Bakistry: The Science of Sweets | Lecture 9 (2012)

okay so I guess we should start oops so can I have my sorry okay so I get to be the warm-up act for Jo Ann tonight which is really fun so okay I promise joy and this would be terrible and it will be so okay so it turns out that I've actually and I've never told her this I felt a kindred connection to Jo Ann ever since we started this cooking class when's do we start this two years ago and there's a reason for it that all of you may not be aware of so it turns out that Jo Ann was a graduate of Harvard College true and her major was Applied Mathematics true so it turns out I run the applied math major at Harvard and when I started you know the first year when Dave and I and all of the people we were all putting together that's good in class I often thought to myself how did a poor nice mathematician end up doing this and then I would think of Joanne and and of course she's escape from mathematics which is good and and so because if she hadn't you all wouldn't be here but anyway so I decided today to sort of show Joanne and all of you what happens to a mathematician when they think about baking and and it's really gonna be bad and I want to show this you and it's called bakery phase diagrams so phase diagrams because Joanne you may not know this but we talked a lot in this lecture series about phase diagrams we've got to face arms and everything but today I'm going to show you recipe phase diagrams okay you ready so the first thing I'm supposed to do before getting into that is the tank our sponsor so as you all know this lecture series has a rich list of sponsors so Jose Andres is saying food group the Elysia foundation Whole Foods at River Street is continuing to donate food for our undergraduate labs and you all should please shop there so we're totally olive oil cause a chocolate specialty foods Boston and Oya so it is also true I was also told to tell all of you that this is an aside but it's an important one if you're interested in this so Ferran adrià is coming I believe on December 3rd the tickets for him so they're free tickets but they're available at Harvard's box office on November 29th I hope I got the number right yeah I did it right okay so if you want to go you have to get tickets so that's the only ticket of their events okay so um it's okay so I'm going to tell you a little story that was done with a bunch of undergraduates and a graduate student at Harvard and I do it very quickly it's called bakery phase diagrams so they're so there's this long list of people and I put three of their pictures up here Oh Lane Angelino diana chi elaine is a computer science graduate student Ariana's the computer science undergraduate Naveen is a graduate student in cooking extraordinary science and cooking person who must be here someplace and then there's a whole host of undergraduates and um we decided to try to make phase diagrams of recipes and so here's the deal so we're gonna so Joanna's gonna talk about baking and it's going to teach us a lot about it and so here's a recipe of four sugar cookies and if you look at any recipe on allrecipes.com you will notice that there are two parts there are the ingredients and there are the directions so right now we're only going to focus on the ingredients since this problem is already too hard for me so okay so now as you all know you know the absolute amount of ingredients doesn't matter all that really matters is the ratio so I mean you might consider you know the various the relative amounts of things is all that matters and so for example if you want to think about this simply so here's like a standard bread recipe you know you can mix water and flour and get bread so forty percent is water sixty percent is flour and that's bread and so now since we want to make bakery phase diagrams what we're going to do is very unusual and we're going to express this on a plot so what you can do is you can make a plot where you can plot flour on the x-axis and water on the y-axis and you can put a dot at the bread recipe see this is what would have happened here if you hadn't escaped so so so in you know you can then sort of play around with it and think about recipes that way and of course it works for bread but it also works for more complex recipes too like here's my favorite brownie recipe so you can take all the ingredients and they have percentages there are lots of ingredients and you know of course you can't represent all of them on a plot because I don't know about you but I can only make a plot with two and at most three axes and so you know you just pick a couple of your favorite ones and you start making plots so sugar or cocoa powder flour things like this so here is the brownie recipe on a plot so this is um flour and this is sugar and that star is the brownie recipe this is the Baker's breasts brownies recipe which is the only one I know how to make so okay so um anyway so that's one dot so you say well that's very interesting well what about all recipes wouldn't it be great if you could do that for everything so well this is the 21st century and so um and so well you can imagine doing this and so what we did is the following thing so Elaine and Diana downloaded I just may not be a legal aspect we downloaded all the recipes from our recipes calm so we have an Excel spreadsheet which has on it all the recipes and once you have them then you can start making plots and this is a bit of a trick I take tricky matter to do that isn't there's a lot of steps and I'm gonna go through them very quickly because you guys want to hear Joanne you know you have to you have to look at the everything then you have to look at the HTML source code then you have to figure out how to find the patterns and it's just a nightmare and you write computer programs it's really a nightmare and you end up with this thing with all this thing that's our spreadsheet you see and anyway but then when you're done you can say gee I know about the baker's best brownie recipe what do all the brownie recipes look like and so we did this and this is the answer so this is sugar this is water and those are all the brownie recipes in our recipes calm so isn't that interesting so now it's not clear what it means and so then you say well so then you say well gee you know what about other recipes this is so great so you can take the brownie recipe and then you take a sugar cookie recipe and you notice that the sugar cookie has different ingredients than the brownie you knew that already but so then you can say well let's make lots of sugar cookies so you take all the sugar cookies and there's all the sugar cookies on the thing and then you say well what about pancakes and so you know there are pancakes those are all the pancake recipes and then you sort of go crazy and you have lots of four things everywhere and then if you're creative so this is the only way you can create a new food if you're a mathematician is you didn't say well look there's a star so that must be a new food so see we discovered a new food so that's how we discover new foods and so so okay but now I want and I'm just as you can take three more minutes is that you then say well because we're supposed to ask questions I mean it's question of what you do with this it's not clear what you're supposed to do with this but um but anyway so here's a question this is one thing that we did with this um so you can ask yourself here's a question what constrain the set of recipes that's an interesting question I mean so how many of you have cooked brownies so um what's the one you so when you cook brownies then there's just a little region of phase space that has brownies and if you go far out maybe it'll be something else so you can ask why is that so we sort of we're sitting around wondering what constrains them and we came up with two hypotheses that I wanted to show you there are two hypotheses so here they are the two hypotheses number one is history and number two is physics and let me explain what I mean by that so history goes by the following thing well there have been a few creative chefs in all of eternity and they invent new dishes and everyone else just tinker's with them and makes new dishes and the reason that the brownie recipes look like they you is because that's just the way brownies are that's number two is physics so you could say the laws of physics are brutal the recipes that can be invented have been invented the recipes that haven't been tried don't work that's those are the two possibilities right and you know if you're a poor mathematician see if you hadn't then you would have this the only shot you have of inventing a new food so anyway so I just want to tell you about history we don't have time so so I'm gonna show you a little bit of history and then we're gonna stop so let me show you what I mean by this so suppose you go to allrecipes.com and you find a recipe so this is a recipe for an gales oatmeal cookies and then suppose somebody else you go and you find another recipe here's another recipe it's coconut rolled sugar