Transcripts
1. Introduction to the Course: Baking at home. Does that sound difficult? Look no further. Once you know the essential techniques and understand the ingredients, you will develop the confidence to bake just about anything. Hi, my name is [inaudible]. I'm a professional chef and baker trained from the prestigious [inaudible]. I've worked in some of the best restaurants and bakeries in Sydney over many years. Now I want to share the experiences I've gained looking at some amazing bakers and shops so that you can become a better baker. We start this class by learning the basics such as the tools we need and also how to measure and assemble ingredients when we start our baking journey. We understand the differences between baking soda and baking powder and also learn about the role of sugars, fats, dairy, and eggs in baking. We also learn the different types of flours and their functions. Once we understand these concepts, we finally apply them by making a beautiful raspberry muffin, which will make your house smell like an amazing bakery. The next recipe is my favorite brown butter chocolate chip cookie, which when dipped in milk, they bring back amazing childhood memories. Then we make the softest orange chiffon cake, perfect for a picnic or taking it to your friend's tea party. Learning how to make an amazing French meringue and the lightest sponge. To finish the class, we make a lemon bond cake, which will be a showstopper and impress anyone you know. The goal of the class is to provide you with a strong foundation and help you become a better baker. The class comes with a detailed recipe book with all the concepts and recipes covered in the class. I can't wait for you to join me and help you and teach you to become a really good baker.
2. Class Project: The project for this class is for you to share your progress, your pictures of any recipe from this class. If you want to make muffins, if you want to make a cake, I would love to see your progress and I would also like to help you if you have any questions or doubts regarding these recipes. Also, if you could drop a small review or a comment, that would really help me reach more students and if you have any suggestions as well of what you would like to learn and I could definitely work on that in future classes as well. Thank you again for joining me in this class and let's begin on our baking journey.
3. Baking Tips To be A Successful Baker: Before we start off with this class, I wanted to share with you some really small tips which will help you really improve your baking skills. The first one is that, when you use the ingredients, make sure that they're at room temperature. The reason we do this is because it emulsifies much better and it also causes a cake batter to be really light as well. The second one is to get an oven thermometer and basically check the temperature of your oven because most of the times home ovens are not accurate and adjust the temperature of your oven according to the temperature you get in your thermometer. The third one is; to use digital scale. I know we're used to using cups and teaspoons but using a digital scale makes such a big difference when you're baking because we can measure everything really accurately. The fourth one is that always arrange your ingredients, measure them before you start a recipe. So as chefs, we make sure that we do that because it just helps to make it really easily and also your line of thought is quite clear like you know what you have to do. It's really nice to just arrange all your ingredients before you start baking. The fifth one is that be really patient and don't open the oven door when you're baking because in our home ovens, a winche just loses so much heat when you open it. Just avoid doing that at all costs. The last one I would say is that if you make any mistakes, just write them down. Always keep experimenting with recipes. That's why, in this class, I'm trying to help you understand what ingredients do and how they react so that you can basically change the recipes however you like. Let's start with this lesson now.
4. Tools to Start your Baking Journey: To start off with this class, I'm just going to show you some of the tools which I use really frequently. It'll just help you to build these tools when you start baking. These are some of my favorite tools. To start off with a whisk, super-helpful, you probably find this in any pastry chef's kit because we use it so often, especially to beat eggs or whip cream. You even make butters. It's very helpful to mix the butter properly with the whisk. The next one is a rolling pin. This one is a wooden rolling pin, very helpful when you're rolling out pastries, doughs, biscuits, cookies, really, really helpful. You could get even stainless steel ones, but I prefer using a wooden one. The next one is a pastry brush. Very helpful when you're glazing cakes, even egg washing. I really like using it when I'm maybe lining cake tins or pans with butter really helpful in that case. Get a good sharp knife to cut fruits or any garnishes you have, maybe berries and even to core fruits really helps in that case. This one is also very important if you really like making cakes and frosting or glazing. This one has got a slight curve on it, which makes it easy to spread, so if you're spreading maybe chocolate ganache or any chocolate buttercream frosting, it's really nice to use this one. A scale. Really important if you want to be accurate and if you want to make really fine products. Definitely use a scale especially if you're making pastries or making cortisol or even dividing, apportioning doughs, I think it's very helpful. A digital thermometer, as a baker we use it a lot because we need to check the temperature of a bread dough we're making to be able to ferment it properly and even in cases when you're making sugar, caramelizing sugar, or making tophi. Even if you're tempering chocolate, very important to have a digital thermometer. The next one is a silicone spatula. This one as well I think you'll find it in any pastry chef's kit because we use it so often. This one, the handle will not melt at very high temperatures, so it's very useful in that case. Also to scrape out a bowl, it can really do that very easily and very easy to wash as well. I really like using this. A sieve. We need to use a sieve especially if you're making cakes because we need the flour to be really fine. It makes really good products if you sieve, especially if you're baking desserts. I would highly recommend getting one. A kitchen scissor. This helps in a lot of different purposes. If you want to maybe cut baking paper or maybe doughs if you have anything, so definitely helps to have one.
