Baking Essential: Ingredients

An important part of baking is to have a pantry that is stocked well with a bunch of ingredients. The essential ingredients that should usually be in your pantry are things such as flour, sugar, baking powder, etc. Listed below are the essential ingredients and a little bit about each of them.

~ Flour: Flour is a grain usually made from wheat but also can be made from nuts and seeds. This ingredient provides body, structure and is essential in most products that are baked.

~ Sugar: This ingredient adds moisture and sweetness to any recipe since it becomes a liquid when it melts. This also helps with making baked goods becoming brown.

~ Baking Powder: This ingredient creates baked goods to rise when mixed together with a liquid. It's a combination of cream tartar, baking soda, and cornstarch. This is double-acting and reacts twice. For example, when it's mixed with heat and mixed with a liquid.

~ Baking Soda: This item is usually used in recipes that need acidic ingredients. Adding together baking soda and another acidic ingredient creates a reaction that causes the mixture to rise perfectly that you'll need to be able to bake it right away.

~ Unsalted Butter: This ingredient is usually used to control the amount of salt that the recipe contains. You might tend to use this ingredient instead of salted butter because the margarine content in the butter is not a suitable substitute for baking.

~ Milk/Cream: This ingredient helps incorporate moisture, fat, and flavor into your recipe. The cream is the fat portion that rises to the top of whole milk. It contains butterfat and is very helpful for making whip cream.

~ Eggs: Eggs are very essential in baking. This ingredient gives the baked goods color, flavor, structure, and richness. This can also help a cake rise by adding air into the batter. You may need the egg whites, whole egg, or egg yolks depending on what type of recipe you have.

~ Cocoa Powder: This ingredient is made from cocoa beans that had the cocoa butter removed from it. There are two types of cocoa power, Dutch-process cocoa and natural cocoa. Natural cocoa is lighter in color and more bitter than Dutch-process cocoa. Natural cocoa is used in combination with baking soda. Dutch-process cocoa is most often used in that need baking powder because it's less acidic than natural cocoa powder. Also, Dutch cocoa powder is more darker in color than natural cocoa. This gives the cocoa a deeper chocolate flavor.

There are many other ingredients that you could use to stock your kitchen but these are a few examples that you may be the most important.