cookies and then suppose you want to pretend like you're smart because you don't know how to cook like me and you say well I want to invent a new recipe so here is something you could do what you could do is you could average the two recipes so you just take the two recipes and you add them together and then you say well I've done it I've invented a new recipe we do that all the time okay so the question is is is that really a new recipe so who thinks it's a new recipe who thinks it's not a new recipe Wow most of you didn't vote this is new things it's a new recipe who thinks it's not a new recipe okay so I think they're not a new recipe one I don't really think it's new recipe I mean come on it took two things that were known and you averaged them that's not new I mean you wouldn't apply that to any other part of your life so red and yellow and you mix them together and you make a new color okay that's a good point but let's ignore that for the moment so so what we wanted to ask ourselves was to what extent are the brownie recipes in all recipes calm to what extent do they reflect creativity and to what express today is like new and we actually saw Elaine and I did a little test we wanted to see if allrecipes.com would take any brownie recipe so we put up a recipe which contained broccoli as an ingredient and they wouldn't take it they've done a reactive so apparently they do have some standards so so the question is to what extent are these are these averages of things so that we so we so we wanted to find this out so the following is what we did we we went we start calling up people and we said can you tell us what the most important recipes for brownies and cookies that were ever invented were just tell us and so we were sent to lots of old books and we went to the old books we got the recipes and we plotted them on the phase diagram so these are the candidates so they're these points these are cannons pre 1,900 1,900 1950 I said these are we just call people up and ask for the cannon and then then the question is is how can we tell if the online recipes are new are they merely linear combinations of the cannon and it turns out I'm that and this is what's really cool so Joey and I would like to tell you a mathematical fact there's one mathematical fact actually not Joanne she was an applied mathematics knows this it's the rest of you so it turns out that the set of recipes that can be obtained by averaging the others is inside what is called the convex hull this is you've learned a mathematical term saying of the points and why do you do it sounds really sophisticated because if we all like to make ourselves see it sounds smart but what it really means is the following so what you do is you take all the points and you take the points on the outside you just connect the dots and everything inside is boring so therefore we immediately see that in these recipes there is a huge uncreated region whereas outside there are some hope at creativity it's only around the edges so creativity lives only around the edges anyway that's that's where I wanted to end without ya now actually Joanne thank you first I have to say how incredibly surreal and daunting it is for me to be on this side of the lectern I remember taking computer science 50 when I was a sophomore over 20 years ago and that class kicked my butt and I pulled more all-nighters for that class than any other class and when people ask me did Harvard help you at all in your current career what I tell them is that it taught me that I can pretty much do anything if I can pass cs50 so I want to thank first of all thank professor Brenner for inviting me and thank Harvard for having me it's an incredible honor to be here again this is very strange for me having sat on that side for so long and I also want to give a shout out to Bethany who is a baker for me at flour who created this PowerPoint presentation I didn't really know what PowerPoint was and I knew I had to have some sort of pictures and I reached out to Bethany she says I know how to do it so everything that you see on the screen she she created and developed in 2007 the Food Network approached me and said we are about to start a new series called the science of sweets and we would love for you to film the pilot episode I am fascinated by the relationship between science and baking and so I jumped at the chance and I said I would love to the very first day they came to the bakery and they whisked me and a bunch of sticky buns away and we went into a hotel room and they had me spend an entire day talking about sticky buns and drawing all sorts of fractals and I had to look at Fibonacci sequence because I had forgotten it but I they made me write it up on a board there was there was a lot of stuff that they had me do there was stuff with protractors which I didn't understand what that had to do with chemistry and baking but I figured they're the ones who know what they're doing so I'm just gonna follow their lead the next day the next day they had me teaching sticky buns to a group of actually Harvard students they put a Craigslist ad and said we want you to teach sticky buns and in the middle of my class I look up and I see Bobby Flay and I realized that well actually I had no idea what he was doing there I actually said to him I'm in the middle of doing this pilot episode so I'll have to talk to you later and he said no I'm here to challenge you to a throwdown at that point at that point I said yeah but really inside I was very confused and you'll see in a second I I say really there's no science of sweets I'm really really upset and kind of shocked but in the end see I'm I'm like come on really okay I'm glad I studied so hard for this I'm gonna get past that okay so when I got invited to come to the class then I was really thrilled because now I get to actually talk about the stuff that I was hoping we would talk about in that in that show and then in the end I wasn't that disappointed that Throwdown came because we did win so okay so there are chefs and there are bakers and it seems like there are many more chefs than Baker's but people who like to cook often say that they can't bake they think that it's too precise there's too much chemistry they don't like to measure things they don't want things to be too exact and it's true if you are making something like a beef stew you can start off with beef some onions throw in some carrots add some potatoes put a little salt a little rosemary or I want you fast sorry and taste it let it simmer for an hour so add a little bit more this more that and when the vegetables are cooked and the beef is tender you have beef stew and you feel very proud in baking it's not quite that easy there is definitely for most recipes a sequence that you need to follow and there's also a certain proportion that you need when you're baking science and chemistry is definitely much more important I think in baking than in cooking so what I wanted to do today is share with you my perspective of chemistry and baking that we see in the field I know that in the classroom even just what you just did was so much more than then we do in in the kitchen we don't think about it quite like that but there's definitely a lot of things that we do think about that I want to talk about tonight okay so if I were to do a class or a lecture on the relationship between science and baking it would probably take several weeks because we could talk about cookies custards I'm just trying to make y'all hungry ice cream croissant doughnuts blueberry pie brioche Yasha Cola or bread what's next aha but instead we're gonna talk about cake I'm gonna focus on cake because there's a number of different chemical reactions and scientific things that go on in making a cake that I think hopefully you'll find interesting and the goal in terms of understanding what we're trying to do in making a cake is we want a light fluffy delicious birthday cake which you see right now on the screen so what I thought I would do is just go through the main ingredients and kind of give you my perspective on what I see and from what I understand is going on and if you anybody who does know anything that's different please raise your hand because this is just kind of what we see in the field and it might not actually be the case because I did a little bit of studying for this but again this is just kind of what we see okay so okay so cakes we have butter sugar eggs milk or liquid vanilla for flavoring and flour but I'm going to start with leavening I'm gonna start with leveling leavening because to me this is one of the most important things about baking and especially when you're baking cakes just to give a little bit of background a leavening agent or to leaven is comes from the old Latin word levar which means to raise and basically a leavening agent is something that you mix into your batter to make it rise and grow if you don't have a leavening agent then you're going to end up with something like a mud pie so very important when you're baking cake there are four ways that you can