Baking is an art. Every art needs good ingredients & accurate skills to become a masterpiece. While gathering fine ingredients is not a major problem, acquiring the required baking skills can be a daunting task for some people.
However, learning to bake is more of a necessity, especially when you reside in a country like India. Numerous festivals throughout the year and even special occasions like birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries are celebrated with sweets, savouries, desserts, and appetizing baked snacks.
Rich & moist chocolate cakes, delicious French pastries, yummy egg tarts, and crunchy biscuits have different tastes and textures. But all are prepared through some basic baking methods. Once you learn these baking techniques, you can easily prepare any bakes you desire.
In this blog, Whitecaps Baking Institute has put together a list of important baking methods to help you grasp the basics of baking. Apart from these baking techniques, you can also check out our essential mixing techniques and some easy baking tips for an easy and fruitful journey in baking.
5 Important Types of Baking Methods
There are 5 important types of baking methods, which, upon learning, you will be able to bake everything, right from cookies to cakes. These techniques include:
- Creaming
- Rubbing
- Whisking
- Melt, Mix & Bake
- Mix it all together
Let’s learn about them one by one.
1. Creaming Technique
While flipping through cake recipes, have you ever come across a phrase called “creaming your butter with sugar”?
It typically refers to a baking technique where we keep on mixing the butter and sugar till it turns out to be a yellow-coloured, pale, frothy, and creamy mix.
Your sugar needs to be evenly spread all over the batter, so recipes often mention creaming the butter. The light, creamy consistency makes your cake batter softer, which results in fluffy cakes.
In the creaming method, we first soften the butter (leave it at room temperature) and add sugar to it.
The mixture is then constantly beaten with an electric mixer at medium speed till the colour becomes pale yellow with a creamy texture and the amount of mix also increases in volume.
Next, we must slowly add the eggs to the same bowl while beating the mixture to avoid any bulky part of the egg getting left. After eggs, other ingredients like flour and dry ingredients make their way to this batter.
Every baker knows that creaming, if not done well, will result in dry or hard-baked cakes.
2. Rubbing Technique
This is also known as the cutting-in method. This baking method is used when making pies for flaky crusts, scones, or pastries. In this process, we rub the butter and flour between our fingers using our fingertips to create a mixture that appears like crumbs.
Bakers follow the rubbing technique to incorporate fats in dry ingredients. We have to cut the butter into small parts and mix them with flour with our fingertips till it becomes a sticky dough.
Unlike the creaming technique, we use frozen butter here. For cutting the dough, you can use a pastry cutter or a paddle attachment on a mixer.
3. Whisking Technique
Do you know that you can make bakes even without adding any leavening (rising) agent like baking soda? Sponge cakes, meringue, Pavlova, and chiffon cakes use the whisking technique that eliminates the need for a rising agent.
This baking method is quite similar to creaming, letting in air to aerate the batter except for the fact that it uses eggs instead of butter. For meringue, we whisk eggs into the mix till it becomes stiff.
Sponge cakes need constant whipping of sugar and butter while adding eggs to them. This makes your cakes rise even if you don’t use any chemical agent like baking soda.
A word of caution: You can use a hand whisk for this baking method, but it is physically very exhausting. So it’s best to use an electric beater.
4. Melt, Mix & Bake Method
This is the easiest and quickest method among all the 5 baking methods. This is a method often used by beginner bakers who have trouble beating butter and other ingredients together.
While mixing the batter for a cake, beating it at the same time is a problem some people face. So what they do is first melt the butter and mix it with other ingredients. After the butter has melted in a pot, eggs are added with other dry ingredients. Also, a rising ingredient like baking soda is added to make the cake rise properly.
Be careful not to overmix the batter. It can lead to cracks in your cake. Unlike other baking methods, melting gives you dense, moist desserts (especially chocolate desserts) and is also good for recipes using syrup or honey. For example, gingerbread uses this baking method.
5. Mix it All Together Method
Mix it all together is the fastest baking method known, as it saves a lot of time and energy. However, this method has its own dilemmas, like if there are any lumps present in the batter or the batter is dry and hard, you will get a tasteless cake.
So you need to pay attention while using the mix-it-all-together baking method. Only experienced chefs use this baking method for making cupcakes. Unless you are an experienced baker, don’t go for this method.
Mixing Methods in Baking
Apart from the five important baking methods, you can also learn mixing methods to improve your skills further.
1. Blending
Blending can be carried out using several instruments, like an electric mixer, or with simpler tools like
- Spoons
- Whisks
- Rubber spatulas
to let all the ingredients spread evenly in butter.
2. Folding
Folding is a mixture technique used for mixing delicate ingredients. You can use a balloon whisk or rubber spatula to fold one texture into another, like when you add whipped cream to a batter.
3. Stirring
This is a simple and basic mixing technique where you use a
- Whisk,
- Spoon
- Rubber spatula,
to mix your ingredients manually.
4. Sifting
Sifting is the process of removing any lumps in your dry ingredients. You can use a rotating sifter or mesh strainer to sift through your dry ingredients.
5. Kneading
For some products, having gluten is essential for giving them structure. So the more you knead, the more gluten you get. This is best when done with hands in a steady rhythm. Or you can use a dough hook on your mixer to make the process simpler.
These are some of the basic baking and mixing methods you need to learn in order to transform from a novice baker to an intermediate baker.
The diploma baking course from Whitecaps teaches you basic baking techniques and advanced decoration skills like:
- Icing
- Pipping
- Garnishing
- Fondant art
Essential baking tips and techniques
Last but not the least, let’s talk about some easy baking hacks that can make the whole tedious baking procedure a lot easier for you.
1. Always read through the entire recipe before you start baking.
2. Use measuring cups and weighing scales to accurately measure ingredients.
3. Unless your recipe states otherwise, always stick to using ingredients at room temperature while baking, i.e., neither too hot nor too cold.
4. Always preheat the oven.
5. Don’t open the oven repeatedly to check your cake or bread because it affects the baking process.
6. Always keep parchment paper and plastic wraps ready in your kitchen for baking.
7. Before baking, grease your baking tray with oil, set the parchment paper, and then pour your batter to avoid stickiness after baking.
If you want to learn more such tips and techniques in detail, then enrol in Whitecaps baking school in India. Our master chefs share many of these secret titbits from their own experience, with students during class sessions, thus enriching your learning experience.
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