How can you know that your bread is done?

Question

Most bread recipes give an estimate to how long that bread must bake. However, I find it hard to check whether it's done or not. I don't have a thermometer, and I don't think the toothpick trick works with bread.

Is there a way to know if your bread is fully baked?

Asked by Mien

Answer

Very simply, bake it for the recommended time in the recipe. Then if it looks golden brown (note that if the air in the oven is not humid enough the bread may stay pale, on a side note a humid oven helps to develop a good crust), tap it in on it's base and if it sounds hollow its done. If it feels soft in the base and not hollow or If its still not golden brown, put it back in the oven for a few minutes then try the tap check again. Although you stated you dislike the thermometer technique, for others reading the bread should have an internal temperature of 200F or 94C, if not return it to the oven for a few minutes until it is.

Answered by Sebiddychef

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How to warm plates before serving?

Question

I realize that serving on warmed dishes is preferable to serving on cold/room temp dishes, so as not to leach the heat out of your freshly-cooked food.

How can I warm my plates?

I have two kinds of dishes: ceramic (cheapo from a department store) and Noritake china (circa 1955-60).

Neither says "oven safe" on the bottom, but would a warm oven do the trick? Or microwaving? Or a hot water bath?

I'm not sure how to achieve warmed plates, but I'm tired of eating cold fish.

Asked by JustRightMenus

Answer

We do this regularly with regular dishes and fine china. Neither say "oven safe". My mother has also done it for years. The process is fairly simple:

• Put our oven on it's coolest setting (about 175F, I think)
• Wait for it to reach temperature
• Turn it off
• Put dishes in and close the oven. We just stack the dishes. As Joe points out, they'll warm faster if you don't stack them. However, I usually do this when I've got 6-8 dishes, so stack is easier.

Be careful when taking the dishes out. They'll be hot. We've never had a problem with dishes using this method. However, if you don't think your dishes will stand getting hot, use your own judgement as there's a wide variety of quality and materials used in place settings.

Answered by yossarian

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What causes curdling and how can you prevent it?

Question

Some sauces are more at risk to curdle than others. What exactly (ingredients, techniques, temperature...) causes this curdling? What can you do to have the curdling risk at minimum?

I'm not asking for ways to fix this, that's already asked here.

Asked by Mien

Answer

In most cases curdling occurs because proteins in the sauce are denatured and bind up with each other forming clumps.

In cooking proteins are denatured by excessive heat, acid, salt, or enzymes.

Heat and acid are the usual culprits for me. For example, when making a hollandaise sauce- the egg yolks are slowly cooked to allow them to set. In most recipes the lemon juice is added later. If the sauce is heated to abruptly or to high then the egg proteins will curdle.

To prevent curdling you have a few options-

• Don't expose the sauce to as much heat.
  Be careful to not overcook egg rich sauces. If possible add the protein rich ingredient later in the process- for example adding yogurt to a sauce just before serving.
• Heat the sauce gently.
  Heating too fast will also make proteins denature. Many sauces are cooked in a double boiler- not to keep the sauce from overheating but to ensure that it heats gently.
• Don't expose the proteins to too much salt or acid.
  Dropping a couple tablespoons of lemon juice into warm milk is a recipe for paneer not sauce.
• Take out some insurance.
  Proteins bind with each other after denaturing when there are a large quantity of similar molecules all together. One solution then is to introduce a lot of dissimilar molecules that will interfere with the protein's ability to bind to itself. Common candidates for this are starch or fat.

It is difficult (but not impossible) to curdle the milk protein in cream based sauces with just heat because the high concentration of milk fat gets in the way. This is why reduction sauces can add cream to a very hot liquid and let it reduce. However, adding acid and heat can still be enough to curdle so be careful if your reduction sauce is very acidic.

Many otherwise fragile sauce recipes will call for a little bit of corn starch as an insurance policy. In the related question that you posted- yogurt sauces are particularly susceptible to this because low-fat yogurt is very high in protein and low in fat, and starch.

Answered by Sobachatina

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Can I brine chicken in buttermilk after I boil the chicken?

Question

I want to make crispy fried chicken and waffles. I have had great luck boiling chicken wings and then deep frying them. Can I do the same thing for fried chicken? Boil, brine in buttermilk mixture, coat and then fry? Or is there a better way?

Asked by Karen

Answer

Short answer: Brining after boiling won't do much (if anything), and you probably don't want to boil all parts of the chicken anyway.

One primary purpose of brining is to hydrate the cells of the muscle tissue before cooking, which allows the cells to hold on to more moisture during the cooking process via denaturation of the proteins. If you cook the meat first, then the heat will permanently denature the proteins first, so the brine will essentially be useless.

The reason why you want to pre-cook chicken wings is that (a) they have a lot of fat which melts off into the cooking liquid, and (b) they have a good amount of connective tissue (collagen) which needs to be cooked low and slow to soften into delicious gelatin. Most of the other parts of the chicken don't have nearly as much fat and collagen, so boiling them would likely only serve to overcook them.

Answered by ESultanik

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What happens when you mix whiskey and water?

Question

It is sometimes said that to best experience the flavor and aroma of a good whiskey (or whisky), one ought to add a bit of water. This practice is said to release flavors somehow.

1. Is there any truth to this?
2. Assuming that there is, what is going on?

Asked by Ray

Answer

Whisk(e)y has some crazy chemistry going on inside of it, due to the complex interactions between water, alcohols, oils, esters and other compounds of various complexity. The profile of these chemicals will vary between different whiskey/whisky styles, but the overall chemistry is similar.