leaven a cake or a batter there's air there's steam there's yeast and there's chemical we're first going to talk about air it's the most basic part of leavening so when you're mixing a cake batter what you want to try to do is create as much air as possible within the cake batter and caps as much air as possible because when air is heated it expands several times over and so if you imagine your batter that has a lot of air in it as soon as it goes into the oven it poof's up a little bit and that's what you want so that you have a fluffy cake so one of the ways that we do this in baking is we cream oops wrong almost we cream butter and sugar together if you take room-temperature butter and then you mix it with sugar if you imagine sugar crystals there they're actual crystals and the way I like to imagine is that it's like when you're gardening and you take a garden hoe and you're hoeing up your garden and you take all of that dirt that's been cold and frozen over the winter and your aerating it that's exactly what the sugar crystals are doing to the butter when you do what's called creaming the butter it gets its name because butter usually looks I don't know how to do this back and forth but if you remember the butter it was yellow and when you add sugar to it a new cream it it ends up looking white and so it ends up looking pale like cream so the action of creaming creates lots of little microscopic air bubbles within the butter and that is the air that's going to help lemon your cake a second step a second way to add air into your cake is by adding eggs into your cake and I'm going to talk about eggs in just a little bit but I wanted to talk about air when you add eggs to a cake batter that the egg acts as an emulsifier which is something that allows you to hold in more air than it would on its own so again I'm going to talk about that in just a sec when I talk about eggs but that's another way we add air when we're and we're creating a cake batter okay the next way is through steam we want to take advantage when we're making a cake batter we want to take advantage of the fact that steam and water when it goes into the oven and gets heated that the water turns to steam and that the steam expands 1,100 times its original volume so whenever you have something that has liquid whenever you have a cake batter that has liquid then as soon as that goes into the oven it's going to turn into steam and then that steam is going to do that little poofing thing that you want to make really light cake so two common ingredients in cakes you have butter which is 80% fat typically about 2% milk solids and then 18% water so that's really really helpful because you have 18% of that butter that you've put in your cake is gonna turn into steam and then egg whites there's often a lot of egg whites within a cake and egg whites are actually 90% water a third way to leaven is with yeast and this isn't a common thing for making cakes but I wanted to bring it up because it's such an important part of baking yeasts are basically single-celled organisms that live in the air there's yeast in the air right now and when you make a bread the yeast come into the bread and they feed on the sugars that are in the bread dough and these yeast actually occur also naturally in things like grapes and if you can see the kind of white stuff that's on the that surrounding the grapes all of that is where yeast lives and so you can make what's called a starter with grapes and flour and water and just mix them all together and then all those yeast will eat the flour and create what's called a starter for bread so the way isse works is you see oh and then so what we've been able to do is we've been able to domesticate so to speak yeast and create the the dry yeast dry yeast packets but just so you understand how you switch there's these single-celled organisms and they feed on sugar and so when you make a bread dough and you mix yeast into it the little yeasts that eat up all the sugar and then just like people they burp and they fart and all of the carbon dioxide that they're burping and farting is what creates the rise in bread dough and so the thing about yeast is that they only like to eat at a certain temperature and they only feel comfortable letting out gas at a certain temperature so you have to keep dough at a certain temperature in order to create the right opportunity to make your bread grow and it also takes a certain amount of time so yeast is very important in baking but it's not used so much in cakes however what is used mostly in terms of leavening cakes are chemical leaveners and there's two main chemical leaveners there's baking soda and baking powder and these have actually only been in existence for about the last 200 plus years before that people only used yeast to make things light but once they discovered baking soda and baking powder they realized that there was a whole world of pastry that was out there and it really really revolutionized the world of pastry just in a very general sense what happens when you use baking soda or baking powder is that these things get mixed into your cake batter or cookie batter or whatever and they react either with heat or with liquid or with acid and then they bubble up and they make little bubbles and those are those air bubbles that we were just talking about that when you put them in the oven the air expands and then you have a cake that's that's light and fluffy so I'm going to first talk about baking soda just to give a little history I thought this was really interesting I didn't know this before I prepared for this class but basically before 1790 they had no baking soda they didn't know to use it I mean they had it but they didn't know what it was for and then they had no baking powder and so people were making breads and sweet breads using yeast and like I was just saying the yeast takes time and it's very fickle it needs a certain room temperature and it needs a certain amount of time and if you don't treat it well it dies and it's just very very fickle and one of the things they discovered is that by accident when you're making a bread dough if you add what's called potage which is K 2 Co 3 it takes away the sour flavor that often develops when you're making a bread that has to sit and proof over time and proof is when the yeasts are doing letting out their gas so breads get more and more sour as they grow you want them to grow but unless you really like sourdough you don't want them to taste that sour so you add this thing called potage which is a it's a byproduct of wood ash and they just found out by accident adding it it took away the sour taste so they started using potage in bread dough's and in sweet bread dough's and then they also realized that what used to take two or three days was now only taking a day or what used to take a day was only taking 20 minutes so they started to use it more and more and they thought it was this wonderful ingredient to add to breads this was back in the 1790s and then they realized that or and then what happened was would it's a byproduct of wood ash and I guessed wood ash somehow for some reason became less common and so the French Academy of scientists had a contest and just said out to everybody said hey can you come up with an alternative to potage because we we can't find it in the wood ash anymore there's no more wood ash so there was a scientist who came up with what's called soda ash and then from soda ash comes baking soda and so American bakers in the 1830s took baking soda and realized they could actually make these bread dough's and sweet dough's without the east at all and so that's kind of how American baking kind of took off because before it had all been mostly the French and the Germans and the Italians so what happens with baking soda is baking soda reacts with acids and when it mixes with an acid it bubbles up and as you know now every time you're making a cake better you want as many bubbles as you can and so there's a list of things that we use in baking that are acidic and so a lot of our cake batters when they will have buttermilk lemon juice cocoa and chocolate sour cream brown sugar and yogurt and these are the common common ingredients in a lot of cakes and so when you have one of these acidic ingredients in a cake batter then you can also add baking soda and then you create a little little bubbles so we're gonna do this really quick so here's some baking soda did it go so I'm just gonna pour some oh that's probably way too much okay we're gonna pour some baking soda and then a little vinegar and so you can see can you see yeah so that's exactly the reaction that happens in your cake batter when you well not exactly that but a version of that and that is one way a chemical way to leaven a cake the next way is baking powder so what do you do if you have a cake or cookie or whatever you're making and it doesn't have one of those acidic ingredients it's not chocolate you don't want buttermilk you don't put yogurt whatever how can you get your cake to leaven well in the early 1800s