Peter is an award winning Master Chef of Great Britain and has been cooking since the age of 16. Peter now runs his own restaurant, Gorton’s, in Tavistock and has recently published ‘Devon Food Heroes’.
How Baking works
Baking is a fine science; every ingredient plays a balanced role. Here is an example of how the individual ingredients work together to make cookies:
- Flour is the basis of structure, there would be no substance to a cookie without it.
- Sugar gives flavour, texture and browning. Sugar also affects tenderness, crispness and browning.
- Brown sugar contains molasses, which is acidic and reacts with bicarbonate of soda to help give the cookie or cake a lift.
- Butter tenderises and is a flavour carrier. Fat stops a cookie from being too overly chewy. If you lower the fat and you are likely to create a chewier cookie.
- Baking powder is a leavener and is made from a combination of bicarbonate of soda and one or more acids such as cream of tartar. Cornflour is also added to absorb the moisture and keep ingredients powder dry.
Chef’s tips
- To avoid dairy products in baking, replace milk with an equal amount of soya milk.
- Exchange 225g butter with 30ml soya milk mixed with 30ml vegetable oil
- Replace 25 per cent of fat with drained unsweetened apple sauce or another fruit purée.
Cakes
- To help a cake rise higher, make sure that all the ingredients are at room temperature before you begin.
- Add salt and spices into the butter while creaming this will help them to disperse through the cake mixture.
- For light airy cakes bake them in the bottom third of the oven.
- To salvage a fallen cake, slice into cubes and serve with berries and flavoured whipped cream.
- To rescue a cake that is undercooked in the centre, cut out the centre and glaze the rest and serve as a ring-shaped cake.
Breads
- Perhaps the most essential of all the foods, bread is extremely gratifying to make and eat. Here are a few tips for you.
- Pulling and stretching dough helps develop its gluten and incorporate air, both necessary for the texture and proper rise of good yeast bread.
- To slow the dough’s rate of rising, store it in the refrigerator for as long as overnight. Remove from the refrigerator and let the dough rest at room temperature for an hour before baking.
- To roll out stiff dough, set the dough aside for 5 minutes and try again. Often the gluten in the dough simply needs to ‘rest’ in order to relax and make rolling easier.
Chef’s tips
- Using different glazes when baking bread will produce crusts of varying colours and textures.
- An egg yolk will brown the bread
- An egg white glaze will produce a shiny crust
- Water will produce a crisp crust
- Honey makes a soft sweet crust
- If the bread is heavy and dense, maybe too much flour was used or it could be too little kneading.
- If the bread has a yeasty taste and the dough over-rose, the temperature was too high during the rise.
Happy Baking!
Peter Gorton
For more information about Peter, visit www.petergortonmasterchef.co.uk or to find out more about Gorton’s restaurant see www.gortons-tavistock.co.uk