lifting in a chiffon or angel cake
These cakes have almost no fat holding air, so the meringue is the entire structure. How far you whip it decides everything that…
Cakes & Sponges
A loaf cake cracks down the middle because it is supposed to
The split is a consequence of geometry and heat, not a mistake. Understanding why it happens tells you how to control where and how…
Cakes & Sponges
Oil cakes stay moist in a way butter cakes cannot match
Butter is solid at room temperature and oil is not, and that single physical difference decides how a cake feels on the third day.
Cakes & Sponges
The skewer test misses more than it catches on a rich cake
A clean skewer means no wet batter at that one point. It says nothing about whether the crumb has set, which is a temperature…
Cakes & Sponges
Why the oven door stays shut for the first two thirds of a bake
Opening the door drops the oven temperature by a large margin in seconds, and a cake whose structure has not yet set has nothing to…
Bread
Autolyse does with time what kneading does with force
Mixing flour and water and then walking away looks like doing nothing, but the dough is building structure while the bowl sits…
Bread
The poke test reads gas pressure, and every dough answers differently
Pressing a finger into proving dough tells you something real, but what it tells you depends on the flour, the temperature and the…
Bread
Tangzhong gelatinises starch on purpose so the crumb can hold more water
Cooking a small part of the flour into a paste before mixing sounds like an extra chore, and it changes the softness of the…
Cakes & Sponges
The all-in-one method works because the fat is soft and the flour is weak
Putting everything in the bowl and beating it briefly breaks most of the rules of cake making, and it produces a perfectly good…
Cakes & Sponges
Acid in a cake batter is doing three jobs at once
Buttermilk, treacle, yoghurt and brown sugar are not there only for flavour, and swapping them out changes rise, colour and texture…
Cakes & Sponges
A rolled sponge cracks because the starch set before you rolled it
The instruction to roll a thin sponge while it is still warm is not tradition, and it is describing a window that closes as the…
Cakes & Sponges
A baked cheesecake is a custard in a tin, and it cracks for custard reasons
Treating it as a cake leads to the usual cake instincts, and almost all of them are wrong for a mixture whose structure is set egg…
Cakes & Sponges
Soaking syrups do not add moisture so much as slow its exit
Brushing a sponge with syrup is usually described as adding moisture, and what it mostly does is change how much the cake loses…
Cakes & Sponges
Melted butter is a third path, and it lifts nothing on its own
A cake made with melted butter is neither a creamed cake nor an oil cake, and understanding what it gave up explains where its lift…