a guy by the name of British chemist by the name of Alfred Byrd created or discovered how to make baking powder his wife Elizabeth was allergic to yeast and he wanted to try to think of some way that she could have all of these sweets so he created baking powder so baking powder so everyone always asked me can you substitute baking soda for baking powder they're entirely different products baking it well sort of and I can show you so baking powder what is baking powder baking powder consists of two main ingredients baking powder is actually baking soda and then plus wine no just kidding okay well but so these are wine barrels and when grapes are whatever the wine is in the barrels and that's fermenting what gathers on the side is something called must mus tea and it's a white powdery ingredient and the must is a very acidic powder so baking powder is simply baking soda combined with cream of tartar which is that stuff on the side of the wine barrels so baking soda plus cream of tartar gives you baking powder if you put baking soda in to hold on let me do this right if if you add baking soda to a recipe that doesn't have buttermilk or lemon juice or cocoa or brown sugar or one of those acidic ingredients so if you have baking soda in there there's nothing for the baking soda to react with right what we just did won't happen and so you'll end up with a lead and cake so what you can do is you can add baking powder and then the the acidic part is part of the baking powder it's baking soda plus cream of tartar and there's a couple different there's a couple of different kinds of baking powder there's single-acting baking powder and double-acting and what you find in the store is usually double acting baking powder and in fact this kind is double acting single acting means that when you mix it with liquid it acts and the liquid it makes the cream of tartar and the baking soda it activates the cream of tartar in the baking soda reaction you get those bubbles and then that batter gets leavened right then and there and then you want to get into the oven right away but what's more common now is double acting baking powder which is great and we use it all the time at the bakery because you'll get a little bit of an action with the liquid so when you add liquid to your cake batter the liquid will activate the cream of tartar and the baking soda reaction but then but the second act for the double acting is when it goes into the oven and then the heat actually causes the the baking powder to react and so you get a little bit of a burst when you first mix your your cake batter together and then when you put the whole thing into the oven that's when you watch it and it rises a lot okay now let's talk about so--that's leaveners they're typically like the smallest part proportionate proportionately to the recipe but I spent the most time on them because I think they're very important but now we're gonna go on to eggs so egg yolks are a great emulsifier and I was talking about emulsification just a second ago oil and water like that don't mix and so when you emulsify something it takes two disparate ingredients such as oil or fat and water or liquid and it makes them come together so that they're homogeneous and what egg yolks do is that they allow that to happen so if you add egg yolk to oil and water you actually create something that's one you actually create mayonnaise and so you can you know you can make something that's one thing and not two things like this so when you add egg yolks to a cake batter you are creating an emulsification you are allowing the batter to then mix with the liquid and all of the the butter or oil or whatever you have that's within your cake batter and because it's emulsified it can hold more air and as we were saying your whole goal when you're making a cake is to create as many opportunities for air as possible so the eggs and and creating the you know all of those opportunities for air the egg yolks are really really rich they have a lot of fat in them and so they contribute to texture they contribute to the crumb which is basically the the surface of the the cake and what it looks like they contribute to mouthfeel and they contribute to the smoothness of the batter so eggs are very important in baking okay egg whites whether part of the whole egg or you separately are actually really really useful in baking as well so the way I like to view what happens when you're cooking with or baking with egg whites is egg whites as I mentioned a little bit earlier are mostly water they're 90% water but then they're 10% protein that consists of protein that's why they're like a really they're a really good diet food because it's mostly just water and they need to get get a hit of protein the way I view the proteins are like all those little rubber bands that you have at the bottom of your backpack you know they all get kind of like scrunched up a little bit so we did one so and all of the protein strands with egg whites stay like this when you have a regular egg white so when you when you can see through the egg whites can you see there's egg yolks he in there but there's also egg whites and plus you can just imagine what egg whites look like you can see through them because all the proteins are like clumped up like these little rubber bands and then there's just the water so you see it all when you add heat or when you add beating if you take a whisk and you beat up the egg whites all of these rubber bands get uncoiled and then the more you beat them the more uncoiled they come to the point where they don't I mean they're not really round rubber bands they're actually like strands so they actually you know they're kind of all crumbled up together and then they start to loosen and then they become nice and big and long and as they become big and long they start to be able to capture air and they create all of these big air pockets now that you have to be a little bit careful because if you so let me just show you that okay so this is what egg whites look like before you beat them and then once you beat them this is what they look like and it's because all of those proteins have been uncoiled and now they're trapping air in them and so you can't see through them anymore you can't see the water that's through them because it's all enveloped in this protein bundle that's been created by either whipping or if you put put it into I mean if you imagine when you're cooking an egg white omelet goes from being clear and then it gets white and that's because all those proteins are uncoiling and then they're causing you not to be able to see through it anymore when you're whipping up egg whites if you add sugar so if you imagine again rubber bands like the rubber bands you know that you you pull them but then they've snap back and you pull them they snap back sugar acts is like a stiffener and it makes them when you're pulling them it makes them kind of stay pulled and so that's why when you're making a cake with egg whites you want to add a little bit of sugar and that will allow the proteins to kind of stay coiled and again the whole point is to create as much air as you can and so if you if you add the sugar then the proteins stand coiled and then they'll hold on to the air and they'll hold on to the water and that's what's gonna give you a nice light and fluffy cake now if you beat too long you'll see that what happens is these protein strands they don't they they're not infinitely stretchy okay and so if you beat them too long then they will eventually snap and then you can't really see it in this picture but if you go home and beat a bunch of egg whites for a really long time you'll see that they start to get kind of foamy looking and then all the water comes out and that's because all the proteins have been stretched really really far and then they snap and then they kind of release all the water and the water rushes out to the bottom and then you're just left with like this this stuff that looks like styrofoam so the goal when you're making a cake with egg whites is you want to whip the egg whites just enough so that they're kind of stretchy but you want you don't want to whip them too far because if you whip them too far then they'll snap and you want to give them enough give so that when you put the batter into the into the oven then you imagine that all of the water that's in the egg whites turns to steam and if you imagine that your rubber band protein strands still have a little bit to give then they'll grow a little bit with the steam that's in the egg whites and then you have a nice angel food cake okay now we're gonna talk just a little bit about flour so flour is the structure that holds your cake together essentially the way to think about it is sort of like when you're building a house it's basically the foundation and it's obviously plays a very important role because it has to hold the weight of the sugar and of the fat usually butter that it goes into your cake so there's a bunch of different types of flour there's every it starts off with bread flour