5. How to Use a Digital Scale: In this lesson, I'm briefly going to describe how we can use a digital scale. I would highly recommend to use one, because if we measure with cups, it's not highly accurate most of the times. What we do is say, for example, we put a bowl and we press the "Tare" button. That takes the weight to zero and say, for example, if you want to measure 30 grams of flour perfect. If you want to add something to this, we just press the "Tare" button again and say, for example, you want to add sugar. Now, we actually do this and press the "Tare" button again. This is very helpful in measuring exactly how much we need because in baking you need to be really exact with the ingredients. Also in some scales you have different metrics. Like you can change it to ml or ounces or grams. In my scale, I have a button at the back. I can just press that and this changes to ounces, and this changes to ml. Usually, this helps as well if you're measuring liquids or if you follow a different metric system. If you want to be really good at baking, I would highly recommend getting the scale.
6. Baking Soda vs Baking Powder: When we first start baking, the most common question I get is, what is the difference between baking soda and baking powder? In this class, I'm going to differentiate between both of them so you can understand how you can use these chemical leaveners in your recipes. The baking soda is slightly more clumpier compared to the baking powder and is basically sodium bicarbonate, and it needs an acidic element to react with it when you use it in a recipe. For example, if you're putting butter milk or honey or brown sugar in your recipe, you would use baking soda. But on the other hand, baking powder already has an acidic element in it so you could use it in any recipe. You don't really need to have an acidic element. But be surely mindful when you use baking soda, because in case it does not have an acidic element, the recipe will test really metallic because this will not work and it will also not cause any leavening. Just be mindful of that. Also if you were to substitute baking powder for baking soda, you could use one teaspoon of baking powder for 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda because baking soda is quite powerful compared to baking powder. Also you cannot really substitute baking soda for baking powder, so just be careful of that. In some recipes we also use both. We do that because the baking soda is not enough to cause the leavening we require, so we need additional baking powder in those recipes. Also with baking soda, we need to put our baked good in the oven immediately. But with baking powder, you could probably leave it out for some time, or refrigerate it, but the baking soda, you definitely have to put it in the oven.
7. All About Flour: In this lesson, I'm going to basically describe the different types of flours available to us. As a baker it's essential to understand the properties of the flours you are using because it can drastically change the bake product we make. Flours basically differ in protein content in them. What that means is that if you have high protein content, it forms a stronger gluten structure, which is good for breads, but not really good for cakes. You have to be quite mindful when you select the flour. If you go to the supermarket, there are so many different types of flours available now. What I'm going to do is briefly describe some of them so that you have a better idea of how to use them. These are some of the most commonly used flours. I'm going to describe to you based on the protein content starting with the bread flour, it has the highest protein content. Probably the best to use if you're making breads, pastries or [inaudible] because it forms a very strong dough because of high gluten content and the dough expands very well when you ferment it. The next one I'm going to speak about is whole meal flour. You can see you can feel the germ and bran in it and it's got a slightly more brownish color, and it's super heavy. But you need to be mindful when you use it because the products we make out of them can be quite dense. Maybe use it in a combination when you making breads and pastries, but it definitely can be used and it gives a really good flavor as well. We've got all-purpose flour here, which is about nine to 10 percent gluten, and probably the most commonly available flour in the supermarkets and in households, because you can use it to make anything from breads to pastries, to cakes, and is really versatile as well. The next one it's cake flour, it's got about six to eight percent of protein. It's very good to make cakes and sponges and muffins because it does not form a strong gluten structure which keeps the product really moist and soft. We have another flour, which is called self raising flour. That is just the cake flour added with baking powder and salt. For every cup, which is about 125 grams of cake flour, we add about one teaspoon of baking powder. That makes self raising flour. That can be used to make cakes, but not really in breads. Just be careful of that. These flours have gluten in them, but we also have flours which do not have gluten like this one. It's coconut flour. You can definitely use this in cakes, but you cannot make bread out of them because to make bread you need a strong gluten structure. In the supermarket, gluten free flours are quite widely available nowadays, and they can definitely be used for baking if you are gluten intolerant. Some of the other gluten free flours can be [inaudible] flour, rice flour, cone flour. Definitely if you gluten intolerant, there are a lot of flours available as well.
