6 Baking Tips For Every Beginner Baker

Baking is a precise science which requires your utmost dedication and concentration. One small incorrect move could result in a disaster and can turn your dish from a masterpiece to a piece of garbage. If you have just started baking and are in the process of learning the basics and techniques of efficient baking, then there are a few tips and tricks that you need to know. When I was young I learned baking from some best baking schools. I tried 3-4 schools because every school was not best on every dish.

These tips will help you avoid any disasters in the kitchen and will make it easier for you to bake an assortment of baked goods in a short period of time.

1. Prepping is Extremely Crucial

A lot of people often make the mistake of skipping the preparation part and go straight to the baking which is completely wrong. Before you actually start baking, you need to first spend some time in preparing your ingredients, baking tools, etc. and read your recipe thoroughly before you start. This is important because once you start baking, it can get a little tricky to get an ingredient or baking tool if you don’t already own it. So, make sure that you read your recipe thoroughly and check your inventory before you proceed.

2. Using the Ingredients at Appropriate Temperature is Important

Another important tip for baking is to always use the ingredients at the temperature specified. New bakers often make the mistake of using cold eggs or butter which doesn’t provide the appropriate fluffiness to your batter. A lot of recipes also call for ingredients at a particular temperature which will help in achieving the desired taste, so if you ignore it then you are likely to end up with a ruined baked good.

3. Measure the Ingredients Accurately

As mentioned earlier, baking is a precise science which is why it is important that you add the ingredients at the mentioned quantity and don’t tamper too much with this. You can experiment a little later on but in the starting, you will need to stick to the recipe measurements. Make sure that you use measuring spoons and cups and weighing scale to check the ingredients quantity before adding it. A little too much butter can turn your cake soggy and make it slightly inedible so always stick with the measurements.

4. Use an Oven Thermometer and Maintain a Constant Temperature

For a dish to bake properly, it requires a constant oven temperature which can be only achieved with a good oven setting and a few precautionary measures. While a lot of ovens do come with an internal thermometer, these thermometers are not accurate or reliable. This is why it is wise to use a separate oven thermometer to ensure that you are providing a constant heating temperature to your food. Another important thing to keep in mind is to avoid opening the oven door too often as it lets out too much heat and can affect the time taken to bake. Make sure that you check your baking dish from outside first and only check it once or twice during the entire baking duration.

5. Store your Ingredients Properly

Storing your baking ingredients properly will help in preserving the freshness and will result in a nicely baked dish. This is why it is often advised to store flour, sugar, yeast, baking soda, baking powder, etc. in an airtight container so that they stay fresh and protected from worms or insects. Make sure that you place your spices and essence in a cool dry place to trap their fragrance and freshness and don’t store them in a refrigerator.

6. Take Care and Maintain your Baking Tools

Don’t be careless with your baking tools and equipment. Keep them clean and dry for future use and always use a mild dish soap to clean them. Store them together in a cupboard so that it is easier for you to take them out while baking and always cover your baking pans and sheets with parchment paper to avoid food getting stuck to it.

A Short Difference Between Pressure Cooker and Rice Cooker

You may get a variety of options for kitchen appliances in the market and the manufacturers are competing to get the best market share and your kitchen counter space. Pressure cookers are basically used to cook beans, meats, and bones and rice as well and on the other hand, rice cookers are more versatile and can cook rice, soups and stews.

But the question remains how to differentiate between both and how to determine which one is best for you and fit your needs. No worries, here we are to help you out. Have a look at these differences to improve your decision. Kitchenguyd review’s on

Pressure Cooker

Let us first start with a brief description of what a pressure cooker is? A well-known household appliance, a pressure cooker is available with three parts: the inner pot, heating element and the temperature and pressure sensors. Pressure cooking means that you can cook your food in a tightly sealed vessel where liquid or air cannot escape at a pre-defined pressure level.

As the boiling point increases the pressure also increases. The water temperature reached the normal boiling point to 250° F or 121° C. When a wet steam forced by the internal steam pressure comes out that means the food is cooked.

Evolution of anything becomes necessary when it comes to survival, pressure cookers have also changed themselves from the traditional pressure cooker on the stove top to a modern electric pressure cooker in which you can easily keep a track and adjust the pressure and temperature through a micro-computerized chip.

Rice Cooker

Many people prefer and in fact, love to have a rice cooker in their kitchen. Like a pressure cooker, a rice cooker also has several parts such as the inner pot, the external vessels with a heating element and a lid. There are some extra attachments with a basic rice cooker like a steaming basket, a tofu container to make tofu etc.

