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Holiday Cooking Tips
Cookie Baking Tips
by: Michael Paetzold
Making better cookies is a lot easier if you understand
the difference between the average commercial bakery and
the home kitchen. These tips will allow you to make better
cookies at home whether it be for a special party or your
annual Christmas cookie baking session.
There are 4 major things that are done commercially
that are overlooked by the average home baker.
Number 1 is that the average home baker does not have a
stone oven. Most commercial bakeries have stone shelves
and that disperses the heat to the pan in a much more even
manner. Obviously, buying a commercial oven for this alone
is not feasible for most of us. (I have considered putting
a commercial pizza oven in my laundry room but my better
half vetoed that idea :-( . Thus I settled for going out
and buying an oven stone for our regular electric oven.
This serves the same purpose with no loss of space in our
laundry room and at a huge savings versus the price of a
commercial pizza oven (even the used one I wanted).
The second thing is the thickness and quality of the
cookie sheet. The average commercial facility uses a sheet
pan or half sheet pan which is probably 2 to 3 times as
heavy as the ones used by the average home baker. This
like the oven stone disperses the heat much better and
makes it much easier for the cookies to bake evenly. I
definitely recommend checking out your local restaurant
supply house to get some half sheet pans which will
definitely be better than the cookie sheet available at
your local supermarket or Walmart.
The third item I use when baking cookies is parchment
paper. It is much easier to remove the cookies from the
paper, your tray doesn't get all cruddy and need to be
cleaned between batches and you will have much less
burning on the edges.
The fourth thing the average home baker misses is
portion control. I have a variety of ice cream type scoops
that I use for portion control. This allows each cookie to
be the same size and allows them to all bake consistently.
When i used a spoon I always ended up with a variety of
sizes and the cooking was never quite even.
Hope these tips allow you to make better cookies in
your house. I know using these tips has improved mine.
Michael Paetzold is the owner of I Love Desserts (http://i-love-desserts.com)
your source for all things about desserts.
webmaster@i-love-desserts.com
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