8. Recipe 1- Easiest Raspberry Muffin Recipe: Beginning with, our first recipe is muffins. I'm going to show you different variations of these muffins with the blueberries, raspberries, and chocolate. The first step is to grease a baking tin or a silicon tin like this one. What I'd like to do is cut pieces of baking paper to squares and just put them inside like that. This looks really nice. I mean, you could do it without it as well. You don't really need to do this, but the presentation is quite nice after it bakes so I really like doing this. After your baking tin is lined, what you do is you set your oven to preheat at 180 degrees for about 15 - 20 minutes while we prepare the batter. As base reshapes before we started recipe, we basically set up all the ingredients we need. It's called mise en place, which means get all the ingredients on place. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to measure the dry ingredients here. I'm going to set that aside. Then I'm going to take the wet ingredients and then I'm going to mix it together. The dry ingredients today is your cake flour. I've got some baking soda and salt here, and some cinnamon as well. The detail of the recipe is in the attachment, the recipe attachments. You can definitely have a look at that. I'm going to mix all of this together now, add the cinnamon and just mix it together. I'm going to set this aside and measure the wet ingredients. I've measured the wet ingredients here, and I'm using milk in this recipe, and this is vegetable oil. The reason I'm using oil and not butter is because oil leads to a really moist texture. That's exactly what I want for the muffins. I'm also using a combination of brown sugar and white sugar. The reason I'm doing that is because brown sugar not only does it give more flavor, but it also gives a slightly better texture because it's got molasses in it. I'm using one egg. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to put oil and mix the sugar in it. This is a really easy recipe and it comes out really well. It doesn't even take that much time to make. When it's mixed like that, you just put an egg and make sure the egg is at room temperature. After the egg is mixed, we're going to put the milk. Its really easy. We really don't have to waste that much. After that is done, this is really important step. We need to sift it because we want it to be really fine. Just get all your dry ingredients and take a silicone spatula and just gently fold it. We don't want to mix this too much because we don't want to form gluten and we just wanted to form a butter. With muffin butters, it's not that smooth, it doesn't have to be that smooth. It can be a little bit lumpy. That is perfect. You can see a little bit of lumps there, which is really good because when you bake it, it breaks down and creates the really soft texture. Now we'll put it in our baking tin. There are two ways to do this. Either you can just directly scrape it inside the baking tin. But the other way, which I like is just take a spoon and just scrape it in with your finger. I'm going to put blueberries and this one, just take a few blueberries and just put it inside like that. When it bakes it will little break down and it will taste really nice. In the other one, I'm going to put some raspberries. I've got some frozen raspberries, but you could use fresh ones as well. The last one, I'm going to put some dark chocolate. Actually you can even fold this in the butter if you want. If you're just making one type of muffins, you can even put oats on top of them if you want to make them healthy just before you bake. That also works really nicely. Before you put them in the oven, just sprinkle a little bit of brown sugar on top. Let's fill, caramelize and form a really delicious crust. These usually take about 20 - 25 minutes to bake. It's been 25 minutes and I'm going to check if it's fully baked. Just put a skewer in the center. If it comes out clean like that, that means it's done. Just read these for about 20 minutes before we can eat them, because as they rest they keep baking, which is called carry-over baking. You don't want to disturb it now because it might be raw. Just let them cool down at room temperature. After 10 minutes of cooling down, when it's slightly okay to touch, we just take it out, put it on a cooling graph. As you can see, it is such a nice structure and its really tender and moist. We just finished with some icing sugar.