To cook rice, you need to heat the water in the inner pot to a boiling point. Now the water will evaporate into steam because the water is absorbed by the rice and expand its volume till it is absorbed properly. The raw rice gets cooked and softened due to the moisture and heat. Rice cookers have evolved themselves from traditional ones to conventional electric rice cooker, micom rice cooker, induction heating +micom to pressure +IH+ micom rice cooker.

Top Posts:

• Frida’s Italian Cheese Pizza
• Frida’s Four Cheese Pizza Recipe
• Frida’s Smoked Salmon and Cream Cheese

Type of Foods you can Cook

Pressure cooker

Braising and simmering are probably two of the best cooking methods to use a pressure cooker. No doubt, there are electric pressure cookers with different other features that work as a rice cooker or a slow cooker.

Rice cooker

Surely a rice cooker is best used for cooking rice. A rice cooker comes with different menu settings such as white, brown, mixed or any other type of brow, sticky, porridge, sushi and many other. There are some multi-functional rice cookers that contain a steam basket for veggies, hard-boiled eggs etc. and also with a slow-cooking feature for soups and stews but that’s not all. To find out what more your rice cooker can do for you check out rice cooker reviews before you make a purchase.

You see both the appliances hardly make any big difference. It is just that one is a perfect appliance for making rice and other for braising meats.

Frida’s Italian Cheese Pizza

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup Sun-Dried Tomato Sauce
• 3 1/2 oz stracchino cheese or fresh mozzarella, sliced
• 2 Teaspoons fresh or 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 Envelope yeast
• 2 teaspoon Sugar
• 2 cup all purpose flour
• 1 cup Luke-warm water
• 1 Teaspoon salt

Instructions

Frida’s Four Cheese Pizza Recipe

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup Basic Tomato Sauce
• 2 oz Romano cheese grated
• 2 oz Provolone cheese, sliced
• 1 oz grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 oz grated mozzarella cheese
• 1 Envelope dry yeast
• 1/4 teaspoon Sugar
• 3/4 cup Lukewarm water
• 1 3/4 cups Unbleached all−purpose flour or bread flour
• 1/2 Teaspoon salt

Instructions

Frida’s Smoked Salmon and Cream Cheese

Frids’s Fired Pizza

Ames — oh the memories. Ames is a unique town, where nearly half of its 58,000 residents are college students bringing the median age down to a ripe 23.8 years (thanks Wiki for confirming my suspicions). The restaurant business is built around demand, and in Ames, the demand is high for pizza places, particularly cheap ones.

The cheap ones come and go… gone are Gumby’s and Home Team pizza, but still kicking are Pizza Pit and Jeff’s. Sure, there’s Great Plains and Black Market among others, but they are upscale using Oatmeal and Deep Dish trickeries, respectively. Falling into that later category is Vesuvius, named apropo, where Napoli styled pizza is served. For those unfamiliar, Vesuvius hearkens to Mount Vesuvius, that land formation created by the evil volcano that wiped out Pompeii. But in its wake of destruction, it left fertile volcanic soils that are known for growing some of the finest tomatoes, and that region of Italy is also known for crafting some of the world’s finest pies.

Enter Vesuvius in Ames. This place has been alive and kicking for several years now, and thankfully it still leaves my chewy and charred cravings satisfied. The biggest legitimate complaint I’ve been able to gather about Vesuvius is the price. At around $10 per individual pie, it’s spendy in comparison with other options. The other complaint I’ve detected is actually quite a compliment — it’s not “cheap pizza”, something that is so ingrained in our way of living, that it’s near sacrilege to suggest that we might go beyond fancy toppings of pineapple and actually consider something so baneful as…arugula…shudder…prosciutto…dear God, the thought.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again until someone finally hears me…Ames is probably the toughest town when it comes to opening a restaurant and being successful. I’ve seen many open and close throughout the years. It’d been at least a year since I had last dined, and so I was happy to see they’d recently done some improvements to their already nice location.

The star of their pizza is still the crust, done perfectly, it’s right on par with Centro in Des Moines — but better, because unlike any other pizza I’ve had they do one thing truly unique and that is sprinkled salt all along the edge of the dough, making that finishing bite all the more delectable and intoxicating, and inviting you to grab another slice.

