Top Ten Ingredients Every Baker Needs
I love baking. Most people eat baked goods on a weekly or daily basis, and you may not know it. Unfortunately, when baking there's usually some ingredients that are needed for almost every recipe, and you're gonna need these stocked up on your pantry if you want to pursue baking as a hobby (if you've considered it, try it, it's a good idea: baking is a very beneficial hobby to have, though trying not to make too much fattening or sugar-filled foods can sometimes be a problem). Anyways, here are the top ten ingredients every Baker needs. Enjoy!
Ah, yes. As the universal baking ingredient, flour definitely claims the number one spot. We've been out of flour a few times when we wanted to bake, and we normally end up with nothing to bake. I could write a four-hundred word essay on why flour is the most important baking ingredient, but I'm not in the mood so I'll give you this short little comment:
Flour is good. Get lots of flour. Bake much ingredients with it, yes.
A baker without flour would be like butcher without the meat.
The most versatile ingredient of all time takes third place. Eggs are always very useful, and if you're baking a cake, cookies, muffins, or really any delicious baked good and the recipe doesn't call for eggs, something fishy is going on.
If you like it sweet, just close your eyes and pour out a random amount of sugar, usually on the delicious side (lots). Just joking. Always follow the recipe as precisely as you can, and if anything, use less than the amount of sugar it calls for. But as baking is always on the sweet side, all recipes will call for some sugar. Unless, of course, you're some crazy health addict and make some kale mushroom muffin crap I could manure my lawn with. But yeah, sugar is very important, and every baker should have some, both brown and white. Yum!
You probably use this in practically every recipe, but don't know what it does. It is really important, though. Last Thanksgiving season (mid-October here in Canada) I made pumpkin-chocolate muffins. I forgot the baking soda. The result was horrible. The taste of the pumpkin muffins was alright, not great but not terrible, but the consistency? It was disgusting. You take a bite, and it's all hard and crusty at one side and basically liquid on the other. It was horrible, and a big waste of ingredients (two minutes after the first taste, all dozen of them were in the trash). Baking soda isn't only important for making paper-mache volcanoes, you need it for baking too!
Usually unless your baking dairy free.
Baking Powder is pretty much the same as baking soda, though there are some differences. I don't feel like explaining them all, so look it up if you're curious. Anyways, read my description for baking soda. It would be similar if you left out the baking powder.
Yeah, I know that this doesn't normally come to mind when I say "think of baking ingredients!" but it is almost always used in baking recipes, normally just something tiny like "a dash", or for those annoying specific bakers, "a quarter of a teaspoon". It is pretty vital, though, it's not just used for flavouring.
I know, this isn't one you always need to stock up on when you take a trip to the grocery store, unless you're this big polluter who always buys plastic water-filled bottles. But water is generally vital in recipes, generally used to balance out the liquid and solid parts of the recipe.