/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>baking
>use these proportions as guidelines
doomed to fail

>>12634083
sieve 130g wheat flour, 65g sugar and 100g corn starch in a bowl, and add a pinch of salt
recipes suggest to sieve stuff to avoid lumps but it's not really necessary if you mix the dry ingredients properly
that said it looks cool so I do it anyway
it's also suggested that one should use powdered sugar, but my primary goal is to save money here so I'm using common granulated sugar
>>12634109
>t. person with no common sense or experience
if you remove butter the result will be drier so if you want to use less butter you add an egg white and a tiny bit of milk to compensate for that, if you want the result to be more chewy and less crumbly you mix it for twice as long as needed, this is the best judgment I was talking about

>>12634143
>no common sense
If I bake something I follow recipes to the T because baking is not an art, it's a science
If you're able to get by with eyeballing everything then that's great though, good on you

>>12634143
grate the zest of about half a lemon and put it in the same bowl
>>12634158
it's exactly because it's a science that you can eyeball it, you just need to know the basic science behind it
you can find a number of slightly different recipes for, say, bread, each using different flours, a bit more water, a different leavening agent, a mix of flours of different coarseness..., and at the end of the day the result is still bread, half decent or fantastic depending on your tastes but still bread, so after you get the rough proportions right you will want to get the details right, and unless you go overboard in one direction (by removing all the proteins for example) you won't fuck it up real bad
I remember reading some bits and pieces of a vegan cake cookbook from a woman who did chemistry research by the day, and the book nicely explained the chemistry behind cake-making, it's not really difficult and you can probably understand it too if I managed, and I can't imagine these notions being very hard to look up either

>>12634313
Sure, if you're baking something you've made before, but when I go into uncharted territory I'd rather just stick to the plan instead of ending up with something shitty that'll turn me off from trying it again
Not to say some people can't do that successfully but most times I try to just go with my gut, my baked goods end up less than optimal, be it a lack of experience or just skill/talent

>vegan cake cookbook
Why reference that and not a real one?

>>12634313
to the same bowl add 150g butter
again, with my main intent being to save money I mostly used margarine (hydrogenated fat free, be weary of trans fats kids) instead of butter, but I didn't have 150g margarine on hand as I prefer the taste of butter and mostly use that and oil when cooking, so I had to use about 30g butter and 120g margarine, for better or worse
cut the butter/margarine in small pieces while it's still cold and add it to the bowl, be sure not to cut it in too small pieces as that will result in a finer textured batter, which will in turn result in more chewy and less crumbly cookies
>>12634347
it's not about following your gut, it's about using more or less of an ingredient of some kind (protein, fat, water, leavener...) to achieve a particular result, but ofc you need to know about the chemistry behind everything to use a sound jedgement, else you're just going with your gut, as you put it
>why reference that
because, as I wrote a moment ago, it nicely explained the chemistry behind cake-making
there was no mention of killing meat eaters in their sleep if that's what you were worried about

>>12634409
Ahem.. FUCK vegans and FUCK their malnutritioned asses
>has to substitute 90% of every recipes ingredients because muh morals
That being said, I don't really have anything else to add

>>12634409
this is what the yolks should look like when done, after this you have to mash them (I used a fork) and add them to everything else
rinse them under cold water until they're colder than room temperature, you want the butter/margarine to remain as cold and solid as possible to make a crumbly batter so be smarter than I was and cool them before cutting the butter up
put everything together and mix with your hands (one is sufficient for this amount of batter really) for as little time as possible
the more you mix stuff the more gluten will be formed by the flour reacting with liquids, this is also the reason why you want to keep the butter as cold and solid as possible, canestrelli should be very very very crumbly
>>12634506
>reee vegans are symbolically threatening my values by not eating meat and being just fine
talk about muh morals

>>12634566
this is how the batter should look like, give or take
if your crumbles are bigger it's all good as long as everything was mixed and no flour was left out, if they're too small you might have overmixed the batter

then the traditional method would be to use a rolling pin to flatten the batter and cut out the flower shapes from that, but that would require too much space and effort since I don't especially care about the flowery shapes, so I used a more modern technique

>>12634665
I rolled it in baking paper
cool huh
the ideal diameter is about 5cm but use your imagination, after cooling this you'll have to cut it in cylinders that will become the cookies

>>12634678
I made two and they were both on the thin side, this one has been in the fridge for about 1h40m, and has reached the right consistency as I can hold it on one end and it remains straight
with the help of a knife, chop it into small circles, put them on a baking tray and then in the oven @ 160°C for about 10-12 minutes

>>12634083
What is this?

>>12634777
and there you go, untraditionally shaped canestrelli
>>12634779
three egg yolks in a saucepan of boiling water

bibidi babidi

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