Techniques: The Basics

These basic techniques are as common in recipes as chopping is.  Even if you’re familiar with these techniques read on below – you may learn something new!

Sources: The New Food Lover’s Companion, Baking & Pastry Fundamentals (Johnson & Wales Textbook), How Baking Works, AllRecipes.com, Wikipedia, my personal class notes, my senior thesis

Roasting Nuts
Browning Butter (and making a roux)
Clarifying Butter (versus melting butter)
Blooming Gelatin
Using Cornstarch
Tempering Eggs
Separating eggs

Roasting Nuts (also called toasting nuts, toasted nuts)
Roasting nuts is a kitchen fundamental that helps get more flavor out of your nuts.

Roasting nuts brings out the nuts’ oils so roasted nuts can go rancid faster.  Roasted nuts are commonly used in recipes where the product isn’t baked.  Examples would include garnishes, cream pies, and candies.  Adding roasted nuts to a product that will be baked is not necessarily a bad idea, but the nut should get roasted during the baking process and a pre-roasted nut may actually burn and become bitter.

There are two methods for roasting nuts – which method you choose is typically based on how much you need roasted.  The first method involves the oven.  Preheat your oven to 350 – 400 degrees.  Place you nuts on a sheet pan in a single layer – you can line your sheet pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil if you’d like but it isn’t necessary.  Place the nuts in the oven for about 3-5 minutes and stir.  Then place your nuts back in the oven for another 2-3 minutes.  In total your nuts should be in the oven for about 8-12 minutes.  Your nuts will have developed a darker color and your kitchen should smell strongly of nuts.  This method is best for roasting lots of nuts.

The second method is the stove top method where you toast nuts in a skillet or pan on medium to medium-high heat.  Stir infrequently to make sure all the nuts are getting roasted evenly.  This method shouldn’t take much longer than the oven method.  It is best for when you’re roasting a small amount of nuts – like a cup.

One type of nut you might want to consider not roasting is pistachio.  Pistachios do develop a richer more intense flavor during roasting but they may also lose their green color.  Consider how you plan to use your pistachios – if they’re for a garnish, don’t roast them; if you are folding them into a meringue, roast them.

Browning Butter (and making a roux)
Browned butter is more commonly used in culinary applications, particularly with fish.  Brown butter has a rich nutty flavor that adds complexity to foods and sauces.  Experiment with browned butter in a cookie or cake recipe.  The browning comes from the milk solids getting cooked by the heat.

To brown butter, simply warm up butter slowly in a pot.  Continue to cook until it develops an amber color while stirring constantly (to prevent burning).

A roux is a very common base for making sauces and is indispensable in culinary applications.  At home it is most commonly used to make gravy but other common uses include cream sauce and cheese sauce.  The most common use of a roux in baking and pastry is making pate a choux dough which is used to make pastries such as éclairs and cream puffs.

To make a roux start off using the same procedure as browning butter.  As soon as the foam subsides sprinkle in flour and stir constantly.  Cook the flour for about 2-3 minutes to cook out the starchy flavor.  The result is a roux to which you can begin to add liquid (like broth or milk) or eggs.  When making a roux, you don’t really want to brown the butter before you add the flour as you may accidentally contribute a scorched flavor to your sauce.

Clarifying Butter (versus melting butter)
Clarified butter is butter than has had impurities removed and water and milk solids taken out.  In India and South Asia it is a culinary staple and is called ghee.  Clarified butter is supposed to have an indefinite shelf life (microbes can’t grow without water – I mean you try living in a vat full of grease) and should be able to cook at a much higher temperature since the solids that would burn have been removed.  Clarified butter, along with coconut oil, is what gives movie popcorn its characteristic flavor.  Clarified butter will not make your popcorn soggy but will still contribute a rich buttery flavor.