9. Sugar the Magical Ingredient: Let's try and learn about sugars in baking. Sugar is such an amazing ingredient. It's probably one of my favorite ingredients because it gives such an amazing flavor. I can't even imagine a cake without the sweetness which sugar gives. What sugar does is that, it's hygroscopic in nature and what that means is that it absorbs moisture and it keeps a baked product extremely tender and really light. It also incorporates air. When we cream sugar with butter, it basically creates these air pockets which rise and gives us an amazing product. It also stabilizes [inaudible] even [inaudible]. When we whip egg whites, if we add sugar to it, it stabilizes it and doesn't deflate. I'm going to speak about the different sugars we use in baking and when they're useful as well, in what circumstances you can use them. I think this would really help you when you start on your baking journey. These are the most commonly used sugars. The first one's caster sugar. It's basically white sugar, which is probably the most widely available. It's very versatile that you can use this in anything. But it doesn't have avalanche flavor as the ground sugars. This one's light brown sugar and this one's dark brown. The difference between these three is that this has molasses in it. Molasses is basically a byproduct of making sugar. Also they have a lot more flavor compared to this one, but they also have a lot more moisture. In case you're using them in recipes, you just need to adjust the level of moisture in your recipes. The last one's icing sugar. This one is basically finely ground white sugar, and there's a little bit of cornstarch added in it. This one's really good for frostings and icing because it dissolves really easily, and also very good to make [inaudible] on the [inaudible]. It's very useful in that case. The other sugar alternatives we have is honey. But honey is not like the chemical properties of honey is not similar to sugar, even though it gives sweetness. If you are directly substituting sugar with honey, just make sure that your recipe allows you to do it because it's not really possible to do that because you will not get the same amount of leavening or the crispy texture which you require. Just be mindful of that.
10. Recipe 2- The Perfect Brown Butter Cookie: The second recipe is chocolate chip cookies. I'll briefly explain you the ingredients which I'm using and then I'll explain you the method. I'm using some all-purpose flour and some baking soda and salt. The reason I'm using all-purpose flour is because I want the cookies to be a little bit more chewy. I want the flour to have a little bit of gluten in it that is why I'm not using gig flour in this case. I'm also using some unsalted butter. Make sure it's unsalted because unsalted butter has less water content. It makes the cookies taste much better. I'm also using a combination of white sugar and brown sugar. Brown sugar gives a really nice texture and a really nice flavor to the cookies. It also gives a really nice color as well, so I like using it. I like using it in a combination with white sugar because white sugar gives a little bit more crispiness. I'm also using some dark chocolate in the recipe. I prefer using dark chocolate over chocolate chips because dark chocolate has more percentage of cocoa in it, which tastes much better and it's more healthier as well. Usually the chocolate chip we get in the supermarket. It has a lot of oil, especially palm oil in it, which is not really healthy and it doesn't have a lot of cocoa mass in it. It doesn't really taste as good. I would recommend get some really good quality dark chocolate and just chop it out, prepare it roughly, and we'll fold that in the butter right at the end. To start off with, what I'll do is I'll brown this butter and I'll show that to you now. Take a pot and put it on medium heat and put some butter in it. What we're doing is we're basically melting the butter and then we're browning it. We're [inaudible] the milk solids. That basically gives a really amazing flavor to the butter. We get those hazy nut tones and that would make our cookies taste really good as well. This probably takes about 2-3 minutes, not more than that. As you can see now, you can see it's slightly brownish color and then milk solids galvanizing in the bottom. Our butter is now ready, so let's just take it off the heat. Our brown butter is really nice and golden. This is exactly what you want. We have to cool this down for maybe 15-20 minutes. You can put this in the fridge for like 10 minutes. But when you add the sugars and egg, the butter has to be at room temperature. It cannot be hot, otherwise, we won't get the texture. It has been about 15 minutes and the butter feels room temperature now. I'm going to add the sugars. Now we're going to whisk this until it completely blends together. At this point, you can even use a stand mixer or a hand machine. You don't have to do it with your hand. It's much easier to do it with a machine. I've been doing this for about one minute now. Now I'm going to add the egg. We repeat this until it becomes really nice and creamy. Also make sure that the egg is at room temperature when you add it. When you get a thick texture and when you can see the sugars dissolved, that means the mixture is ready. Just take a sieve, it's very important to sieve it because otherwise you might find the clumps of flour and it doesn't taste that nice there. Now, I'm just going to