Does your grocery store have the nerve to inconsistently stock cake flour? Does it drive you crazy to see recipe after recipe that calls for it, and wonder what else you can use? Good news: Cake flour is really easy to make at home. Add two tablespoons of corn starch to each cup of regular flour and sift this mixture together twice. Measure your cups of flour from this mixture.
So you’ve made some fruit scones or peach cupcakes and you notice that the end product is streaked blue and green. Sound familiar? In almost every case, it’s not you, it’s your baking powder. Baking powder with aluminum in it reacts to acidic ingredients, causing this discoloration and what many people find to be a “tinny” or metallic taste. Fortunately, this is as easy to rectify as ditching your baking powder for an aluminum-free brand, such as Rumford (the brand also makes Clabber Girl baking powder, which, oddly, does contain aluminum) or Bob’s Red Mill.
The biggest different between all-purpose and bread flour is the amount of gluten: bread flour has more of it. But it may seem annoying to have to keep a giant bag of bread flour around if you’re only an occasional bread-baker. Enter a product known as a “gluten additive” or gluten flour, something you can usually add one tablespoon of to each cup of all-purpose flour to turn it into bread flour. Think of all the cabinet space you’ll save!
If I could ice every cake in whipped cream, I would. But, because it is whipped with air alone, it doesn’t stay thick over many hours. One way to keep it stable is to dissolve 1 teaspoon of gelatin in 2 tablespoons of boiling water, cool it to room temperature and drizzle it into your whipping cream when it is halfway thickened. Then, whip it a little longer than usual — until it holds medium-firm peaks.
Updated in 2019: I’ve been remiss to add the simpler stabilization method I’ve used for the last several years. It’s adapted from Nancy Silverton and it never fails. For every cup of heavy cream you whip, beat in 1 to 2 tablespoons of sour cream or creme fraiche. It won’t make it tangy (or not in any truly notable way) but it does keep the whipped cream stable. I have had jars of this in the fridge for 4 to 5 days and found them just as fluffy as they were on the first day.
Homemade whipped cream leaves the canned, and god forbid, bucket stuff in the dust (being actually whipped and cream), and takes less than five minutes to make. The trick: a cold bowl, clean beaters, and a ratio of about 1 cup of heavy or whipping cream to 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar, beaten until it holds soft peaks. Start low, so you don’t splash yourself when it is still liquid. Add a splash of flavoring (vanilla, almond or a liqueur) at the end for extra awesomeness.
Flash freezing — the process of spacing items out on a tray, freezing them until they are firm and then storing them in more space-efficient freezer bags — is the single most revolutionizing concept I have adapted into my cooking repertoire, because it allows us to freeze uncooked dumplings, gnocchi, biscuits, scones and even scooped cookies without them become one doughy mass.
Have a lot of egg whites or yolks leftover from a recipe but don’t know how many? A good approximation to keep in mind is that 1 large egg yields about 1 tablespoon of yolk plus 2 tablespoons of white. This has come particularly in handy when I have halved a recipe that called for an odd number of eggs — I simply beat one egg and measured out 1.5 tablespoons.
In perhaps my most persnickety tip yet, did you know that when a recipe calls for a drop, pinch or dash of an ingredient, this can be translated into an actual measurement? 60 drops yields one teaspoon, 1 dash is equal to 1/16 of a teaspoon and 1 pinch is 1/8 of a teaspoon. Now, try to get your head around the fact that someone, somewhere actually took the time to measure these things out.
Cream is labeled illogically, with names and not numbers representing milk fat within. This ought to help sort them out: half-and-half (equal parts milk and cream) has 10.5 to 18 percent milk fat; light cream (a.k.a. table cream) ranges from 18 to 30 percent, but is most often actually 20 percent; whipping cream (a.k.a. light whipping cream) has 30 to 36 percent; and heavy cream (ironically, better for whipped cream than “whipping” cream, though both work) has 36 to 40 percent. Double cream (not widely available in the U.S.) has 42 percent. Oh, and it is awesome.
After years of struggling to perfectly poach an egg, I discovered I could get much of what I liked about them from soft-boiled eggs, with a zero percent failure rate to boot. My technique is just like that of my hard-boiled eggs, except I drop the boiling time down to 6 minutes. This assures a solid white and soft yolk, and the pinnacle of deliciousness spread over buttered toast and topped with a pinch of salt.
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