and then goes to all-purpose and then cake flour those are kind of the three basic ones the main difference in the three types of cakes are the protein content again we're going back to protein and it's kind of the same I have a different analogy but it's kind of the same idea so flour the protein within the the protein content that's in flour is it's like it's it's loose like cotton it's very loose it's not very elastic in fact it's it has no strength and it's just very airy and so when you have flour on its own this is the the protein or what's called gluten is is just kind of sitting there just kind of hanging out as soon as you add water to flour it causes the proteins to gain strength and rather than being loose and fluffy they start to get kind of stretchy and they actually start to get elastic and the picture that I was gonna put was of Hanes underwear but I decided that probably it's there's a little too last minute I have this last-minute epiphany last night and I think Bethany had gone to bed and I was like oh we should put a picture of Hanes underwear but but so if you can imagine so with flour being the cotton and then when you add water it becomes the Hanes underwear that's what you're doing when you're adding liquid to flour so I bring this up because there's so many different roll there's so many different flours and people are always asking you know which flour should I use so if you are making a bread you actually want something that's really stretchy I mean imagine like the best artisan bread loaf that you've ever had and when you open it up it's got like all those long chewy delicious air pockets that's all gluten that's been developed because you've added water to your flour and you mix it up and as you mix it it starts to get stretchy and stretchy and elastic and you want that when you're making bread however when you're making a cake imagine the worst cake you've ever had and you take a bite from it and it's like really chewy and maybe kind of tough and that's when you had too much gluten and so when you're making a cake you don't want to use bread flour or high gluten flour you want to use cake flour cake flour has very little protein in it so when you add the water to it you get some of the stretchiness but you don't get a lot and you don't want to you want a little bit of stretchiness because you want some of that structure to hold all of the air whether you're beating up egg whites or whether you're creaming butter and sugar you need a little bit of structure but you don't want a lot and so that's why when you're making a cake you often use cake flour all-purpose flour is smack dab in the middle and it's exactly what it says it's all-purpose you can use it for bread you can use it for cake your bread won't be quite as chewy and your cake won't be quite as tender but it works for the most part so okay and then finally oh no not finally another important ingredient is butter so butter contributes obviously to taste and it also contributes to mouthfeel but one of the most important ways is that butter what it does is it coats the flour particles and so I was just talking about these long stretchy gluten strands that happen when you mix flour with water when you add fat or butter to it the butter coats the flour so that when you add liquid to it you don't get the stretchy and so that's what you want because you don't want a lot of stretch when you're making a cake you want it to be you want it to be tender and you want the flour to be protected from the water and so the butter basically acts as like a little cocoon and it protects the the flower okay and then finally we're gonna talk about sugar sugar obviously adds sweetness and flavor it's essential but there's a bunch of other things that it does sugar attracts water and so the more sugar you have in a baked good the more moist your baked good will be oftentimes at the bakery if we have something that's a little dry we either think to add more fat or we'll think to ourselves maybe we should add a little bit more sugar because if you add a little bit more sugar it attracts water that's in the air and then your baked good ends up being a little bit more moist sugar also acts as the creaming ingredient when you're combining butter and sugar like I talked about and remember the garden hoe the sugar is gonna be in there kind of digging out all these little air particles sugar just like butter also cuts through the gluten strands so it's very helpful to have in cakes because you're what you're always trying to do is combat the development of gluten in a cake because you want your cake to be as tender as possible this is just a nice loaf of bread like I forgot I don't know why it's there either I was trying to figure it out last night but anyway I thought it looked nice but sugar also this is melted sugar that has reached caramelization which is it like 290 I think or 300 but so sugar within a baked good when you imagine it if it's in the oven it starts to caramelize and it contributes to the color but also what contributes to the color is what's called the my art effect which people who like to cook often know about it because they talk about it when you're when you're grilling steaks and it's that really nice char on the grill with the steak but in baking the my artifact actually comes into play with sugar because the sugar that's in breads and cakes and cookies and all of that it reacts with the amino acids that are in that are in flour and it creates browning so you get browning both from the caramelization of the sugars and you get browning from the my art effects so two separate things but they end up looking the same okay we at flower decided to try a bunch of different cakes a bunch of different ways just to see what they would be like so we tried a cake without any leavening whatsoever I actually have it I have some here and I'll cut these up so that some I don't have enough I have enough for everybody have a good cake but I didn't have enough for everybody have the bad cake so and I don't I don't know that you really want the bad cake it's pretty bad but anyway so this is a basic yellow birthday cake the recipes at the end so you can jot it down and make it at home but this has no baking soda and no baking powder and what we did was we baked all these cakes and I had all the Baker's come together and try them all and and just and I didn't tell them which was which and I said you know shout out what what you think they all are so this one gummy super dance sticky and sour and all of that made sense because there's absolutely no leavening I mean there's no chemical leavening there is the leavening from the creaming of the butter and the sugar there is a little editing that happens with the water that's in the butter and the water that's in the eggs that does do a little bit of pouf so you don't quite get you know a mud pie but it's not really I don't know if you can see can you see it on there yeah it's pretty dense it's also really sour because this cake is made with buttermilk I don't know where the carrot is this cake is made with buttermilk and there's nothing to react with the buttermilk so it just tastes really sour it's actually pretty gross but a lucky few of you will get to try it okay then we also tried no baking soda and this one that so there is baking powder so we do have the baking powder there's liquid in the cake and so the the baking powder was activated by the liquid and then the cake went into the oven and then the baking powder was activated again by the heat so we got a little bit more of a lift but the taste of this was soggy mushy greasy and flat and so didn't figure out how to do this okay and again we'll pass out some of these then we tried no baking powder I don't have one here but no baking powder so we had baking soda and this actually ended up being a little bit better the baking soda reacted with the buttermilk we got a little bit of lift and we made a pretty decent cake this cake was cakey sandy katni so it's not awful but it wasn't it wasn't great then we tried one with melted butter which this was something that surprised all of us because we spend so much time at the bakery talking about how important it is to cream your butter and sugar for a really long time make sure you create as many air pockets as you can and then I said to my pastry chef I said just make with melted butter don't do any creaming just melt the butter add the sugar and go so we thought it was gonna be really dense but there it turns out there's enough I guess enough liquid in the melted butter and there's enough liquid in the eggs and then there's the baking soda and the baking pan all of those things created what I found interesting was everybody liked this cake and then when they tried it a couple of people said it tastes like a cake box cake and if you think about it when you make a cake box cake it's usually you add oil and eggs and you're not doing any creaming right you're just mixing everything together so I thought that was pretty interesting the next thing we tried was