To clarify butter you simply need to warm it up slowly on the stove in a pot.  (If you are careful you can use the microwave to warm up the butter – which is what most restaurants do.  Stove space is valuable real estate and making clarified butter is a waste of space.)  Eventually, the butter will separate into a foam, a clear yellow middle (clarified butter), and a cloudy whitish bottom layer (the milk solids, water, salt, and impurities).  Skim off the foam using a spoon.  At this point you can separate the clarified butter several ways.  One method is to carefully pour out the clarified butter into another container avoiding spilling any of the bottom layer out.  A second method which is very popular on the Internet is to refrigerate the melted butter.  The clarified butter should remain fluid while the milk solids will have solidified and you can easily pour out the clarified butter.  Another method involves scooping out the clarified butter using a spoon or ladle.

Melted butter, on the other hand, is all three layers.  Melted butter is commonly used in cakes and pancake batter.  When butter is melted it loses any air cells that may have been trapped when it was solidified, reducing some of its ability to physically leaven products.  Water is still in melted butter so steam can still physically leaven your baked good.  It is easier to incorporate into batters by combining with eggs or the liquid ingredients.  When you melt butter, even in the microwave, you should use the same care as if you were making browned butter or clarified butter.  You are not trying to heat it up and forget it.  Once completely melted stir all the layers together to have a homogenous-looking mixture.

Blooming Gelatin
Gelatin comes in two forms: sheet and granulated.  Sheet gelatin is almost only available commercially so don’t bother looking for it.  Granulated gelatin is most commonly available in grocery stores as Knox unflavored gelatin.

In order to properly use gelatin it must be prepared correctly.  The first step is called blooming which is a process of hydrating the gelatin.  In a pot, add the liquid ingredients that you are blooming your gelatin in.  The liquid ingredients can be almost anything but water and juice work best.  I find that you can bloom in milk/cream but it doesn’t work as well.  Also, if you bloom in juice (or are trying to gelatinize juice) keep in mind that tropical fruits like kiwi and mango must be boiled before using.  They contain an enzyme that won’t allow the gelatin to set up.  Next, sprinkle your gelatin into the liquid.  Do not allow it to clump up – sometimes stirring after sprinkling the gelatin in can help prevent clumping.  Allow to sit for 3-5 minutes.  This sitting time is blooming.

After the gelatin has been hydrated/bloomed, warm it on the stove on a low heat to melt it.  Stir occasionally.  Do not allow your bloomed gelatin to boil.  Boiling with denature the gelatin proteins and it will not set up.  Once the bloomed gelatin has been melted down and you no longer see any granules it is ready to use.  If you want to add sugar to your product, add it to the bloomed gelatin before you begin melting it.  The sugar should be completely melted just like the gelatin granules.

I have found in practice that to make a standard gelatin the ratio is about ¼ ounce of unbloomed granulated gelatin (conveniently one pouch of Knox gelatin) to 14-16 ounces of liquid.  For a tougher gelatin that can have a bite to it use about 11-13 ounces of liquid and for a more tender gelatin that must be served in a glass use around 20-24 ounces of liquid.

Using Cornstarch
Cornstarch is a starch that is used to thicken liquids, just like flour.  Cornstarch is more

resistant to burning than flour is.  That’s why bakers prefer to use it over flour.  Cornstarch also thickens more than flour does (supposedly twice as much), so you need less cornstarch than flour to thicken a sauce.  Cornstarch has to be used a certain way in order for it work predictably 100% of the time.

The most common way cornstarch is prepared to be added to a recipe is to be dissolved in cold water.  Hot water may cause cornstarch to lump up no matter despite how much you whisk it.  After the cornstarch is dissolved in cold water, you bring your liquid ingredients (not the cornstarch mixture) to a boil.  Then add your cornstarch slurry to the boiling liquid and boil for 1 -3 minutes while constantly whisking.  This 1 – 3 minutes of cook time cooks out the starchy flavor of cornstarch, makes the cornstarch translucent, and makes the cornstarch actually thicken.  Cornstarch also gives the thickened sauce a glossy finish.

I find that even when using cold water cornstarch can lump up or even settle to the bottom of the bowl.  To make the cornstarch more cooperative, I add some of the recipe’s granulated sugar to the cornstarch and stir them together before adding in water.