If you’ve never tried Vesuvius, it’s worth your time, dollars, consideration, fill in the blank. If you live in Ames and don’t yet know it, let me tell you how incredibly fortunate you are to have such a fine pizza place in your backyard. I’ve eaten pizza all over the country and can say Vesuvius is among the best I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience. Read our another article about pizza (Frida’s Mexican Pizza)

Frida’s Mexican Pizza

When you walk into Michael’s what strikes you first is the aroma of pizza. Not just pizzas that are coming fresh and hot out of the oven, but the aroma of pizzas that have remained in the air from yesteryear. It’s a smell of nostalgia and memories. You can taste sauce and yeast. [Worth a mention: my editor questioned whether this is a good thing — and in fact it is. Any pizza place that doesn’t smell like pizza isn’t worth your time or money.

Be wary of the posers.] The other thing that strikes me personally is Nobb Hill in San Franciso. There’s a pizza place there called Za Pizza that if my memories serve me well, feels about as a close a doppelganger of a restaurant I’ve ever seen. Both are small, with loyal patrons, great service, and were having fun with different toppings isn’t something they shy away from.

We’ve been to Michael’s in the past, and it’s one of those places that whenever you’re there you say out loud “we should come here more often”. Almost in unison my wife and I said it together, but we really meant it. We agreed that this is our place. The place we’d been searching for years to really call our family pizza place.

Personally, I’m envious of people who live in places like Brooklyn, where great neighborhood pizza places, with rich histories, and committed owners are a dime a dozen. In Iowa, it’s just not as common to find a place that meets that criteria. But we both agreed this might just about as close to that as we’ve seen. Sure there’s Chuck’s, but it’s just not quite our cup of tea.

As a kid, my family would always order potato skins whenever a place would offer them. It’s something that I’ve been able to get Lissah hooked on recently. What a brilliant combination, right? Pizza and potato skins. They’re great — nice and potato-y, something ironically many potato skins lack, as potato skins often times are skin spoons to hold everything but potato — bacon, cheese, chives, and sour cream. Not so with these, albeit some may say they’re heavy on the potato, we feel they’re just right.

The pizza is really the star at Michael’s, as it should be. The crust is perfect, with a perfect crispness on the outside and a nice chewy center. The sauce is wonderfully robust, with a hint of it stolen from the fridge of someone’s loving grandma. But it’s the toppings that are the pièce de résistance, the magnum opus.

We ordered their meatball, which features their “red Sauce, Meatballs, Sauteed peppers, Carmelized onions, Marinated mushroom, Roasted garlic, Mozzarella and Parmesan” (a big shout out to their menu for the regurgitation, which I was in no way prepared, qualified, or capable of recalling…I thank you).

But the meatballs and the caramelized onions are certainly worth an explicit and elicit mention. The meatballs were loved by all — imagine large, homemade meatballs cooked to perfection, then sliced to look somewhat like mini sausage patties. They were delightful… in fact so much so that our girls asked for as many as we could muster, which left very little for my wife and I. And the caramelized onions, what a treat, being nice and sweet provided such a nice balance and just made the experience.

Without further gushing, there you have it. A fantastic, wonderful, worthy-of-a-drive, much closer to home than San Francisco, been in business since 1979, Des Moines original. Damn, I’m hungry now, and they just closed.

Ladies Lunch For Cuties | Frida’s Things

Our girls hit the jackpot when it comes to the neighbor department. Two funny and entertaining girls that are the same ages as our two oldest live in the house next door and all of them get along just as good as chocolate and ice cream. They are always up to play together so we decided to host our little buddies for lunch and a playdate.

I kept the food simple as they are little girls and my two aren’t exactly adventurous eaters. I served the little ladies cheese and crackers and apple slices. I knew all the kids would be fine with this: no allergies and food they liked. The last thing you need when you’re outnumbered five to one by little is to have one of them unhappy about food choices. We stuck with water but a simple “punch” of fruit juice or even a fruit and veggie blend drink with a little seltzer or clear soda for a bit of fizz would be fun.

I decided to serve the food on bright colored platters to make it feel more special for the girls. I pulled out whatever I had in my cupboards. It didn’t need to match or fit a particular theme although, being as it’s all mine, it seemed to fit the fun, bright, and girly categories which worked well for this group of girls. I happened to have some fun “princess” paper plates left over from a birthday party so we used those. They worked well with the platters and since they were paper, I didn’t have to worry about the girls breaking them or washing them.

It was a lovely sunny day and the girls love being outside so they dined al fresco on our deck. That means, any mess is outside and not in my house….bonus! The girls decided it was like a picnic so they were totally sold on the idea.

The adorable conversations and the sheer joy of little girl giggles and squeals made any effort worth it. They had a great play date for the rest of the afternoon dressing up, coloring with sidewalk chalk, and blowing bubbles. It was just so much fun for all of us and we can’t wait to do it again!

Our Little Backyard Garden