adding half the amount of sugar just to see you know would it not Brown as much would it be drier would it have a little bit less lift because we have you know fewer of those little garden hose creating all those air pockets and this one was eggy and drying the throat but this one was interesting everybody really liked this because it tasted like pancakes and so if you think about pancakes and I think with with that what did you call that whole something whatever that that chart there was a thing for pancakes and it was down at the bottom it was very low sugar was high proportionate flour but low of sugar and that's exactly what the cake recipe was once we looked at it for like oh yeah it's kind of like a buttermilk pancake recipe so it was really really good but after you know it tasted a little bit dry and then after you know the day but the leftovers were just really dry because they didn't have that that that thing that sugar does which is draw in moisture and then we wanted to try I was just curious about this so this was no leavening whatsoever so no baking soda and no baking powder but I wanted to try whipping the whites and whipping the yolks just to see if we could get something and when this one ended up tasting a little bit like was like a pound cake which is how people used to make you know back at 200 years before when they didn't have baking soda and baking powder they would just make cakes with just by beating up eggs and sugar and this one tasted sour because again we have the buttermilk but we didn't have the baking soda that reacted and it also tasted and this might just be because in the bakery were very conscious of this it tasted very meringue II so when you make meringues you just mix egg whites with sugar and you beat them and we're often trying to combat the merengue effect that happens sometimes which is like for the brownies if you if you whip the eggs too much and you bake brownies at least a flour what happens is the brownies rise and then they fall and you have like this crispy crunchy top on top which we don't like and so that's what happened here was it came out of the oven and we were like wow there's no baking soda baking powder but it still looks so great and then it kind of fell which I don't think you can really see in the picture but there was kind of that top that was felt a little bit like ring and then this was the regular birthday cake and this one and honest I did not you know tell people which one was which but everyone was like the first thing that everybody said it's everything you want a cake to be fluffy light tender delicate balanced so we're very pleased with that and this is the cake recipe so what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to make this cake and kind of talk and as I'm making the cake they're gonna pass out the little portions of cake though that I made for everybody and then I'll cut up oh so sorry so this was the this was the regular one that came out great so you can see the visible difference if this is if this is regular and this is without any baking soda this is without any baking powder okay so the first thing we do in making this cake this butter is at room temperature if the butter is too cold your sugar isn't going to have enough strength to do its thing [Applause] I'm not making this cake by hand [Laughter] you're gonna see if it if it just goes without okay [Applause] [Music] okay okay so we're gonna I'm gonna talk you through this they like that so I just want I thought it would be nice to kind of sum up the whole thing and make an actual cake which you guys are tasting right now so what you do is you cream the butter and the sugar the paddle beats the the butter with the sugar and all of that garden hoe action happens the butter turns from yellow yellow to pale white and that's probably going to take like five minutes then we add the egg yolks and I add them slowly one by one and what I'm trying to do is create that emulsification because if I can get the eggs to emulsify into the butter and the sugar then when I add the flour and I add the liquid I'm going to create all these opportunities for air in this particular recipe we also add additional egg yolks and that's to create even more tenderness even more opportunities for emulsification and then this recipe has buttermilk and then cake flour with some baking soda and baking powder and the way we add the liquid and the flowers to the cakes to the batter at this point is what's called the 3/2 method and we start off with a third of the dry and you put a third of the dry in and you're just gonna mix it just until it barely comes together then you're gonna add in half of the buttermilk then you'll add the second third of the dry then you'll add the rest of the buttermilk and then the rest of the dry and that way you're kind of gradually introducing both of these sets of ingredients which you want to be combined into your cake and at that point the cake goes into the cake pan and then into the oven and that's when all the magic happens with the heat and all those different options of how the heat can create air bubbles and steam and all of that sort of stuff so I thought I would pass out some of these cake I don't know if anybody wants bad cake does anybody want bad cake so so that is that's all I prepared so if you have questions I'm more than happy to answer questions so there must be questions we actually usually have a microphone we can give you ask the question with no no but too much bad cake no you can speak louder speak loudly this is no um in your book you talk about the action of creaming and why all the cake recipes start that way and you also mention that we see a lot of chocolate-chip cookie recipes start that way and and I can't why why would you do that if you wanted a dense chocolate chip cookie and I wonder have you ever tried talkative cookies using the melted butter method we have yeah how that compares with snow I'm not creaming but just incorporating it with room-temperature butter if you have you mean melted butter versus so melted butter it turns out makes a little bit of a crispier cookie because you don't have all of those air pockets that you're creating and so you're just melting butter you've got melted butter mixing it with sugar and then do you want to pass out okay and so it just it creates a flatter crispy cookie because you don't have all of that leavening from the air so did that answer your question okay next question next question yes there's a microphone here I I've had or I've seen some recipes where almond flour is used in place of regular flour and it wasn't just sort of a gluten-free kind of a recipe even though it turns out to be that way what properties of almond flour are there that make it so appealing to be used in cakes because this actually tastes a little bit like you use it it's a good thing so well almond flour does not have any of the gluten that's in regular flour so you don't you don't get any of the stretch and the chew and it doesn't have any of the ability to capture air and so I don't usually view it as a substitute for regular flour I mean we definitely use almond flour and a lot of things and especially because of the gluten-free craze that's going on now everybody wants to know what you can substitute I don't think you can really substitute almond flour for flour there's other flours that you can substitute for flour but you can certainly incorporate almond flour into a gluten-free recipe which is what we've done but it has such different properties than regular flour that it's it's like you're not you're not comparing apples to apples at that point you know you're you're adding almond flour to something it's sort of like the question about are you creating a new recipe at that point I think you are creating a new recipe you're not saying I'm gonna take out some flour and add some almond flour you're saying I'm gonna take out some flour and then new page I'm gonna add some almond flour which is a different it you get a different thing sure so I mean the thing the question is how do muffins differ from cakes and I think in order to answer that question everybody has to erase from their minds the Dunkin Donuts muffin that you think of because a Dunkin Donuts muffin is a cake it's just in muffin form does anybody else want baking soda okay I'll just let you guys pass it around so that's no leavening so the muffin what a muffin is supposed to be is not as it's sort of like a pancake it's supposed to be less sweet and not as cakey and a lot of I don't know if you know if you read a lot of muffin recipes they say don't overmix and the reason is because there's not a lot of sugar and there's not a lot of fat and so you don't want something that's really tough because when you have sugar and you have fat it coats the flour particles and the sugar cuts through all the gluten and you create a tender product but in a muffin they're not supposed to be very sweet and I'm not supposed to be very fatty it's just supposed to be like a little small I mean cake is the closest word to it