Cornstarch can start to break down 3 to 4 days after cooking so the sauce can begin to

separate.  Rice flour has been commonly used as a thickener because it doesn’t break down and holds on to water much better than cornstarch can – but I don’t have any experience using rice flour as a thickener.  Arrowroot is another thickener that is available.  It is not as common as cornstarch and is the most expensive thickener out of cornstarch, flour, and rice flour.  Arrowroot is great though because it is stronger than cornstarch, has no flavor, and can thicken at lower temperatures.  In addition it doesn’t break down.

Tempering Eggs
Tempering eggs is a technique that you need to use whenever you are adding eggs to a hot liquid.  It is most commonly used when making custards such as flan, pastry cream, or crème anglais.  In each of these recipes, milk/heavy cream and sugar are brought to a boil on the stove.  Then the boiled liquid is added to the eggs.  The process of carefully incorporating the boiling milk to the eggs is called tempering.

To temper eggs, slowly drizzle in a steady stream of the hot liquid into the eggs while constantly whisking.  This allows the eggs to steadily – but quickly – warm up to the liquid’s temperature.  If you were to add the very hot liquid to the eggs all at once the eggs would coagulate and turn into scrambled eggs.

After the eggs are incorporated the custard is then slowly cooked to a maximum temperature of 180 degrees.  In the case of crème anglais this is done on the stove and when the custard reaches 180 degrees it is called “nappe” which means it coats the back of a spoon.  An old school way of checking for a good nappe is to coat the back of a spoon with the crème anglais and blow hard in one spot.  The crème anglais should get blown away into a flower/mum shape.  In the case of flan, the custard is slow wet baked in the oven.  This means it is baked in the oven in a water bath at a lower temperature.  This helps make sure that the product sets up evenly.

Separating Eggs
Many recipes incorporate egg yolks and egg whites separately for different reasons. One reason is that egg whites whip up significantly better when the yolks are removed. That means lighter, airier, and fluffier meringues and chiffons. Some cakes will even ask you to whip up the egg yolks as well for even more volume. Some recipes separate the eggs to make the product healthier. Other recipes only use the whites to make the product more shelf stable or to only add precisely what is needed in the egg white (one example of this is royal icing).  Still other recipes, like custards, use extra yolks for their fat content. Whatever the reason, separating an egg is an indispensable technique that you should master as soon as possible. If in time you find that you are separating a ton of eggs it may be in your best interest to look into buying frozen egg whites and egg yolks from restaurant supply stores. Egg whites found in supermarkets are pasteurized and are great for royal icing but cannot be whipped up to make meringues or chiffons. Egg whites supplied by baking supply distributors contain whipping agents to help them whip up and are safer because they are pasteurized.  Be aware that you often have to buy these products in bulk which can eat up a ton of space in your freezer.

To separate an egg, carefully crack the egg on one or two sides. You want the crack to go around the egg’s middle so you have two deep hallow grapefruit-like halves. Crack it as cleanly as possible since any sharp edges can pierce the yolk. After you crack the egg shell, slowly and carefully pull it apart allowing the egg white to drip into a bowl. There is still more egg white you can claim in the shell and you can get more of it by carefully passing the egg yolk back and forth between the two shell halves. Once you’re finished you can place the egg yolk into a separate bowl.  View the video below for more guidance!

Here are more tips when separating eggs:

• When separating several eggs you might want to use two bowls for egg whites.  Use one to separate into (a staging area if you will) and then pour that one into a larger bowl (an egg white reservoir).  That way if you happen to break a yolk, get a bloody egg, or otherwise mess up you only have to throw out one egg white instead of all of them.
• If you are making a meringue or chiffon you should always wipe out any bowls and wipe off any utensils that the egg whites will touch with a paper towel dampened with vinegar.  The vinegar will break down and clean off any fat residue left on your equipment.  Any fat present will inhibit your egg whites from reaching their maximum volume.
• If you’re separating several eggs keep the used shells accessible that way you have back up shells to use just in case you mess up cracking one of the other eggs.
• If you accidentally drop the yolk into your whites or a little yolk drips down, you can use a shell to scoop it up.
• Crack your eggs in a plastic grocery bag to keep your work area clean and sanitary.

Check out this video on how to separate an egg if you need more guidance: