Professional Bakers Are Sharing The Industry Secrets At-Home Cooks Don't Know About, And I'm Taking Notes
Baking can be tricky. With so many steps and ingredients (not to mention the hours of wait time), it can all feel very overwhelming.
Luckily, I stumbled upon this Reddit thread by u/J_mo0d, in which professional bakers are sharing their tips and hacks for their craft.
People shared everything from tips about ingredients to recommendations about kitchen scales (and more of course!)
Here are 17 of the best tips, below:
1."Unless it says otherwise, butter and eggs should always be room temperature."
2."My wife is a home baker and one of her little tricks is to add instant coffee to chocolate cake to make the cake richer."
3."You probably need a bit more salt than you think, especially when baking sweet things. It sounds counterintuitive to a newish baker — if you want something to be sweet, you cut down on salt, right? WRONG. Sweet things need the contrast of salt, so don’t be afraid to add a bit more."
"Pay attention to differences in recipes that call for kosher salt (Morton’s or Diamond Crystal? One is more salty than the other...), sea salt, crushed sea salt, pink salt, table salt, etc. Not all salts are interchangeable."
4."Buy restaurant-grade sheet pans. They are better than any cookie sheets you can get and will last forever."
5."I used only salted butter for my American buttercream frosting. It made all the difference in the world on wedding cakes."
6."Parchment. Line those cookie sheets."
7."Add cinnamon. Small amounts of cinnamon make any home-cooked bake amazing."
8."Also, use quality cinnamon, you get more flavor! I have 2 types of cinnamon in my cabinet, Indonesian and Vietnamese. They have different flavor profiles, and both are so much better than the cheap stuff."
9."Your oven is unique. They all are, and the thermostats are always a little off. Get an internal thermometer, and pay attention to it. Adjust your settings accordingly. Basically, learn your oven."
10."Coarse, flaky salt (like fleur de sel or Maldon salt) on top of chocolate chip cookies takes them to a whole new level you never thought you could reach."
11."With boxed cake mix, sub softened butter and milk for oil and water, respectively, and your cakes taste scratch made. Saw a few bakers give this tip and tried it. Super accurate. Also, for my recent chocolate cakes, instead of dusting the pan with flour, I used hot cocoa mix instead and enjoyed that."
12."If you want to find a good base recipe for something, do a general search (scones, for example), then compare 5-7 recipes. They will usually have the same or similar base ingredients in the same ratios. There's your standard recipe. Then you can adjust dry versus wet ingredients to change up the flavors however you want."
13."Weigh everything. Using measuring cups will fuck up your bake half the time."
14."Not a secret but often something home bakers forget: baking is science. You can’t just throw things in willy-nilly and hope for the best, like you do when cooking. If you’re starting out, stick to the recipe. And the steps. In their order."
15."Use a digital scale and convert everything to grams, it makes it SO much easier to get exact measurements."
16."Coffee, mayo, and/or stout are my secret weapons when making a chocolate cake."
17.And finally, "Sourdough is waaaaayyyyy easier to make than it appears. Just follow Richard Bertinet's recipes —look on YouTube—your bread will gain in taste, smell, shield life, and every other aspect. Just take 5 minutes per day to keep it alive. Baking is 5% work and 95% waiting."
Do you have a baking tip you think other people should know? Let us know in the comments!