fold that together. Once it's almost ready, we just add the chocolate in it. The dough should be slightly thick. We're going to chill this down, so then it sets completely. Then it'll be easy to shape the cookies. We've chilled the batter for about three hours, and if you can push this, do it overnight like it just stays much better the next day as well. What I'll do is I'll use an ice cream scoop. You can use the other one as well and make sure you press it out. You can even use a spoon, it works either way. I'm going to line this tray with a baking paper. Now, I'll shape about one tablespoon, about that much. Just make something like that and just put it on the baking paper. Once you've shaped the cookies, you spread them across. If you want, you can refrigerate it and then bake it as well. We can do that as well. But I'm going to bake it directly and I preheated my oven for about 15 minutes at 200 degrees, and these should take anywhere between 12-15 minutes. I'll show you a technique in which, because I want more flatter cookies, so in after 10 minutes, I take the tray out and I bang it on the table so it makes it really flat. These are finally ready. What I'm going to do now is take a spatula like this. It's basically like a flat one. I'm going to pick these up and put it on a cooling rack. Just to finish them, sprinkle a little bit of sea salt. Now, my favorite things to do is finish with some dark chocolate, such as the heat of the cookie will slightly melt it. This is completely optional, but I really like the taste of this. After it's cooled down for about 10 minutes, I'll just show you the texture. It's really nice and chewy from the center, and really nice and crispy from the side. The chocolate melts because of the heat. It gets really nice and gluey. My favorite way to eat this is just dip it in some milk. You guys should definitely make this recipe, it's so good.
11. Eggs- The Natural Leavener: In this lesson, I'm going to describe the role of eggs in baking. Eggs is just such an amazing ingredient because it binds everything together and gives our cakes and batters such a good texture when you bake it. It can also be used to aerate in case of mousses or souffles, and it also causes leavening. It's also a really great emulsifier, especially when we make custards or flans. Eggs has two parts, basically, one is the white and the other one is the yolk. The white mostly has protein in it and the yolk has fats. The white is surely good if you want to aerate, maybe make meringues or if you want to lighten textures, but if you want a silky texture, then the yolks are really good.
12. Recipe 3-The Softest Orange Chiffon Cake: I'm going to briefly explain the ingredients that you're going to use and a little bit about the process we're going to follow. First step, you measure all the ingredients. What I've done is I've separated the sugars in two bowls. What I'm going to do with this, this is going to go in the egg yolk mixture and this one I'm going to use for the meringue. I'm using white sugar because I don't want to use a sugar which overpowers the flavor of an orange because I want this to stand out. I'm using cake flour and I've also added some baking powder to this just to give it an extra leavening. These are two whole oranges, you can get any type of oranges you have available. I'm also going to zest this because the zest has more flavor than the juice because of the oils which come out of the zest. Don't miss that step because that's very important. I'm also using vegetable oil because I want the oil to give some amount of moisture in the cake. I'm not using butter because I personally feel this cake oil serves a better purpose than butter because we don't need the flavor of the butter in the cake, because we have oranges. We need something more neutral, so I think oil is much better. I'm also using some eggs. Make sure that these are at room temperature because it emulsifies better with the other ingredients. Before we start the recipe, the first step is always to prepare our cake pan. Just put some melted butter, and you're going to put a piece of baking paper here so that we can easily take it out when it's completely baked. The easiest way to do this is to fold this into a square, and then fold this again. Fold this into half again, something like that. What we'll do now is we measure from the center and we just got it from there with a scissor. Now I just want to check if it fits. Once we've got the bottom, once the cake is baked, it'd be really easy to pull out the cake because most of the time, the cake gets stuck in the bottom, but the sides, it's not that hard to take it out. After we've measured all our ingredients, I'm going to start putting them all together. I'm going to show you how to separate eggs. It's very important to separate them properly because if there is any eggshell or part of egg yolk in the white, you won't get a stable meringue. Best way of doing this is, put in a bowl. You can do it with an eggshell as well, but I'll just do it with the hand, and just put it here. If you want to use gloves, you can do that as well. You can even do it like this. Just use the eggshell, whatever you find comfortable. After you finish zesting the oranges, you're going to juice them, and we need about 90 ml of the juice. I'm just going to get a glass, and just take a sieve. You can definitely use a juicer for this, but I don't really have one. I'm just going to measure 90 ml of the juice. Perfect. You