Baking

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Chelsea - Without seeing the whole recipe it's hard to fully troubleshoot your recipe, but we do think there is too much sugar in this recipe. 2/3 cup of sugar is a LOT - most recipes call for about 2 tablespoons of sugar. Too much sugar can inhibit or even kill the yeast by making the yeast produce too much alcohol. Yeast can tolerate just a certain amount of alcohol. So, the sugar will not kill yeast directly. Sugar and yeast both need water content in your dough. If you add too much sugar that competition can go wrong. The dough will rise too slowly or not at all because the sugar is absorbing all the available water. At first, it may seem like you simply need more water, but unfortunately, the dough is a little more complicated than that. The most straightforward solutions are using a recipe with less sugar or adding more yeast. We would probably recommend the former. Have you tried our recipe for Japanese Milk Bread? If you'd prefer to try a different recipe, we always recommend using a recipe from a well-tested, reliable source such as a cookbook, food magazine, or food section of a newspaper. Many recipes online are not tested and, therefore, a recipe for failure (pun intended). Lastly, we would probably also recommend a recipe with some milk or egg in it and butter in place of oil. All of these changes will add richness and flavor to prevent the dough from being dry and dull-tasting. Best, The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Marla - In addition to, obviously, changing the flavor of the cake, you're correct that it will affect the moisture of the cake since the wine is part of the liquid ingredients in the batter. The alcohol doesn't serve any purpose in the cake from a technical perspective. Best, The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Joanne - We didn't test lard in our Single-Crust Pie Dough, so we don't know for sure if/how it will work, though we presume a half-or-less substitution should be fine. If you do try it, make sure to find good quality rendered leaf lard, which is a bit hard to find. Much of the lard widely available in grocery stores has been hydrogenated and filled with preservatives, with a strong piggy flavor, which makes baking with it considerably less desirable than an all-butter crust. Good luck! Best, The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Cheryl - Many chefs and bakers believe that using unsalted butter will allow you to control the salt content in your dishes better than using salted butter. But we've tested salted versus unsalted butter in a number of savory and baking recipes and we didn’t find any measurable difference between the two. The small amount of salt in salted butter (it's about 1/4 teaspoon per stick, depending on the brand) is undetectable when cooked or baked in a recipe, we found. Still, we have a preference between the two. Though most culinary professionals and publications will recommend using unsalted butter, we prefer the salted kind because it tastes better when you’re not cooking with it. Unsalted butter doesn’t cut it on toast! Since we prefer to stick with one kind, salted butter is our choice. It also has a longer shelf life. So if you don’t go through butter at a fast rate, buying salted butter is a good idea. You can certainly still use unsalted butter in our recipes if you prefer. You just may need to adjust the salt to your personal tastes. Using salted butter in the lemon almond pound cake will not make the cake salty, it will just give it a more rounded, deeper flavor. Hope that helps! The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Ginny - This is the recipe we developed based on the coconut pie we had in Yelapa. Best, The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi John - For loaf and tart pans, you can assume metal. For pie plates we prefer glass. Glass heats up gently and evenly, priming the pie for a consistent, but slightly slower bake. It also provides an easy window into doneness, which ensures that the pie dough is completely cooked. For 9x13 baking pans we generally specify if it’s necessary for the pan to be metal and, otherwise, either glass or metal should work. Just keep in mind that glass heats up more slowly so cooking times may be on the higher end of a range. Hope that helps! Best, The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Steve - We aren’t sure of your question - are you asking why it turned into batter? This is likely because you made two changes to the recipe. First, in order to replace some of the cream with egg you would’ve needed to measure the amount of cream you removed by volume or weight and replace with the exact same amount of egg to ensure the texture of the dough would be the same. Second, you used light cream instead of heavy cream. Light cream contains less milk fat that heavy cream (18-30% vs. at least 36%). The more milk fat, the thicker the cream, and the less water in the product. This would definitely make the dough more loose. Hope that helps! The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Gail - We are so glad you enjoyed the bete noire! The pieces of zest are meant to be very finely sliced for serving. We chose to cook the zest in larger strips (and then slice after sugaring) to prevent the zest from falling apart during candying. Best, The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Linda - A dark metal pan absorbs and distributes heat more quickly and thoroughly than lighter-colored pans. So not only does your cake bake more quickly in a dark pan, its crust can potentially burn (or at least brown unpleasantly) due to over-exposure to oven heat. Therefore, you should lower the temperature by 25 degrees and start checking you baked goods about 10 minutes before the times specified in the recipe. Best, The Milk Street Cooking Team

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Leta - You should be able to replace the milk with coconut milk. Just make sure the can in well blended before using it in your recipe. You can sub 1:1 for the milk. Best, The Milk Street Team