but it's not really a cake and so because you don't have the sugar and the as much sugar as much fat that's why with both pancakes you know waffles and and muffins they say mix until barely combine and it's because you're gonna be mixing dry ingredients with liquid ingredients and as soon as liquid hits the the dry you're going to start creating gluten so you just want to be really careful you don't have that much fat or sugar to help so you're gonna be very careful mix it just until it comes together and then bake it I tried some sweet breads with very nice over here sorry I tried some sweet breads very nice crust like crispy sweet and I was wondering if you could say a few words and I guess it's not not for cakes like this but what what determines if you get a nice crust I mean is it ingredients as a temperature well I think one of the main things is the sugar content will help because the sugar will caramelize in the and then you'll you'll get a little bit of a crust I think the heat of the oven is something that a lot of people underestimate because a lot of home ovens aren't calibrated and so when you put something into a 350 degree oven it might only be 300 and you actually need that burst of heat to create the crust but I think the main thing that does the the nice crust is the mixture of the the fat and the sugar together and they kind of form like a crust on top that's my guess hi thanks thanks for coming a friend of mine who's a bread maker has a jar has a jar that is a culture and can you go over what that is substituting in what your what you've shown so far the culture and also is that only used in making breads or to use that also in baked sweet goods so the culture is what I was talking about briefly with sourdough when he has his quits called a sourdough starter and he may have gotten it from somebody or he may have created it on his own but you can create one by I mean one way is to take mashed up grapes and you should get organic grapes so that you know it has all that stuff on the outside it has the yeast the natural yeast and mash up the grapes with some water and some flour and just let it sit like cover it a little bit like with the gauze or something but don't don't put don't put it in a sealed Tupperware or don't put saran wrap so that the air can't get into it but cover it so that like bugs don't get into it so take some kitchen towel and leave it out for a week and then peek into it a week later it's gonna be all bubbly and fermented and that's because all of the yeasts have come through and all the yeasts that are in the grapes have come out and they've eaten all that flour and then they've created all of that gas and then what you do is you add a little bit more flour I mean you take out the grapes and they add a little bit more flour a little bit more water you stir it around cover it and you leave it for another day and you're basically just feeding it it's like you know feeding a plant or something so you feed it you feed it you feed it and then eventually what you have is a starter and you can take that starter so if you feed it and you have this big amount you can take half of it and dump it into a bread dough and then you don't need the packages of yeast you can just use all of those active yeasts that are naturally occurring in the starter and then you'll make a bread dough with just the starter and more flour and more you know water and whatever else you want to add to your bread dough and then all of the yeasts that are in that starter they're gonna be so happy because you just gave it all of this new food and it's gonna eat it and eat it and that's what makes your bread dough rise and then you stick it into the oven and they get really happy because they like the heat until you kill them and then you make and then it's a loaf of bread I forgot the second part oh yes can you use starters for other things besides bread yes you can you can make sourdough actually there's a great recipe in Nancy's silverton's book I think it's desserts where she makes a sourdough pancake and she just uses rather than baking powder which will lower baking soda which a lot of people use when you make pancakes and she uses a starter and so you mix starter with a little flour and a little bit of egg and a little sugar or whatever and then you make these pancakes and they rise and they're beautiful and you can make you could make a chocolate cake out you could make a cake out of it but the thing with yeast like I was saying before and the reason why people don't use yeast that much for cakes and why everybody loves baking soda and baking powder is that yeasts are very temperature dependent and they're very time-dependent so they they don't like the cold and they don't like the heat so if you make a cake with yeast you have to watch the temperature and then they're living things that need air and food and so if you don't give it enough air food eventually it will die so with baking soda baking powder you don't have to worry about it but with yeast you kinda have to watch it a lot so you can make a cake with yeast but most people don't have the patience so let's take short of you were two more questions jo-ann has a book signing outside afterwards and I want to make sure we leave time for that what about you red shirt so I was wondering a lot of most baking recipes call for the addition of a little bit of salt and I know that's usually like in cooking to bring out the flavor is there any science part of that as well like any reaction that that to my knowledge and most of baking no it's just for flavor except for when it comes to bread and we were talking about the yeast and how they're very picky so nice kick they love sugar and they hate salt so if you put too much salt in your bread dough it'll just kill the yeast but besides that from my understanding you put salt in just for flavor there's a lot of baking recipes that don't have salt in them so you talked about what the chemical reactions for eggs and butter one challenge I found with baking for my co-workers is that someone or vegan can you talk about other options vegan options and how they how they differ how to bake vegan is that what you're asking without I mean that's a big challenge it's definitely challenging I mean you can cook with more oil oil will work just like butter except that oil doesn't have as much water and so it's often a challenge trying to create you know the lift that comes from butter and it doesn't have the same taste because you don't have the emulsification of eggs that's also very tricky we have a vegan chocolate cake at the bakery that that actually it does have a really nice cakey texture I'm not sure how it does that because it doesn't have any eggs in it I don't know of substitutes per se I mean we don't we don't do substitutes it's going back to the question of how do you create new recipes I mean we often look at recipes and we will do the average of recipes and when it comes to vegan we'll say okay well let's just take this ingredient out and see what happens but because the bakers know most of what we talked about today they can say oh well if we don't have you know egg yolks and what's something else that we can substitute and they'll play around but I don't know of like a way to take a non vegan recipe and just kind of it's the same with gluten-free it I wish there were an easy way there might be an you and I'm just not aware of it that you can just substitute and just say oh well if you don't have well what with butter and oil that's a very easy substitution we often do that at the bakery sometimes we'll say you know what let's take out half the butter and just replace it with oil and that you can do but for something like eggs I think that's harder and then for dairy soy milk is often used instead of milk when when making when you use dairy in recipes thank you so you talked about how yeast it's gonna there live and you need to keep them alive in if they stick around too long and you don't take care of them they'll die right but I heard in baking biscuits somebody said that in order to get them light and fluffy you need to have fresh baking soda and fresh baking powder is does the age of your baking soda and baking powder matter it does that's a that's a great question we don't face that at the bakery because we just go through it so fast but they I know I remember from before I became a professional Baker all the recipes that I would said that I would use would say you know make sure you test your baking soda and baking powder and take a little bit of your baking soda and put it in vinegar and make sure it fizzes up and the same with baking powder I mean it's not I don't think it's because it's a lot it's not alive but I think it does have a shelf life but I I'm not sure exactly why it ate I mean I think just everything ages after a while just gets tired exactly recipes um in your cookbook call for if you're making like cookies they make really big cookies if you want to make them smaller how do you adjust the you know like I assume the recipe is the same