Many recipes call for room temperature or softened butter because it is easier to incorporate into a cake batter or cookie dough than rock hard, cold butter is. The same is true of eggs, even though most recipes don’t specifically call for eggs to be at room temperature. Refrigeration keeps eggs fresher for a much longer period of time than storing them at room temperature, but they will blend into recipes much more easily if you take the time to take the chill off of them before using them. Eggs at room temperature will have more “relaxed” whites that take on more volume when beaten and break up more easily when whisked into a batter. Cold eggs can actually cause the butter you carefully softened to firm up and give a batter a slightly curdled appearance (although it is usually just fine to keep going with a recipe when that happens).
To bring eggs to room temperature, you can take them out of the refrigerator about 30 minutes before you plan to use them (around the time that you might take your butter out of the fridge) and leave them on the countertop. If the eggs sit out longer than that, it won’t hurt them in terms of how they act in the recipe, but they will have “aged” compared to eggs that have been kept only in the refrigerator.
If you forget to take your eggs out of the refrigerator, you can warm them up very quickly by placing them in a bowl full of warm water. Just 5 or 10 minutes in a bowl full of warm water – hot water may cause the egg shells to crack – will take the chill off of your eggs.
Recipes that call for egg whites alone often call for them to be at room temperature. Eggs are, however, much easier to separate when they are cold. To warm up just your egg whites or egg yolks, separate the eggs when cold and place the whites and yolks in small bowls. Place these bowls into slightly larger bowls full of warm water and allow them to sit for 5-10 minutes (or simply let them sit, covered, at room temperature for 30-60 minutes before using). Leftover egg whites or egg yolks can be stored for later use.
Stand mixers are great tools to have in the kitchen, as they can handle all kinds of jobs with speed and ease, from creaming butter and sugar to kneading bread dough. One minor annoyance to using KitchenAid stand mixers, which are easily one of the top selling stand mixer brands available, is that the included paddle attachment doesn’t do an effective job of getting everything off of the sides of the mixer bowl. You need to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula when creaming butter and sugar or blending in flour for a cake batter. It’s a minor inconvenience, but it does take some additional time and dirty up some additional kitchen equipment. Some companies have come up with spatula-like paddle attachment that eliminate the problem, and while many of them work – and work well – with KitchenAid mixers (such as the Beater Blade), many people with KitchenAids prefer not to take a chance on using a non-KitchenAid approved attachment.
Fortunately for anyone in that boat, KitchenAid has now come out with the KitchenAid Flex Edge Beater. This paddle attachment has been adapted to have a spatula-like bowl scraper on one side and a regular paddle blade on the other, so it gives you the ability to scrape the bowl while you mix and still allows you to mix in chunky things (such as raisins or chocolate chips) which can jam up other brands of bowl-scraping blades. It fits KitchenAid 4.5 Quart and 5 Quart mixers, so it will work on most home models, and it is both durable and easy to clean. It’s a great accessory to add to your mixer and one that anyone who does a lot of baking will get a lot of use out of.
Homemade bread is a wonderful thing to make and to keep around the house, but there are several things that keep us from baking bread as often as we might like. The first thing is time. It can take a couple of hours to take a loaf from start to finish and, while we might have time on the weekends, this rules it out for weekdays. The second thing is difficulty. Kneading bread can seem like a daunting task to novice bakers, and even experienced bakers don’t always want to get the counter covered with flour. This No Knead Whole Wheat Honey Sandwich Bread is one of the easiest breads I’ve ever made and it is darn tasty. It requires no kneading and has a very short rising time, so the bread can be fully baked just about one hour after you start to mix the ingredients together!
The secret to this bread is the temperature of the ingredients used. It uses both bread flour (you can use all purpose, but bread flour gives you a slightly better texture in the finished loaf) and whole wheat flour, which gives the bread a great structure and a good wheat flavor. The flour is warmed before adding it to the rest of the ingredients, and all that heat kick starts the yeast into a rapid rise and cuts the total rising time to just 30 minutes!
The bread also does all of its rising right in the loaf pan that it is baked in. You don’t need to knead the dough before putting it into the pan, just stir it very vigorously when you are incorporating all of the ingredients. If you have a stand mixer, you can mix your dough with a dough hook and transfer it directly to the loaf pan. If you don’t mind a little kneading, you can turn the bread onto a lightly floured surface and knead it for just 1 minute to smooth it out even more before putting it into the loaf pan. I usually do the little bit of extra kneading, but it definitely isn’t necessary if you just put a little bit of muscle into your mixing.
The finished bread is a great sandwich loaf. It has a good whole wheat flavor to it and just a hint of sweetness from the honey. It slices easily, toasts well and makes fantastic sandwiches. You can eat it while it is still warm, if you want to serve it for dinner, but it is best after it has cooled completely. You can use whole wheat flour or white whole wheat flour in this bread and you’ll get good results both ways, but a little bit lighter flavor from the white whole wheat if you prefer a slightly less hearty whole wheat flavor.
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Whole wheat flours can not only add fiber to baked goods, they can add a lot of flavor to them, too. But as is the case with so many ingredients, not all whole wheat flours are created equal. Flours range in flavor and in texture, and using different brands can even impact the results you get when you bake with them. Cook’s Illustrated recently did a taste test of whole wheat flours to see which brands were standouts in their test kitchens.
The five brands that Cook’s Illustrated tested in a recent issue were King Arthur Premium Whole Wheat Flour, Bob’s Red Mill Organic Whole Wheat Flour, Hodgson Mill Old Fashioned Whole Wheat Flour, Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flour and Pillsbury Best Whole Wheat Flour. All were tested in whole wheat sandwich bread and in pancakes. King Arthur and Bob’s Red Mill came out on top, both praised for their great whole wheat flavors. Hodgson Mill’s flour had a strong flavor, but a very coarse grind that led to some overly crumbly sandwich bread. Gold Medal and Pillsbury had the finest textures and the most subtle flavors to their whole wheat flours. These last three flour brands all received the “Recommended with Reservations” rating from CI.
When you choose a whole wheat flour, take into account the flavor and the performance of the product. Tthis might mean that you try a couple of brands on your own at home. Personally, sometimes like a rustic feel for whole wheat baked goods and sometimes I prefer a finer, more subtle presence. I would opt for Pillsbury or Gold Medal for baking bread if I wanted to have a texture that is similar to non-whole wheat bread (finer grinds of the whole wheat generally mean that there will be a bit more gluten in these flours) and a coarse flour for some hearty whole wheat chocolate chip cookies (a coarse Hodgson Mill would be my pick there).