Simple effects of dilution

Adding water, or serving on the rocks, has a number of simple effects, such as diluting the ethanol a bit (ethanol anesthetizes your taste buds a bit), and cooling it (making your taste buds slightly less sensitive to certain flavors), but the fascinating part is what happens to the oily flavor compounds during dilution.

Dilution masks some flavor compounds

Oily hydrocarbons are somewhat soluble in high-proof whiskey. There are long-chain esters and short-chain esters of many varieties. As you add water, the whiskey becomes more polar, and the long-chain esters become supersaturated and start to precipitate in the form of micelles, microscopic "droplets" of esters that have clumped together. In some liquors like absinthe or ouzo, these droplets can get so large that they become visible, and visibly cloud the drink (an intended feature of absinthe preparation). In whiskey, these droplets are usually microscopic and don't visibly cloud the drink, because most of the oils have been removed during chill-filtration.

However, these droplets do something important, in that short-chain esters, being more soluble in the droplet than they are in the diluted whiskey, enter the droplet and become trapped inside. These compounds are now less available for tasting or smelling. Fortunately, these compounds are the oily, grassy compounds that many people do not like in their whiskey, and masking them is considered an improvement.

Dilution releases other flavor compounds

There is another type of micelle "droplet" that forms in whiskey. Ethanol, in high concentrations in water, forms it's own clusters, as ethanol molecules gather up with one another. Interestingly, warmer solutions cause more clustering of ethanol molecules, as do higher concentrations. Like before, these micelles trap compounds that are more soluble in ethanol than they are in water, volatile flavor compounds. However, unlike the oil droplets, these flavor compounds are desirable. Cooling the solution and diluting the solution both serve to "pop" these ethanol micelles, allowing them to release their trapped compounds for aroma and flavor.

So cooling and adding water can have the effect of both masking certain flavors by forcing them out of solution, and enhancing others by promoting their release back into solution. In the end, the result of the changed flavors is a matter of taste, which is why some people prefer neat, with water, or on the rocks, but one cannot deny that real chemical changes are in play.

References

• Scientific Paper: Release of distillate flavour compounds in Scotch malt whisky
• Blog posts: New perspectives on whisky and water
• Article: Tasting Whisky
• Wikipedia: Scotch Whisky

Answered by Sam Ley

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“Screaming” noise while steaming milk?

Question

When steaming milk (for a latte or other coffee drink), it sometimes produces a loud, high-pitched "screaming" sound. I think you can usually prevent it by keeping the tip of the steaming wand on the surface of the milk longer before putting it in deeper, but that's just a guess more than anything I've actually been taught. I've always assumed this noise means the milk is scalding, but I'm really sure.

What causes the screaming noise, and what is the best way to avoid it?

Asked by keithjgrant

Answer

The screaming noise occurs when your steaming wand can't draw in enough air. The worst that will happen is your milk will taste a little sour. Just pull the wand out of the milk for a second then put it back in.

Answered by ElendilTheTall

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What is the difference between quick bread and cake?

Question

Quick breads, like banana or zucchini breads, seem to be assembled in an identical method and with similar ingredients as cake. Many recipes have comparable quantities of fat and sugar.

So what is the difference and how can you tell whether a baked good should be called a quick bread or a cake?

Asked by Sobachatina

Answer

This question has become blown out of proportion. I was just curious- then I started getting answers that quickbreads and cake are the same thing- which they "obviously" aren't. So I started doing my own research.

Wikipedia says that the term quickbread was probably invented in the US after the discovery of chemical leavening. The Wikipedia references and some dictionaries corroborate this definition. Basically anything leavened with soda is quickbread.

This doesn't work. There are a great many things leavened with soda that can't be called quickbread. A good example is plain old white cake. Obviously this is a semantic issue but one that needed solving.

Two American cookbooks that I consider canonical recipe resources, The Joy of Cooking, and the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, both have a separate quickbread section. In it are a variety of fruit breads as well as some biscuits and scones.

On Food and Cooking muddied the water a bit by differentiating between quick breads such as biscuits and batter breads such as banana bread. These were grouped together, however, and contrasted against cakes. This book says that cakes are higher in fat and sugar and have a more delicate texture.

Ratio, as linked in this answer, confused the terms a bit more also including a term "quick cake" but it differentiated between the different products with distinct ratios for the flour, fat, and sugar.

With several competing definitions I decided to take an unscientific poll. I called 6 friends in Washington, Utah, Georgia, and Texas. I tried to find a variety of American cultures. Obviously it is biased by the fact that I know all of them.
When asked "What is quickbread to you?" without exception all of them replied "banana bread" When I followed up with: "What is the difference between that and cake" I received the following answers:

"It is eaten at breakfast"
"It has less sugar"
"It is loaf shaped"
"It is more dense"
"It has a more open texture"

My conclusion is that the historical definition of "anything with soda" is no longer useful. In cookbooks it seems to now be applied to chemically risen baked goods that:

• have as a rule of thumb a particular ratio of flour, fat, and sugar
• have less sugar than cake
• refers in particular to fruit breads, biscuits, and scones
• generally has an irregular vs uniform texture

The popular definition (among my extremely limited, unrandom sampling) adds:

• tends to be loaf shaped

And now I can sleep easily again.

Answered by Sobachatina

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