#bakingtips

🍥 [Homemade] Birria Tacos.

Almond-flour low-carb baking is your secret weapon for moist, nutty treats — perfect if you’re following keto, low-carb, or gluten-free eating (or just love tender cakes and cookies). It gives baked goods a melt-in-your-mouth crumb that wheat flour can’t match while keeping carbs low, so you can enjoy dessert without the guilt. Read on for 18 recipes, exact substitution rules, and troubleshooting hacks to help your almond-flour bakes turn out perfectly every time.

When you try new sourdough recipes, you might run into a variety of different preferments. Here’s how to the tell the difference between levain, biga, poolish, and pâte fermentée.

Levain

Levain, AKA sourdough starter, is a basic mix of flour and water. It does not use commercial yeast. Rather, it focuses on developing natural yeasts and bacteria already occurring in the flour and the air.

Levain takes several days of active feeding before it’s ready for use in baking. Although you can make a levain in about 5 days, the longer you maintain the levain, the more flavorful and fluffy your bread will be.

Stiff Levain vs. Liquid Levain

Many sourdough recipes use levain, but the consistency of that levain varies widely.

As a general rule, if a recipe calls for a stiff levain, then it needs a starter with 60% hydration or below.  A liquid levain, in contrast, typically uses 65% hydration or higher. If you wanted to make a liquid starter, you could combine 2 parts flour to 1 part water (or close to it).

Poolish

Poolish is similar to liquid levain in that it ferments at 100% hydration, or equal parts water and flour. However, unlike liquid levain, poolish only ferments for a few hours (anywhere from 12 to 16 hours) rather than a few days.

It uses a small percentage of commercial yeast to do the work, about 0.1-0.2% fresh yeast.

Biga

Biga is similar to stiff levain in that it ferments at 50-60% hydration, or 2 parts flour to 1 part water, or 100 grams flour to 50-60 grams water. Additionally, biga is similar to poolish in that it relies on commercial yeast to do the work.

Pâte Fermentée?

Pâte Fermentée translates from French to “fermented dough.” It is a handy way to ferment dough from bread you make on a regular basis.

When you make bread, you can set aside 1/3 of your loaf after it has finished its bulk fermentation. You then incorporate the old dough as leaven for your next batch of bread, set aside 1/3 of that loaf after it has finished, and continue the process.

Homemade scones fresh from the oven.

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Click here for the recipe 👇

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I LOVE baking. However when things go wrong I literally hate it so much, for the sole purpose of missing one ingredient/not enough of something can turn your baked good to garbage. It sucks that baking is so sensitive. I forgot to add baking powder to banana bread once and it turned into banana brick. Truly tragic. As I continue to bake, I have picked up on what goes wrong in my baking escapades. However, this post is about some super simple basics that I find to be helpful for the most amateur baker (as if I am not an amateur, lol). 

1. Parchment Paper is your best friend.

When baking cookies, or honestly anything, you always want to line your tray or pan with parchment paper. The biggest mistake you can make when baking cookies is using aluminum foil to line your cooke tray! Aluminum foil conducts heat quicker and affects the way your cookies bake; Specifically, your cookies will bake quicker but the bottoms of your cookies will be darker and crispier. Heat distributes more evenly on parchment paper, and if you’re bougie, silicon mats work just as well!  When using a pan to bake - for things such as brownies or cake, i find myself spraying the pan with oil (vegetable, avocado, coconut, who cares), placing the parchment paper on (and making sure it’s an exact fit beforehand!), spraying once again on top of the parchment paper to ensure it’ll stick, and then I pour the batter in. This guarantees that your baked good will easily slip out of the pan once its baked.

2. Baking Powder vs. Baking Soda

Baking powder and baking soda are both leavening agents (both will allow whatever you’re baking expand/grow), however they are not interchangeable! There’s actually a lot of science behind it, but I will spare you the details. Long story short, baking soda is a base, and in order for it to do its thing, it requires an acid. So per se in a cake recipe, baking soda would be used in conjunction with buttermilk because buttermilk would act as the acid. On top of needing an acid to reach its full potential as a leavening agent, the acid agent also neutralizes the gross taste of the baking soda alone. Baking powder, however, consists of baking soda and cream of tartar (an acid!), so you don’t need to add an acidic agent when using baking powder. To sum things up, baking powder is more potent than baking soda as it is a leavening agent that requires no additional help, whereas baking soda does. 

3. Measure your flour correctly!

It is super common to just take your dry measuring cup and scoop out some flour, level it, and continue on about your day. But, if that’s how you’re measuring your flour - you’re doing it wrong. Sorry to rain on your parade, but the correct way to measure your flour when using it is to scoop the flour into your measuring cup, and then level it off once full. Scooping the measuring cup with flour packs the flour in, thus getting an inaccurate measurement. Also, please use a dry measuring cup (but you knew that already, right?).

4. Not everything goes in one bowl!

When baking, it is ~essential~ that your dry ingredients go in a separate bowl, while your wet ingredients go in another. Also, sugar (brown or white) is considered a wet ingredient. You also almost always slowly mix your dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. There are a bunch of explanations of why this is the way it is, but basically - if you do it all in one bowl, the flour will get wet quicker and gluten will develop, and no one wants a baked good with a lot of gluten. It’ll be tough and yucky. 

5. Overspread cookies