can definitely drink the rest because it's so tasty. Just whisk this. It's really easy, you just add the sugar and then add the oil. Until it's completely combined, I'll be just sifting the flour. We just take a sieve and this is our flour and baking powder. This step like release a really nice and really light texture, so I would definitely not skip it. Once you add this, just gently fold it with a spatula, and you don't want to see any lumps in the batter. If you see any lumps, just keep mixing. So bad batter is now ready. This is the base of the batter and now we're going to make a French meringue and we're going to fold it through. The French meringue will basically give it a really light texture and also basically help it to rise even more. When you make a meringue, the basic tips are that there should not be any water anywhere near the egg whites because then it will not rise and also there shouldn't be any fats. Just make sure that the bowl you put the egg whites in is purely clean and also make sure that your whisk is really clean like there's no water in it. What we now do is just start whisking this. I'll use a machine to do this because doing it with hand is just too tiring. Once you see it starts to form like this, we slowly going to add the sugar and keep beating until it gets really shiny. As you can see, it's got really shiny and it's got really fluffy as well. Now we will start folding this in our base batter. The first step, you take about 1/3 one just mix it really vigorously just to make batter light. The next step, you fold it gently. Just the last addition. You don't want to mix this too much as well. Just when you can see it's combined and you can't see any light meringue, this is perfect. Now we're going to put this in my cake mold. What we need to do before we bake it, just give it a depth and we're going to bake this for about 50-60 Minutes at 160 degrees. After 15 minutes, I've just taken this out of the oven, and I'm going to check if it's baked. Just put a skewer and if it comes out clean, that means it's done. With this cake, we need to put that upside down to prevent it from collapsing in the center. So just hold it like that and just cool this down for about 20-30 minutes and then we'll put it upside down and then we'll take it out of the mold. It's been about half an hour, and what I'm going to do now is take a spatula and just loosen it from the sides. Let me just take the cooling bar and just flip it, like that. Then take a plate and just put it there at the bottom, and just flip it like that. You could do lot of things with it. You could put whip cream, icing sugar, some fruits, berries, yogurt, whatever you like putting on this cake. The cake is basically a base for all sorts of different fillings. I'll just cut a piece and show you. It's so soft. This cake just exactly taste like eating an orange, which is that it's so soft and so moist from the inside as well.
13. All About Dairy : In this lesson, we're going to discuss the role of dairy in baking. Dairy is such an amazing ingredient, because it has so many different roles. We can use dairy to give structure to our bake products, and it holds and binds everything together. You can also use dairy to emulsify in case of custards and ice creams, and we can use dairy when we want to tenderize beef products in case of breads, even cakes. I'm going to discuss the different types of dairy products we can use in baking, so that you can develop a better understanding when you're baking with them. These are the most commonly used dairy products in baking, and probably the most commonly used is milk. It's used in everything because it has such good properties, maybe in cake butters, muffins, scones, even ice cream custards. Probably you can use it in so many things, really versatile as fat. If you are lactose intolerant, I use soy milk, because soy milk has good amount of protein in it. It is good substitute of milk, so you can definitely use that. The other one's yogurt. Yogurt is slightly acidic in nature, also, it's slightly higher in fats. You could use this in cake butters and even in some doughs, but just make sure to use tenderer baking soda, so that it reacts with the acidic side of yogurt. It makes really tender products as well. I really like eating a yogurt cake, so I definitely experiment with that as well. This is cream cheese, and cream cheese is famous for cheese cakes. It's very nice as well because it's really rich, and I really like using it in frostings, even fillings in different cakes, makes really good component. The next one's whipping cream. This one's got 35 percent fat in it, and it's really good for whipping. But the other cream you have available has 30 percent fat, so just make sure if you have whipping cream, the fat percentage is 35 percent. This one's really good if you're making ice creams, even some frostings, some fillings, ganache, so many different uses. This one's buttermilk. Buttermilk is basically a little bit more thicker compared to milk and slightly more acidic as well, so you have to use this with maybe baking soda to get a nice leavening, and it gives a really tender product as well. Even in case of waffles and pancakes, you can use buttermilk. If you don't have buttermilk, what you could do is take one cup of milk and add maybe two tablespoons of vinegar in it. Any neutral fit flavored vinegar would do, and just keep it outside for a while and it'll just become very thick and buttermilk-like.
