baking: does it come easily to you?

Just made a very fluffy banana bread, except I only had two ripe nanas so I subbed in a mango that was sitting around, ryde I don't care because it's really good.

one soft fruit for another sounds uncharacteristically reasonable Leee

i bet it was great

Et voila!

https://64.media.tumblr.com/c6dd28c060d7965a299bef6c33707b73/6df84e9df02fdb48-e0/s1280x1920/523ed8c913680811f3ca08b8c66ace542c940bc7.jpg

And yes, it's very good.

nicely done!

https://tybe.tumblr.com/post/660739054009188352/strawberry-pie

This one turned out well! I’m still using Lily’s crust recipe though this time I didn’t par-bake, and yet it came out super flaky. I do like the slightly raw taste but this was a nice surprise.

I'm coming to realize that some fruits that I love to eat fresh do not bake well, namely strawberries -- I find the change in texture less appealing. I'm better off buying a basket and just eating it raw!

yeah strawberries don’t hold up well, i think because they dont really have much of a “skin” and the flesh is v porous

You have to turn strawberries into compote if you’re going to use them in a baked dessert unless: the raw part of strawberry shortcake.

i made some strawberry cream cheese muffins and the strawberries were awful.

they also need to be with an acidic thing like rhubarb because they get so bleh by themselves

I love balsamic vinegar with macerated strawberries.

I find strawberries very tart and acidic usually! But I've never tired to bake with them, I guess.

yea the moisture in fruit makes baked goods go wonky. freeze dried then crushed/powdered can give you a pretty good wallop of flavor, or dried fruit if you don’t mind some chewy bits

Dried fruits are A+! One of my favorite muffin recipes uses the, to great effect, they're such a good sweetener.

Strawberries are a little bit tart when they're raw, but that acidity tends to get overwhelmed when they're baked into a soggy undifferentiated glop. I wonder if adding lemon juice might help that out.

Blueberries hold up pretty well in bakes, save for the pies I've made so far. In fact, most of my fruit pies have been unimpressive.

ok i was going to post about this before but i felt bad for criticizing my mom's pies, which are really not bad (just...not as good as mine lol), but she doesn't do enough to address the watery fruit issue. for apple i have had success with a recipe that has you macerate the apples and let the liquid drain off for a few hours. you then cook the liquid with corn starch (it forms a caramel-like texture that is very appley) and add it back before putting it in the pie. dorie greenspan's blueberry pie recipe has the blueberries mixed with flour (iirc), then you also put unseasoned bread crumbs in the bottom. it produces the most perfect pie slice with barely any watery juice. it's important to do this with pie because the crust and the density of fruit mean the liquid will not evaporate off sufficiently, as opposed to a cobbler or crumble that is open as it bakes and also has cake batter or other starch to soak it up.

Ground almond is great in blueberry pies, tarts and (my fave) clafoutis. Also if you are making muffins or cake, soak the bloobs in corn starch solution and they won’t sink to the bottom.

I've followed recipes mention coating bloobs in flour, and I haven't had an issue with them sinking.

And if I ever try my hand at a fruit pie again, that ground almond hack sounds great! I assume it's there to soak up the moisture?

I really don't mind a juicy apple pie, and I've never liked that gloopy texture that you get when you thicken it. I'd much rather have the juices soak into the bottom crust, especially if I'm using an apple like Granny Smith that has really tart, flavorful juices. For cherry and blueberry pies I mix the fruit with the sugar and flour and let it stand for a bit before cooking it, which seems to work well. I use frozen sour cherries and they're really good, almost as good as fresh.

Blueberries are tricky because commercial ones have so little flavor; it's worth using wild blueberries, but even the wild blueberries you get in stores are pretty bland so you have to put in lemon juice to make them tart enough. If you ever get a chance to pick fresh blueberries and make a pie, do it. It's amazing and tart and bursting with flavor and you don't need any citrus at all.

The blueberries in the UK are really good (lots come from Poland). The ground almond hack is really effective if you’re making a French style tart, with custard: after your shortcrust is part baked, cover the inside of the base with a generous few tablespoons of the ground almond before covering with your bloobs. Bake that for 15 minutes, make some custard, then pour the custard over the bloobs and return to the oven.

it doesn't come out gloopy! if you mean that weird canned pie filling-like texture. it's this recipe but as i recall the temperature may be too high https://www.joyofbaking.com/ApplePie.html

Re apple pies: I totally hear harbl about the juices method! I always find a lot of water in the bottom after the sugar spice mix draws it all out. Sadly I would usually just discard it and then pile the drier apples up verrrry high in the pie since they break down so much. Just thinking about it is making me miss pie!

I'll give it a try! I've never put any thickener in apple pies; I just slice the apples very thin and layer them with brown sugar and cinnamon, and I always use very tart green apples, and it ends up juicy but not wet. But mine definitely have a soggy bottom; Bake Off would not approve.

