Cooking For Engineers

[mumu33]

I was wandering if any one could tell me how you are suppose to do a recipe if there are not no guidelines? Meaning speeds to use,is this something that comes with expr. or what am i missing? On this web site shows how peanut butter cookies are made but in the recipe just says cream and no speeds. Other recipes will say speeds and others dont could someone please help to understand this. The rec. say using electric mixer beat butter and sugar till creamy,well being a newbie in baking how would you know what speed to be on,and saying to me just untill mixture doesnt fly doesnt seem to help me. You could easily do this creamy on low speed or med speed how do you determine what to do? Just trying to understand,and sorry if this is really stupid to any expr. bakers.


THANK YOU

[Michael Chu]

I don't bother putting in mixer speeds unless it's necessary. There are two reasons for this. (1) I don't know what mixer you own or how fast high or medium speed is. This is kind of a non-reason. I can still give guidelines such as "low speed" and it'll give you some sort of idea. (2) It often doesn't matter. This is the real reason why I'll leave out this information in a recipe. It's not that important how fast you run the mixer when creaming butter with sugar. Run it on low and it'll take longer for the sugar to evenly spread and enough air to be beat into the butter (too low and it won't cream, but I'm not sure is a mixer exists that runs this slow). Run it on high and it gets done faster, but you might have a dirty kitchen from butter flying all over the place. In the end, when no mixing speed is specified we only care about what you end up with. (There's usually a photo of this - if not, I apologize.)

Don't get too concerned about the speed of your mixer, blender, or food processor. Unfortunately, it's often something that you have to adjust for yourself - if it's mixing slowly and nothing looks like it's jumping up, you can speed it up if you want. In some cases you'll want to avoid overmixing, but the recipe will tell you when to stop (e.g. soft peaks) and usually show you a picture or have a verbal description of what to look for ("until butter and sugar lighten in color and sugar is fully integrated").

In the article you mention, the mixing speed doesn't matter. In all the stages we are only mixing until the ingredients are integrated. Go as fast as you are comfortable - but too fast and stuff starts splattering.

[mumu33]

THANK YOU SOOOOOOOMUCH!!!