14. Fats- The Ultimate Tenderiser : In this lesson, I'm going to discuss the role of fats in baking and fats is something we use so often as pastry chefs. Literally like every day we're using butter or oil. What fat does is that it basically tenderizes baked products. Think about cakes, brownies, muffins. It's basically coating the flour. It's making the products really tender. Also in case of pastries and [inaudible], we basically layering the fats and the dough. What happens is when this bakes the moisture in the fat, it evaporates and that causes the dough to raise and create such beautiful layers. Fats is also used when we cream butter and sugar together. What that does is that it basically creates air and it causes lifting. I'm going to discuss the different types of fats, which is basically liquid fats, which is oils, and solid fat, which is butter. What are the advantages of using each and when you can use them. These are three textures of butter. I'm going to explain when to use each. The first one is solid. We use this if we have to rub the butter against flour. If we're making maybe scorns or if we're making [inaudible] crust, and also in puff pastry if you're making rough puff pastry. What that does is that, basically it coats the flour and when you bake it, you get that flaky texture. Also if the steam evaporates and it also leavens the pastry. That is really useful in that case. The second one, the softened butter. This is really useful if you're creaming butter with sugar because it basically incorporates the sugar really well if it's soft, also if you're aligning cake buns [inaudible]. Really nice to use softened butter. Melted butter, used in brownies and cookies, waffles. Basically melted butter causes the product to spread slightly. If you want the cookies to spread, use melted butter. In the recipe I'll show you later, for cookies I use melted butter in that because I want it to spread slightly. I think it's really important to understand when you can use which type of butter because it helps to make better products. I'll briefly speak about the differences between using oil and butter in baking. We use oil if we want the texture of the cake to be really moist because oil does not solidify at room temperature. Also, we can use oil in different breads because oil incorporates very easily and because oil does not have any water in it, it does not affect the recipe as much. Also oils like olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, tastes really good in Italian breads. It's really useful in that case. We use butter when we want it solidify in case of [inaudible] so that it dries when it bakes. Now to when we want to incorporate air, and we cream butter and sugar together. Also, when we want a more pronounced flavor, I think butter would be a better choice to use. Also butter leads to more tender cakes. That is the main difference between both the fats.
