What The Pros know (About Bakery)

• An oven temperature that is too low will cause your batters and doughs to melt before they set, resulting in greasy, undercooked pastried.
   
• While golden brown bottom crusts are integral to a delicious cookie or pastry, sometimes ovens bake unevenly, resulting in overbrowned crusts. If the bottoms of your cookies always burn, do what professionals do -e first. Oastry chefs call the simply slip a second baking sheet of the same size under this “double paning.”  You’ve just created your own insulated baking sheet for the task at hand, without having to purchase an extra pan that won’t be used on a regular basis. 
   
• Brown sugar hardens quickly when left exposed to the air, resulting in hard, unusable lumps of sugar. If this happens, you can resuscitate the sugar by slipping a brown sugar softener (it looks like a clay teddy bear) soaked briefly in water into the container of hardened sugar. A damp, wrung-out paper towel will serve the same purpose. close the lid tightly, or wrap the mixture overnight, and that will work, too, but if you forget to take it out, you could wind up with an unpleasant surprise two weeks later when you open your brown sugar and find a piece of molded fruit. 
   
• You can test the viability of your baking soda by stirring 1/2 teaspoon into a couple tablespoons of vinegar of lemon juice. If it bubbles and fizzes, it’s fine. It not, buy a new box.
   
• Indirect contact, salt can kill yeast because it removes the water that yeast needs to live. Always blend salt with the flour rather than measuring it onto the yeast itself.
   
• The grade of maple syrup is an indication of color and intensity of flavor, not quality. Always use the darkest most flavorful syrup you can find when baking with maple syrup. Grade A, the lightest “fist run” of maple syrup is wonderful on pancakes, but use Grade B (or c when you can find it), which has been boiled longer and is more concentrated, for baking.
   
• As you incorporate the butter block for your first turn, if the butter is too cold to easily smear over the dough, you can place the butter between two sheets of plastic and roll it into a 9 1/2 by 11- inch rectangle. Peel off one sheet of plastic, invert the buttered rectangle over the dough rectangle , center it, and peel off the other sheet of plastic.