How to Properly Grease Pans for Baking

After taking the time to bake a product from scratch, do you ever struggle to extract it out of the tin? Once you do manage to release your product from the tin, are you left with an unattractive and nasty white paste glued onto your product? If you take just a few simple steps to properly prepare your baking tins, you will be guaranteed your products will release easily and look professional.

What you will need: melted clarified butter pastry brush baking tin bread flour

1. Brush a thin layer of melted clarified butter onto your baking tin.
2. Place the tin in the fridge or freezer.
3. Once the fat has solidified, remove the tin and dust with bread flour. Shake the tin to ensure the entire surface is covered. Bang out the excess flour.
4. Immediately fill the tin with your recipe and place it in the oven for baking.

When preparing tins in this fashion you are essentially creating two separate layers. The flour will adhere to your baked good and the clarified butter will remain on the surface of your tin allowing for easy release. By not using clarified butter, the water present in regular butter will mix with the flour and create a gluey paste. The primary reason for dusting with bread flour is to avoid caking. Bread flour doesn't clump and will leave a very thin, even coating atop the solidified butter.


You will reap great rewards by taking these few extra steps.

Tagged as: [ baking basics butter clarified flour greasing howto pans pastry techniques tips ]

Pastry Mid-Term at NWCAV

Yesterday morning we wrote our mid-term exam, which was followed by a little over 2 hours in the afternoon to prep for the practical part. By the end of the day today, we each had to present the following items that we had previously learned in the curriculum: 1) a poppy seed cake sliced into 3 even layers which were glazed with nappage (apricot glaze), and sliced into 10 even pieces; 2) a baguette;       3) croissants; and 4) checkerboard cookies. Aside from doing these recipes once in class, repeating them at home was where the practice would come in.

The key thing to this exam was how well the team worked to get each of our individual projects done. So many things have to be considered when you only have 2 ovens to work with. There was a third oven but it was only used to bake off cookies if we couldn't squeeze them into the 2 good ovens. The functions in that third oven aren't as good as the others so to try and bake breads and cakes in there would not have been a good idea. We split into 2 teams of 6 and worked out a time-line on how to get things done. We literally had to start building our doughs together so that we would all be at the same stage before proofing our products. If someone was too slow or too speedy, proofing would be affected and they would either block or hold everyone up on going into the oven to finish things off. Communication was the most important factor.

I found it less stressful than the culinary mid-term. The pace of pastry is somewhat different. Even though you can be moving quickly and multi-tasking all day long, there are certain things that just take time and that you have to wait for. Proofing can't be rushed and neither can baking. Other items need to rest or be chilled before you can work with them. That's why it is so important to have an excellent game plan and to be on the same page with other people in the kitchen. If you aren't part of the team, you could put the entire production at risk. Here is a picture of some of the finished products.

Tagged as: [ baking exams nwcav pastry ]

Sourdoughs Need Love and Attention

Chef Marco introduced us to his “pet” sourdough when we started our bread series. His sourdough (like all sourdoughs) needs special care and attention. Sometimes it travels with him on vacation but if he is forced to leave it behind, he has someone look over it, feed and talk to it, and make sure it stays healthy. ;)

When Chef gave all of the students some of his sourdough starter to begin making sourdough loaves, my partner in class and I decided to call our new “pet”, Frankie. Ingredients were added to part of Frankie to bake off some loaves and the rest of him was divided into containers, which we took home with us. We needed to treat him well and make him grow for future Frankie sourdough loaves.  


If sourdoughs aren't babied they will DIE. The natural yeast inside starters needs three things to survive and multiply: food, warmth, and moisture. If you don't provide these things to your sourdough, society (fellow bread-makers) may label you as being abusive.

I remember the first day I brought Frankie home and placed him with care in the refrigerator to slow his growth. I fed him equal parts of flour and water every few days, worrying if I was feeding him too much or too little. I let Frankie out of the fridge every so often and forgot about him one night on the countertop but he was ok. He warmed up and started to multiply more rapidly. Another time when I took Frankie out of the fridge, I thought he didn’t look very bubbly, so I fed him a little onion slice to make his yeast activate. At first, he liked it.

A few days later, Frankie was drowning in a yellowish liquid that didn’t smell the greatest. I was worried about my little baby and thought I’d take him back to school for a check-up. Poor Frankie was dead.

During the course of the feedings, Frankie’s PH level became out of whack. The onion didn’t help things either. I got a little confused. The addition of an onion was for another recipe (a grape sourdough starter). I either underfed him or overfed him or gave him too much water and slowly killed him.

I felt horrible that Frankie had to be washed down the kitchen sink and couldn't bring myself to take a picture of what remained of him. I'm moving forward though. Chef gave me another lot of sourdough to try again. This time I have placed an automatic reminder in my calendar to let my new little friend, Franklin, out of the fridge twice a week and feed him properly with only flour and water. No onions this time.

Tagged as: [ baking bread natural nwcav pastry sourdough starter yeast ]

A Sticky Dough is a Happy Dough

I like the fact that in class we are not using Kitchen Aids for the mixing and kneading of doughs. By doing everything by hand, we are learning to identify when a dough has been kneaded enough just by feeling it. When people move on to using machines in big production kitchens to make large quantities, they will be able to look and touch the product to determine when it is done. What has amazed me most during this past week of bread-making is that most of the doughs that we have kneaded by hand are extremely sticky initially but then come together as they are kneaded more. Even the end result is something stickier than I'm used to. The home baker will undoubtedly feel the urge to add additional flour at the onset to make the dough more manageable to knead?but this is actually the worst thing they could do.

There is a lot of science behind bread making and I have a greater appreciation for the artisan baker. Formulas were created to calculate the Desired Dough Temperature (DDT). This is the precise temperature that dough should be at after kneading and before resting. It is not something that is found in recipes on the web or in many cookbooks but rewards professionals with excellent results. Accurate gluten development, hydration, fermentation, and proofing times have to be understood to create an optimal product.

For most lean doughs (ones that have very little or no fat in them), the DDT is between 75°F to 80°F (24°C to 27°C). For enriched doughs (ones that have more butter, milk, eggs, etc.), the DDT is slightly higher to keep the fats soft while kneading.

So how do you find a DDT? The only temperature you can control in a recipe is the temperature of the water that you are adding. To find the DDT for a dough, you have to calculate the sum temperatures of certain factors: room temperature, flour temperature, mixer friction (the heat generated by mixing/kneading)¹, and pre-dough (sour dough, etc.). If your recipe includes 3 of the aforementioned factors, you multiply the desired dough temperature by 3. If there are 4 factors, multiply by 4 and so on. Once you have multiplied the factors, you subtract the sum temperature of the room, flour, mixer friction, pre-dough, etc. The value left is the temperature that your water should be at when adding it to your recipe.

It is quite amazing that when you follow these calculations, and after kneading for the appropriate amount of time, that the DDT will be spot-on. The benefit of having a DDT is that the yeast will be most active during this resting period and will produce gases which will be trapped between the network of gluten strands, creating a beautiful rise in the oven.

To calculate DDT (example):


What is also interesting to me is that you can take roughly the same ingredients (flour, yeast, water, salt, butter) and form such incredibly different products from the same things just by altering the amounts, the proofing time, the baking technique, etc. Click here for more pictures of the finished products.


¹ To calculate mixer friction multiply the total kneading time by 2 (when kneading by hand). Fahrenheit should be used when calculating DDT.

Tagged as: [ baking bread ddt dough gluten kneading temperature tips ]