2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29
Almost everyone loves sweet and savory cookies and cakes, but how many of the hosts even think about why they actually put butter or eggs in the dough?
All the basic ingredients used for pastries can be divided into stabilizers, softeners, sweeteners, leavening agents, flavoring agents and thickeners.
The stabilizers contain protein and, thanks to it, retain their shape after being removed from the oven. This category includes flour, eggs and starch.
The flour contains protein, which during mixing turns into long elastic threads that stretch but do not break. Thus the dough becomes a porous homogeneous structure. The longer we knead the dough, the more stable these fibers (gluten fibers) become.
The softeners make the pastry tender and deprive it of dryness. Here are the butter, the oil and the lard. During kneading and heat treatment, the fat particles surround the elastic threads of the flour and shorten them.
This property has not only fats, but also high-fat products - cream, high-fat milk, greasy cheese, egg yolks. It is very important how you add the fat to the dough.
If you add the fat to the dry ingredients or add it in the middle of the finished dough, the pastry gets a layered structure. If the fat is mixed with the sugar until foamy, and then mixed with the other ingredients, a fine-grained cake structure is obtained.
For sweeteners, everything is clear - these are sugar, sugar and maple syrup, powdered sugar and honey. But keep in mind that honey and sugar affect the structure of some cakes and retain moisture in the pastry.
The leavening agents make the dough fluffy at the expense of releasing carbon dioxide as a result of a chemical or thermal reaction. Pores are formed in the dough, which are fixed during heat treatment.
The chemical leavening agents are soda and baking powder, and the organic ones are yeast. The physical leavening agent is considered to be the steam that is released during heat treatment and causes the existing gaps in the dough to expand. This is the principle of croissant dough.
The taste ingredients are innumerable - vanilla, walnuts, fruits, everything that gives flavor to the cookies.
Thickeners make creams, sauces and puddings thicker. Gelatin, eggs and products containing starch are most commonly used for this purpose. The consistency of the product depends not only on the thickener, but also on the method of preparation.
For example, if you boil a cream and stir it constantly, you will get a thick, slightly liquid cream. And if you prepare it in a water bath without stirring, the cream will be thick and will retain its shape after cooling - like caramel cream.
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