Ideas on how to make chewy chocolate chip cookies? I remember an Alton Brown recipe that recommends using bread flour, ostensibly because of higher protein content, in which case, could mixing the a batter of all-purpose longer than is typical to better build up the gluten achieve the same result?

apparently resting the dough in the fridge for an hour or more makes them chewier but i havent tried it bc
i am too impatient & hardly ever rest my dough, also i like crunchy cookies anyway so

yeah the nyt choc chip recipe uses a combo of cake & bread flour and also recommends to rest it in the fridge for 24-36 hours... unsure which of those things contributes to the chewiness but i can confirm it's a v yum recipe.

i always rest it at least 24 hours but i'm not sure how much that contributes to chewiness, it's more of a flavor thing. chewiness comes from butter content and baking temp iirc. i always make this one: https://www.food.com/recipe/worlds-best-chocolate-chip-cookies-by-dorie-greenspan-332767

i would not suggest doing anything to develop gluten in a cookie

this is the best article about chocolate chip cookie variables https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe#toc-giving-the-cookie-dough-a-rest

ah and it will send you straight to resting the dough, scroll up to the top of course

lol resting the dough is probably the easy tip that I wanted to hear the least because like Veg, I am very impatient. I'll try the Dorie recipe though -- especially since it uses whole sticks of butter (I don't like having leftover sticks).

Any no-bake suggestions so that I can avoid using the oven in the midst of summer?

this one is a classic & super easy

https://littlespoonfarm.com/no-bake-lemon-icebox-pie-recipe/

I love Little Spoon. I use their sourdough bagel and sourdough English muffin recipes all the time. (Well, not in summer, obvs.)

I made snickerdoodles with some gingerbread type spices and peanut butter and the inside turned green, lol wtf?

one time i made a pumpkin pie with soy milk and it turned out gray?!?!?! like a dang zombie pumpkin pie!

trying to imagine the taste of peanut butter gingerbread snickerdoodles and failing. gingerbread snickerdoodle, brilliant; peanut butter snickerdoodle, god-tier; peanut butter gingerbread snickerdoodle, my brain cannot knit these flavors together. were they good, aside from the unconventional coloration?

The texture was too dry and crumbly for snickerdoodles and the PB totally overwhelmed the spices, but they didn't taste bad by any means.

Also, they looked a lot like falafel, and the green seemed to get more intense with time. I'm pretty sure it wasn't mold because it didn't taste like mold (which I'm well acquainted with because I accidentally eat it a lot).

I know baking with walnuts can cause a weird green color sometimes (maybe when the batter is alkaline?) - maybe peanut butter can do similar.

Did you use raw ginger or spices?

Does bread dough rise at room temperature? How long must or can you wait before the dough spoils?

No yeast, I used baking soda.

All the spices were ground. I did add sage on accident.

The snickerdoodles started turning green overnight, and I'm pretty sure the green got darker and more vivid even after I put them into the fridge that day.

cursory googling suggests that baking soda can cause a reaction w ~sunflower seed butter~ to cause green cookies, so maybe it’s something to do w that type of reaction but other ingredients like whatever kind of peanut butter you used etc

I did add sage on accident.

“i didn’t have butter so I substituted some leftover crackers”

LOL come on now, I added those crackers deliberately.

you know i love it

Youn, yeast dough will rise at room temp, just slowly. I've done 48 hour cool rises with no problems and have always left biga (which is basically very wet dough) out over multiple nights as well. You mostly don't want it to dry out or for the yeasts to use up all the available sugars (when they will all die off).

Thanks! I took up making a few quick breads a while back but won't feel like I've begun to bake until I bake with yeast, can knead dough (to the transparent window pane test), and know how to roll a pie crust. I'm not so big on frosting, piping, etc.

It's great that breads change color with their ingredients. I love how walnuts can turn bread purple.

Well this was a fun rabbit-hole to fall down!

https://www.reddit.com/r/foodhacks/comments/b2yvun/interesting_fact_sunflower_seed_butter_turns/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbiEngKpVgQ

Both of those look like a spot-on cross-section of my 'doodles, and actually I just remembered that I scraped out some leftover sunflower seed butter with a new jar of PB, though I'm struggling to remember how much, anywhere from 25-75% of what I used.

I could've sworn that I've baked with sunflower seed butter before (because I usually buy that from TJ instead of PB) but now I'm doubting my memories! #lolold

i think i saw suggestions to reduce baking soda amts if using sunflower seed to counter whatever reaction but when baking goes beyond recipes into sciencey math equations i dip out, i like the science of the end result but if i need a calculator i’m baking something else

If it doesn't kill me and it doesn't taste bad, I can deal with the unexpected green.

And I guess I'm still falling down that rabbit-hole, the labcoats have looked into this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33401798/

one time i made a pumpkin pie with soy milk and it turned out gray?!?!?! like a dang zombie pumpkin pie!

I've been making pumpkin pie with soy milk for over a decade - works great as long as you use unsweetened soy milk. HMU if you want to see the recipe.