15. Recipe 4-Lemon and Berries Bundt Cake: The cake pan we're using for this recipe is called a bundt pan. It's got a really nice design. If we want to bake a cake in this, we have to ensure we butter it well, and also put a flour coating on it, otherwise, the cake tends to stick. Just put butter well across that. Once you've buttered the cake, just put a little bit of flour, and just move the cake pan around. Just at the end tap it. You get a nice coating of flour all around. You don't want extra flour to be stuck there, so that's why we tap the floor out. I'm going to briefly explain the ingredients we're going to use. This is basically a pound cake. Traditionally, pound cake had equal parts of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs, but this recipe is slightly different because I wanted to make it a little bit more easier. The butter we're using is unsalted butter, and we're also using some cake flour and baking powder. Baking powder is for additional leavening, and it really helps to get a very light texture in this cake. Also, I'm using caster sugar. This is white sugar. You can also use a combination of different sugars, but I like using white sugar in this cake. I'm also using a little bit of vanilla. Vanilla gives a really nice flavor. This is a vanilla bean paste. Make sure to get a real vanilla paste and not the imitation because this one tastes really good. I'm also using some room temperature eggs. For this recipe make sure that the eggs are at room temperature, otherwise, the batter will tend to split when you mix the eggs. I'm going to start putting everything together now. It's a really easy as a pie. What you do is you take the flour and then you just add the butter in it. The butter has to be slightly soft. Then you add the sugar as well. You could use a mixer for this, but I'm just going to use my hands and show you how it's done. We just have to basically coat the flour with the butter and create a breadcrumb texture. This leads to a really nice and soft cake. The texture of the dough it's basically like it's absorbed all the butter, and basically the butter has coated the flour, and that's what creates a really nice texture. When you get this consistency, I'm going to add a teaspoon of vanilla. I've just got a vanilla paste which we'll add there. I'm also going to add some lemon zest. This is completely optional, but I really like the flavor of this. You could even add orange zest if you want to. After you've added the zest, what we do is we add the eggs one at a time because we want it to emulsify really well. If we add it all together, the batter might end up splitting. I'm just going to show you the texture of the batter when I make it. As you can see, the batter is really nice and smooth. It's not split at all because whatever ingredients we were using were at room temperature. We don't really need to mix it more than this because we don't want to form the gluten. I find this method really easy because traditionally pound cakes take so much time to make. I also like adding a little bit of rum in this cake, but this is also completely optional. About one tablespoon just at the end. This gives a really nice flavor and just mix it through. Now we're going to bake this for about 50 minutes, maybe 40-50 minutes at 180 degrees. We'll check it after 40 minutes with a skewer and see if it needs more time. After we feel batter, just take a spoon and just smoothen it out just to level it. I'm going to check if it's baked. If it comes out clean that means it's baked. We're going to just cool this upside down. If you do this, it doesn't deflate. Maybe cool it for like 30 minutes. Then I'm going to unmold it. I'm going to show you how to make a sugar glaze. This is really easy. You could use this in anything ranging from donuts to cakes even muffins. You can just put this on top. It gives a really nice color and texture. Super easy to make, icing sugar and milk. The important part is to sift the icing sugar before we start mixing in the milk. So just take some. We do this to remove all the lumps. After we've done that, just add a tablespoon of milk to start off with and start whisking it. This has to be quite thick, so we don't want to add all the milk at one go. I need to add a little bit more because I still have some icing sugar. This should be enough. That's perfect. So you see the consistency, it's really thick, but at the same time, you can pour it. It's been about 20 minutes. I'm just going to unmold the cake now. It looks really beautiful, it's got a really nice shape all across. It came out really cleanly from the mold because we had lined it so nicely with butter and flour. I'm just going to put the glaze on the cake now. When you bring the glaze, the cake should be slightly warm. When you glaze the cake just make sure there's a plastic sheet below so it's easy to clean up. Just pour the glaze on the top of the cake and see how it nicely just covers it in super raw status path. You can see it's nicely covered the cake and just let it sit for about 5-10 minutes so it just drips down on the plastic sheet. Then you can take that glaze and pour it over again so that you don't really waste any glaze. Let it sit for like 10, 15 minutes, and then we can finish the cake. Just take a baking paper and a cake board. This is not necessary if you have just a basic setup like a baking paper it should work as well. Just take the cake with a pallet knife. I'm going to put some raspberries and strawberries, and I've got some sunflower from my garden just to decorate the cake. You can use anything you want. You can use any type of berries. You can use zest of any fruits. It's just like a blank canvas. You can put anything you want. Another tool which I like using is a tweezer, it looks like this. They're useful when you're finishing desserts. In case I'm putting flower petals, it's just maintains the flower petal, doesn't destroy it. It's really easy as well. It's time to finally cut the cake. This is my favorite part. The cake is so soft and nice. Let me show you the crumb. Such a nice crumb.
16. Thank you: We've reached the end of this class and I can't tell you how proud I am of the progress you've made. I would love to see pictures of your desserts and your baking and I would also like for you to follow me on YouTube, on Instagram so that we can keep in touch. If you have any questions, please feel free to message me on those platforms as well. Thank you again for joining me and I hope I could help you on your baking journey.
Shubranshu Bhandoh, Baker/Pastry Chef - Le Cordon Bleu
