Archive for the ‘New Products’ Category
Nonstick parchment paper is a great tool to have in the kitchen. Perfect for lining cookie sheets and cake pans, parchment paper makes cleanup easy and prevents your baked goods from sticking to your pans. Parchment paper is best used on flat surfaces (such as the bottom of pans), but there are things that I bake that I like to be able to lift out of the pan for cooling, slicing and serving. These include coffee cakes, brownies and bar cookies, and when making these types of baked goods, I typically line my pans with aluminum foil and lightly grease it. I can lift the foil right out of the pan (I wrap it up, over the sides) and my baked goods don’t stick.
Reynolds Wrap has managed to combine aluminum foil and parchment paper into one product, their new Nonstick Pan Lining Paper. This paper has foil on one side and parchment on the other. The idea is that the foil allows the paper to conform to the shape of the pan – sides and all – but the parchment paper gives it a nonstick finish with no extra greasing required. This product is a little more expensive than both foil and parchment are, but I picked up a roll recently to see how it performed.
The paper feels heavy, much thicker than either plain aluminum foil or parchment paper. It pressed easily into my pans (sheet pans with shallow sides and deeper, rectangular baking dishes), wrapping into the corners and up the sides easily and staying exactly where I contoured it to my pan, although I noticed that it didn’t have quite as much flexibility as plain aluminum foil. The parchment side of the paper worked just like regular parchment, so it definitely didn’t need to be greased. Overall, I was happy with the performance, but lightly greased aluminum foil works just as well for most baking applications. I would choose this for more heavy duty baking (like lasagna, which Reynolds Wrap actually recommends) where I would think that foil alone might not hold up to the job.
You might want to use a little extra caution the next time you pop a pyrex baking dish into the oven because Consumer Reports has noticed an uptick in the number of incidents involving exploding or unexpectedly shattering glass bakeware that have been reported recently. Not all of these incidents result in injury, but even if you don’t end up with a burn or a cut from a hot piece of glass, you could very well end up with an oven full of shards.
Pyrex and other glass bakeware is traditionally made of borosilicate, a type heat resistant glass that is fantastic for baking because it can easily withstand the high temperatures of the oven without breaking or cracking. This type of bakeware is even strong enough to hold up to sudden, sharp temperature changes. So why are some of them shattering unexpectedly when put into the oven or another high heat environment?
At some point, makers of glass bakeware, especially in the United States, switched from using borosilicate to using soda lime glass, which is less expensive to produce. Pyrex manufacturers in Europe still use borosilicate and any glass pans that you inherited from your parents or grandparents are made of borosilicate. Soda lime glass can more impact-resistant than borosilicate is, but it is not as resistant to heat or abrupt temperature changes as borosilicate is. Manufacturers World Kitchen and Anchor Hocking state that they put their soda lime glass through a thorough thermal tempering process to maximize its strength, but most of the reported incidents are from their products (not that surprising, since they produce about 75% of the glass bakeware in the US) and many of the incidents involved spontaneous breakage, rather than misuse or exposure to unusual conditions.
Consumer Reports put together a great video that shows the difference between borosilicate and soda lime glass. Glass bakeware is still safe to use, but if you have older pieces they are probably stronger and much less likely to shatter under normal use conditions.
The standard chocolate chip for a chocolate chip cookie is semisweet chocolate, but over the past few years chocolate chip cookie-lovers have been looking for ways to improve on their favorite by chopping up other types of chocolate and adding them to their cookies. You can grab just about any kind of chocolate bar you like, with any cacao percentage, chop it up and add it to a batch of cookies to customize them to your personal tastes. I think that there is still something to be said for having that classic chocolate chip shape in my chocolate chip cookies, though, so I am always willing to try a new chocolate chip flavor if I spot one. Lately, I’ve been seeing new Nestle Tollhouse Dark Chocolate Morsels on store shelves and picked up a bag to try.
This dark chocolate version of the classic Tollhouse chip boasts a 53% cacao content and that it is a natural source of antioxidants on the front of the package, and it is a little bit more affordable than some of the premium dark chocolate chip brands out there. The chocolate chips do have a distinct dark chocolate flavor, with a distinct cocoa flavor and some fruity notes to back it up. Unlike a bar of dark chocolate, where you want the chocolate to have a sharp snap to it, these have a very smooth texture and melt easily in your mouth. This makes for a great melt in a still-warm chocolate chip cookie and actually produces a much more satisfying result than many other dark chocolates would. I’ll keep darker chocolate bars for snacking, but these dark chocolate chips are definitely a great choice for getting some dark chocolate into your baking.
One of my favorite desserts to make at home is a Chocolate Lava Cake. They’re the kind of thing that you usually only find in restaurants because they look as though they are difficult to make. When you make them at home, they are a dessert that appears to be as impressive as it is decadent. They’re not that difficult to make from scratch, but up until recently a from-scratch recipe was your only option if you wanted to reproduce these at home. Betty Crocker released a Chocolate Molten Lava Cake Mix as part of the new Decadent Supreme cake mix line and I tried a box to see how it stood up to the “real” thing.
The first thing worth noting about this mix is that the ingredient list is short and that it uses real ingredients: butter, eggs, chocolate, flour and cocoa. The mix whips up quickly and is in the oven in less than 5 minutes – which I will admit is much faster than my recipe. If you grease and flour your pans, or use a silicone mold, your cakes should pop out easily in spite of their soft centers and be ready to eat in minutes.
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Fans of Starbucks’ ultra-convenient instant coffee, Starbucks Via, are definitely going to take note of the brand new flavored versions of Via that Starbucks has just released. These instant coffees are flavored with natural flavorings and sweetened with a little bit of sugar. This makes them more of an all-in-one product that regular Via, which comes plain and unsweetened, although it is available in different roasts. They’re available in Vanilla, Caramel, Mocha and Cinnamon Spice and incorporate easily into both hot and cold water, just like regular Via does. The flavors come through very well (especially the Vanilla!) and compliment the coffee. You might have to add your own milk or cream to the coffee when using these, but this works out well for me because I’d rather add my own milk than have powdered milk of some kind already blended into the coffee.
And how to they work for baking? While regular Starbucks Via is great for baking because it has such good flavor and is so easy to incorporate into a recipe, the flavored Vias are not quite as versatile because of that small amount of sugar in the mix. It might be nice to get that extra boost of vanilla flavor in a recipe, but the sugar can throw off the ratios a bit and might end up making your dessert a bit too sweet. That being said, it is not a huge amount of sugar and if you’re not a fan of black coffee, it might be more worthwhile to keep these around for drinking and just keep in mind that, if you are going to use them to bake, you might want to cut back on the sugar in your recipe by a tablespoon or two.
