You might be tempted to think this is a bad thing given what we’ve just learned, but it isn’t. Fats (and sugars) interfere with gluten formation. Very few cookie recipes call for melted butter. That typically means room temperature or small cuts of cold butter. Not too hot and not too cold you need it just right to get the creaminess that most cookies need. With its golden color, you can think of it as the Goldilocks of your recipe. Peanut butter cookies often have minimal ingredients relying on nuts, eggs, and sugar to give the cookie its shape and texture. If you’re feeling adventurous or looking for a way to remove flour from a recipe, you can consider using a nut meal which is essentially finely ground nuts. Even all-purpose flours have varying amounts of protein in them, so if you find a brand you like, be sure to remember the name. If your cookies consistently crumble or spread flat when they shouldn’t, you should consider a flour that has more protein. Why is this important? Well, it’s the difference between a soft, sticky dough and a bowl full of flour soup! If you are substituting a low-protein flour, you should be watching closely to see if you will need to adjust the amount as you are mixing to get a good cookie consistency. The amount of protein in your flour will determine how much water it can absorb. Adding water to your flour and mixing it in allows 2 proteins called glutenin and gliadin to bond with each other and form gluten. Gluten makes a baked product strong so that it can better hold its shape. Flours that have more protein in them, like all-purpose flour products, can form more gluten. The type of flour you use in your cookie will decide if your cookie is tender, tough, or crumbly. Does all of that matter? You bet it does! You can have the finest ingredients measured out with accuracy, but if you don’t control your ingredient temperatures and the order they are mixed together, you could have a problem with your bake.Įvery ingredient in your cookie matters, but some ingredients give you lots of options within themselves. Let’s take a deeper look at the ingredients themselves, ingredient temperature, and mixing order of your ingredients. Measuring ingredients is just one-way math and science come into play in the kitchen. In this instance, the recipe wants you to add the ingredient, use a spoon to push it firmly down, and add more until your cup is firmly packed. Often you will see a recipe that calls for 1 cup of firmly packed brown sugar. Interestingly enough, some recipes do call for compacting ingredients. Dipping your cup measure into the flour bag to fill it might seem like the quickest method, but you risk compacting your ingredients and getting more than your recipe needs. If you don’t have a kitchen scale and your recipe is written in scoops, it’s best if you pour the ingredient into the measuring cup or use a spoon to scoop it in smaller amounts. Volumetric measurements that call for scooping ingredients can vary each time you bake, depending on the ingredients themselves and your scooping technique. A weighed amount will always give you the same amount of ingredients each time you bake. Weighing ingredients gives a baker accuracy in measurement. You will always have a certain amount of variability if you use volumetric measurements in your kitchen. Sifted flour has more air and less flour in it. But 1 cup of sifted flour weighs about 4 ounces, and 1 cup of unsifted flour weighs about 4.5 ounces. If your recipe calls for ounces, it doesn’t matter if your flour is sifted or not. Weighing isn’t affected by the air because air does not contribute to weight. We’ll find out later why air is an important ingredient in baking. If you’ve ever had a recipe that calls for sifting your flour first, this is to add the air back into the scooped volume. That means that it gets more dense or compact. One advantage weighing has over scooping is that certain dry ingredients, such as flour, tend to settle as it sits. Both methods are tried and true, and the decision is typically made by the recipe itself and how it was written. As you might imagine, the first method uses a kitchen scale, while the second uses measuring cups and spoons. The other is to scoop a set volume amount. There are 2 main ways to measure ingredients in the kitchen.
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