Category: Baking Ingredients

Sweet Cream Butter

Most American butters (as well as most Canadian and British butters) are “sweet cream” butters, which means that they’re made from cream that hasn’t been allowed to sour at all. This was a big selling point in the days when dairy wagons frequently showed up late to collect cream from farms, by which point the product had fermented a bit. Butter made from soured cream was acidic and cheesy and mostly unpopular with American consumers. For that reason some dairies would “correct” the cream with an alkaline (like lye) which neutralized the acid but brought even more off flavors to the party. “Sweet cream” butter was bland, but far fresher tasting.

READ ON

On Butter

Butter is a firm fat that’s made by churning (agitating) cool cream. Cream, its unadulterated state, is an emulsion of fat within water: little butterfat globules within thin lipoprotein membranes, suspended within a watery medium. The act of churning breaks most of those membranes allowing the butterfat — a mix of different types of triglyceride molecules — to flow out.

At that point some very interesting things happen. Groups of like molecules start to collect and stack up on one another, forming crystals. The crystals collect into large masses and when the masses are pressed most of the rest of the watery medium (known as buttermilk) is expelled. The result is a reverse of the original emulsion: tiny drops of water within a medium of fat crystals, free fats and a few remaining butterfat globules.

READ ON

First, What is Fat?

In very general terms, fat is a storage system. It allows animals to lock away energy for later use, much as plants lock energy away in the form of starch. Of course plants make some fat too, though it’s usually in liquid form — oil. Animals make more fat because it’s a denser storage medium, and that’s better if you happen to have to move around (chase prey or, conversely, run away from predators). You can store 4 calories (kcals for you Europeans) in a gram of starch, bur more than twice as many (9 calories) in a gram of fat.

Chemically speaking, fats and oils are triglycerides, sub-members of the extremely broad lipid family of molecules. Triglycerides, as the name implies, are made up of a trio of fatty acids, all connected to a “backbone” of glycerol. They are all more or less “E”-shaped, though since the type and configurations of the fatty acid molecules they contain are highly variable, different triglycerides can behave in very different ways. One factor that greatly influences the behavior of a triglyceride is its degree of saturation (for a discussion of that, go here).

READ ON

Stevia

I left this out during sugar week, but a few readers out there asked if I’d mention it. I don’t really want to go down the slippery slope of non-sugar sweeteners since there are a lot of them. But stevia is extremely popular these days so…why not?

Stevia, as I mentioned, is not a sugar. It has nothing even sugar-like in it. It’s an extract from the sweetleaf plant that goes by the technical name of steviol glycoside. It’s incredible powerful stuff. The pure form clocks in at something like 300 times the sweetness of sugar, though packaged stevia is only about 50 times as sweet as an ingredient. Even so a mere teaspoon will replace an entire cup of sugar.

But to say a chemical compound is sweet doesn’t necessarily mean it performs like table sugar — especially in baking applications. Stevia is funny in that its sweet flavor comes on much slower than table sugar, so in that sense it’s not quite an equivalent. Then there’s the question of bulk. Sugar does a lot more than make, say, a muffin sweet. It acts as a moisture-retainer and its sheer weight provides a counterbalance to the leavening. So if you’re wanting to bake with stevia you need to take the various factors into account. Many people add apple sauce, yogurt or pulped fruit to compensate.

READ ON

Glucose Syrup

“Glucose syrup” is what some in the English-speaking world call corn syrup. Indeed this incredibly thick and sticky stuff is corn syrup, just a rather special kind. In what way? It’s exceedingly low in moisture, which makes it handy for all sorts of confectionery work where you want to keep the finished product flexible without adding extra water to it. It also has a much cleaner taste than grocery store corn syrup because it has fewer of the thickening long-chain starch molecules in it (it’s thick because it’s almost entirely, well…glucose).

Rarely does a baker use glucose syrup, save in caramels and fondants. The fascinating thing about it is that despite being nearly 100% glucose it doesn’t taste very sweet compared to conventional syrups, even though it’s made of the simplest of sugars and the general rule is that the simpler the sugar, the sweeter it tastes to humans. It does of course have every bit as many calories. Even more really, since most syrups are about 20% water. Just one of the quirks of the way our taste buds work. Curious indeed.

READ ON

Invert Sugar Syrup

I’ve referenced invert sugar quite a bit over the last week. But did you know that you can actually buy it in a jar? You can. I did. Then I took a picture. This is nothing more than a plain ol’ everyday sucrose syrup that’s been heated and treated with an acid (tartaric or citric, probably). You can make this yourself of course, but some bakeries and/or confectioners would just as soon buy it pre-made. Who am I to argue?

READ ON

Honey

Nature’s most skilled and experienced syrup makers are the bees. They’ve been making syrup out of plant nectar for millions of years. The process they use is the same one we employ for making syrup out of tree sap or cane juice: reduction. They start with a thin 80-20 water-to-sugar solution that they extract from flowers, then slowly reduce it until it has a moisture content right around 18%. At that point they deposit the syrup in a cell in the honey comb, cap it off with wax and await the winter (or the beekeeper).

READ ON

Maple Syrup

Human beings around the world have harvested sweet tree saps for eons. Most of us in the Northern Hemisphere automatically think “maple” when we consider tree syrups, but in reality there are many other types of sap-giving trees. Birch trees, for example, which Alaskans and Scandinavians have long tapped for their sweet nectar. Hickory and elm trees also contain sap, though it’s less sweet and delivered in smaller quantities, so it takes more time and work to collect it and reduce it down to a syrup.

READ ON

Sorghum

Sorghum syrup is, generally speaking, something you only see in households in the upper Midwest. Sorghum, like sugar cane or wheat, is a grass. It produces heads the size of corn ears that contain small seeds, about the size of millet. Farmers once grew sorghum for cattle feed. The grain itself is nutritious, and the stalks can be stored and fermented into silage, i.e. edible compost that cows can live on during the winter.

READ ON

Malt Syrup

The Chinese have been making malt syrup for thousands of years. In fact up until the mass adoption of cane sugar, it rivaled honey for its popularity. The technique is pretty neat. It involves the “malting” — which is to say “sprouting” — of barley grain in pans of water. Once the seeds have germinated, the sprouts are dried and ground up to make a powder.

READ ON