up till I put them in the oven how do you adjust the time when you're making the cookies a quarter of the size that you make them well we make the mini cookies all the time at the bakery too and you know it's it was that was one of the most challenging parts of the book was trying to pick a time for anything I mean if you ask I have two Baker's here at flour and maybe there's more but there's two here that I know of and we don't time anything it's like you put it in the oven then you take it out when it's done and so it was a challenge trying to put a number two you know because we're in and out of the oven so so much so what I tried to do in the book and what I encourage everybody who likes to bake to do is to to look more at the visual cues than the time because you know ovens are different ingredients are different everything is different I mean I think this is why people who cook are like oh I can't bake that's such a you know that's so crazy but I find it fascinating that you know you could take the cookie batter one day and it takes ten minutes in another day it takes 12 minutes and it might just be the oven that might be the batter's a little bit older so you know I I would start by reducing the time I mean if you have the big cookies and you want to make them half the size I mean reduce it by I know take 25% of the time and just check I mean it did it does mean you're glued to the oven a little bit more but I think as long as you just keep checking and keep checking but you you're right you should definitely bake them for less oh sorry yeah hi I just had a quick question about the creaming of the butter with the sugar and what often happens when one adds the egg yolk or the eggs is that yeah it kind of falls apart and I was wondering if there is a way to avoid that so if you're creaming butter and sugar and if you're doing it the right way then the butters at room temp right and then often what people will do is they'll add a cold egg and so if you add a cold egg if you imagine butter in the fridge it's hard right and so the chill of the egg will immediately go into the butter and it'll it'll freeze up the butter so you want your eggs to be at room temperature and the other thing it and I wish that I could have shown you is that you want to add it a little bit by a little bit because you are trying to create this emulsification you don't want to overwhelm the butter and the sugar you want to just introduce a little bit of egg so it gets used to it and kind of embraces it a little bit more it gets used to it embraces it and then if you add it little by little it'll just slowly get nice and creamy and it'll be all now if you don't do that then you could just keep the mixer on and if you have warm hands or a warm towel you could put it on the surrounding bowl to try to warm up that butter because it's probably too cold and if you just beat it for a long time eventually the egg will beat in but that's a great question because if you take a cake after that point and you if it's looking curdled and you don't keep beating it I mean it's not the end of the world but then if you imagine what happens when you add the flour is that you're gonna have flour that's then gonna mix with a little bit of the egg and a little bit of the butter and that's not what you want you want it to mix with the whole thing together so definitely keep beating it until it all comes together and become smooth hi could you address the baking powder and baking soda ratio and why you use both of those in a recipe or not and if you can actually ruin a recipe by adding too much I don't know if it's a normally a 1 to 2 ratio or so that's a that's a great question um and I'm worried I'm not going to remember the exact proportions but I think it's one 2 teaspoons of baking powder per cup of flour so this assumes that you're just baking with like milk or you know water or something or soy milk and then for baking soda which is a lot more powerful than baking powder it's either 1/4 teaspoon per cup of acidic ingredient or half a teaspoon and I don't know off the top of my head I guess be just look it's half a teaspoon 1/2 teaspoon per cup why you use both is kind of the whole point of the lecture which is you want as many opportunities as you can to create as much air as you can so that you can have a really nice light and fluffy product I mean the cake that didn't have the baking powder that I don't think I brought it but I showed it on the was actually a pretty good cake it just wasn't as fluffy as we wanted it if you have too much baking soda so if you add too much baking soda and there's not enough of an acidic ingredient then you just end up with this really soapy taste and that happens to us a lot I mean they look exactly the same right and if we often take them and dump them into containers because well we'll get like these big containers of them and we'll put them in containers that are manageable for us and sometimes every now and then they get swapped and you can always tell because they if it's too much baking soda it's really really soapy if it's too much baking powder it often tastes really metallic but that's a great question because I remember when I first started baking and I was like oh I want a really light fluffy cake and so I would take all of the leavening agents and I would say I'll just add more you know I'll just keep adding and but you that's that's what differs you know between cooking and baking like in cookie you could say oh I really like the flavor this rose I'm gonna add more and you can and nothing happens and you just have a beef stew that has a lot of rosemary on it but if you make a cake and you're like oh I really want it really fluffy so I'm gonna add even more baking soda and then you end up with a mess if you have too much the other thing that happens when you have too much leavening is that it can go into the when it goes into the oven and it reacts with the liquid or the heat and everything it starts to bubble up too much and then it gets flat and so if you have too much leavening it's like the cake gets really excited it's got all these bubbles but then it's like too much and it overflows the pan and then just kind of flattens out thank you so much for the lecture and for the great cake I find a lot of times that bakeries don't really do yellow or vanilla cake very well it gets really dry I don't why is it that yellow cake is so challenging and then which of the lovers would you recommend pulling to keep the cake from drying out at home which of the which of the lovers would you add more fat would you have more sugar is it kind of just a art I would probably hmm I would probably add more egg yolks usually that's the first thing we go to when something's a little bit dry I don't like to add more sugar because I don't like things super sweet and it's tricky adding more fat you would think that fat would make it more moist but often makes it greasy and why don't other bakeries make yellow cake that tastes good it's just dry everywhere I think the challenge and baking in general is for any bakery it's not can I make a good cake like anybody who's gonna open a bakery has probably made a good cake before the challenge is figuring out how can I make a good cake every day for the hundreds of people who come in and do it in a way that is labor efficient and you know and and taste good and all the things that you want and so sometimes I think what people do is they will make a yellow cake and then they'll bake it and then maybe serve it for two or three days because you don't want to not bake enough cake because if you don't make enough cake then the customers come in and they say I want yellow cake and then you don't have yellow cake to give them so you try to overestimate but then the next day when you have leftover yellow cake do you throw it away or do you serve it a lot of people say well let's serve it and then that might be why I mean I think it's always the business part of deciding all of these things is so challenging because it's not just making a cake at home for your family you know and if there's leftovers everybody doles it out and goes home with cake the business part of trying to figure out how much to order and how much to make every day and what can you sell the next day and what can you not is challenging and you're you know the whole point of a business is to bring in more money than you you you put out and so I think sometimes the decision of deciding well maybe I can get another dollar for this cake you know if I sell it for another day is maybe why some places have dry cake I'm just guessing thank you so I'd like to propose so we didn't get to all the questions but we got to a lot of them we have bad cake in the front I think this is bad this is bad and Joanna's gonna sign books outside I believe yes

Channel: Harvard University

Views: 81,427

Rating: 4.912879 out of 5

Keywords: science and cooking, joanne chang, flour bakery, baking, science

Id: 1VfUdxXcR_8

Length: 79min 52sec (4792 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2012