Pepper is just behind salt in popularity as a seasoning. Pepper is added most frequently to meats, soups, sauces and salads. Ground black or white pepper comes from the berries of a tropical climbing shrub. Read more »

The most nutritious and beautifully presented meal in the world cannot be enjoyed unless it tastes good. Enhancing the flavor of foods is an art that is critical to the acceptability of foods, and a restaurant can suceed or fail depending on how that art is practiced. The most common reason for consumers to reject food is unacceptable flavor. Seasonings and flavorings help food taste its best. They are rarely, however, capable of redeeming foods that are not of good quality to start with or of rejuvenating foods that have lost their quality during preparation. Example, no amount of cinnamon will raise the flavor of an apple pie made from frozen apple slices to the level of one made from fresh and juicy apples.

Biscuit Method

This method is similar to the pastry method except that all the dry ingredients – flour, salt and leavening are first combined. The fat is then cut into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Liquid is added last. The dough is mixed just until moistened and not more or the biscuits will be tough.

Muffin Method

This is a simple, two-stage mixing method. The dry and moist ingredients are mixed separately and then combined and blended until the dry ingredients just become moist. Over-mixing will result in a tough baked product riddled with tunnels.

Fat is first cut into flour with a pastry blender, or with two knives criss-crossed against each other in a scissor-like fashion, to form a mealy fat-flour mixture. Half the milk and all of the sugar, baking powder, and salt are then blended into the fat-flour mixture. Lastly, eggs and more milk may then be blended into the mixture.

In the single stage method, also known as the “quick-mix”, “one-bowl” or “dump” method, all the dry and liquid ingredients are mixed together at once. Packaged mixes for cakes, biscuits, and other baked goods rely on a single-stage method. Read more »

The conventional sponge method, also known as the conventional meringue method, is identical to the creaming method except that a portion of the sugar is mixed in with the beaten egg or egg white, and the egg foam is folded into the batter in the end. Read more »

The conventional method, also known as the creaming or cake method, is the most time consuming, and is the method most frequently used for mixing cake ingredients. It produces a fine-grained, velvety texture. The three basic steps are: Read more »

“Mixing” is a general term that includes beating, blending, binding, creaming, whipping, and folding. In mixing, two or more ingredients are evenly dispersed in one another until they become one product. Read more »

White flour is one of the more difficult ingredients to measure accurately by volume, because its tiny particles not only vary in shape and size, but also have a tendency to pack. In addition, the various white flours differ in density, ranging from 100 grams per cup in cake flour to approximately 150 grams per cup in all-purpose flour. This influences the number of cups obtained from various flours of the same weight. Although there is no standard weight for a cup of flour, 1 pound of all-purpose flour averages 4 cups. Read more »

The amount of sugar needed depends on its type – granulated white sugar, brown sugar, or confectioners’ sugar (powdered or icing). Measuring methods differ among these sugars, because 1 pound of each yields 2, 2 1/4, and 4 1/2 (sifted) cups respectively.

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