I’ve noticed different recipes often have very different methods of combining the ingredients. Some recipes have you combine the ingredients one at a time. Others make you combine some ingredients, and then add the results together in a specific order.
Is there any actual reason for doing things in a specific way? I can understand that mixing baking powder into the flour will let it be spread out much better than if you just add it by itself. Sometimes however recipes have very different orders of mixing in things that don’t seem to make much sense. Is it just the recipe writer teaching you to do things one way because “that’s how I’ve always done it, and that’s how I was taught to do it, so you’ll do it that way too”, or is there some actual scientific reason to do things in a specific order?
Some of the different mixing methods I’ve encountered:
Mix dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, spices, butter, dry yeast) and wet ingredients (liquids, melted butter, fresh yeast) separately. Mix dry ingredients into the wet ingredients a little at a time while mixing.
Mix dry and wet ingredients separately. Mix wet ingredients into dry a little at a time.
Add things into the mix one at a time. For example my muffin recipe goes:
Butter - sugar - egg - flour mix - cream - chocolate. If I added cream first, would it actually make any difference?
Yes, you should follow the order listed in the recipe. Some order swaps make no difference, some make a significant difference. If you can’t tell one from the other, then you should follow the recipe.
For #3, butter and sugar first is important because you are creaming the butter. The sharp edges in the sugar tear tiny air holes in the butter. Those holes expand upon baking, making a lighter baked good.
Also, mixing in the correct order often makes it physically easier to do the mixing. Adding small amounts of liquid gradually to dry ingredients and blending as you go is a lot easier than dumping a load of flour into a bowl of liquid and then trying to get rid of the lumps.
It also matters in cooking, but not quite so much as in baking. Often you add things to the heat depending on how long the cooking time for that particular item is. For example, if you’ve got a recipe with a variety of vegetables like a stir-fry, the order in which you add the veggies to the wok/skillet ensures they’ll all be done at the same time, and none will be overdone.
And sometimes it’s just for convenience. Some recipes may call for you to saute spices in oil as the first step, then add the other ingredients. You certainly could saute the spices in oil in another pan, and add them later in the recipe, but it’s easier to just do it first and not dirty another pot.
Sometimes it’s chemistry. Emulsified sauces, like Hollendaise or vinegarettes, need the fat added to the acid very slowly at first, while whipping furiously. It won’t emulsify if you do it the other way around.
Sometimes it’s just common sense. If you’re making Alfredo sauce, you want to add the Parmesan to the hot butter & cream. Put the Parmesan in the hot pan first, and you’ll have melted-Parmesan-on-pan, not Alfredo sauce.
And sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Soups and stews, for example, are very forgiving, as are things like marinara sauce.
Some of the order directions are legacy of having to mix by hand, for example, one of the simplest sponge cake recipes is the weigh-the same method:
Weigh the eggs in their shells, then use that weight of SR flour, caster sugar and butter, plonk it all in a bowl (minus the eggshells now) and beat into a batter with an electric whisk.
If you try that by hand, you’ll find it very difficult to mix to a uniformly-textured batter, and by the time you have, you’ll have overworked the flour, and the raising agent may also have used up some of its bubble - and you’ll get a flat, tough cake.
So you have to cream the butter and sugar (which softens the fat), then beat in the eggs (which loosens the mix), then mix in the flour (which is possible now that the rest of the ingredients are soft and wet.
When working with wheat flour, the steps are often arranged to minimize the amount of physical action on the flour. The more you stir, beat, knead, etc. flour, the more gluten develops. If you want French bread or pizza dough, developed gluten is awesome. If you want biscuits or muffins, developed gluten is a recipe for tough and dry. So that’s why you mix all the dry and all the wet first - no developing of the gluten there - and then mix it all together in one short step. If you mixed in the eggs and stirred, then the milk and stirred, then… you’d wind up with tough, stretchy dough. Again, perfect for pizza, lousy for muffins.
Baking soda or powder also matter in the order. You don’t want them hitting something wet until you’re ready for the leavening to start. If you mixed them with the liquids at the very beginning of a long mixing process, you’d wind up beating out all the bubbles and have very dense final products.
In general, I’ll follow the instructions as closely as possible. There are some order combinations that are just tradition or old wives tales, but it’s usually not worth finding out the hard way.
If you mix the butter/fat with the sugar first, then it coats the sugar and the liquid is unable to completely dissolve the sugar. Likewise with flour, if you mix flour and liquid first, the flour will absorb it and drastically change the texture of the final product.
The majority of the order rules have to do with controlling how/when/how long liquids are in contact with the dry ingredients. For good texture, you want to keep it as short as possible; it happens during the actual baking process when the fat melts down.
My husband often remarks that baking is a lot like chemistry and I have to agree. I’ve learned the hard way why you do things in a certain order and why it’s bad to over mix cakes and muffins.
One point: in order to minimize the working of the flour, I whisk together all the dry ingredients, something older recipes don’t do. Then I put in the liquids in the order specified and mix only enough to get things well mixed. Before I read somewhere about whisking, I would sift them together, but this is much easier and probably more effective. If the recipe calls for creaming the butter and sugar, then I would consider sugar one of the wet ingredients, else it is dry.
I think it is about 75% bullshit. Typical instruction: “Fry the onions for five minutes, then add a clove of chopped garlic, simmer for one minute and add a tablespoon of paprika.” I seriously doubt that it makes any difference if you follow those steps in reverse order.
I do a lot of cooking without benefit of recipes, and have discovered that there are defiantly some ways that work better. Geoff Smith and Julia Childs were pretty good about explaining these things, but some of the modern cooking shows seem to be pretty much based in superstition.
In your example, it is much easier to burn the garlic if you start with it. The onions evolve a lot of water which controls the temperature. Burnt garlic tastes nasty. Not sure if paprika has significant capsicum or not, but I have burned red chile powder and had enough “pepper spray” in the air to induce watering eyes and a coughing fit to myself and anyone who walked into the kitchen.
Now if the meal will consist of just the one dish, I can probably keep an eye on things well enough to avoid problems, but typically I have 2-3 dishes going at once (so as to have them ready to serve at the same time) and things like starting with the onion really help avoid problems when it gets hectic.
Thanks for the interesting answers. I definitely tend to follow recipes when I have them. I don’t know how to distinguish between the important things and the things you do out of custom after all, so might as well do everything as is instructed. I was just generally curious on the subject.
When cooking meat you’re not supposed to add salt until after the cooking, right? I remember hearing that the salt will start reacting with the uncooked meat, which may produce a worse result. Does the same apply to any other spices, or can meat be spiced at any point in cooking?
It depends on what you’re trying to do with the meat. Salt will draw moisture and protein to the surface. If you do this to, say, a steak before you sear it, then it will promote the Maillard reaction and give you better browing. On the other hand, if you stir salt into ground meat before forming patties for hamburgers, you’ll destroy the texture. In general, I always salt meat on any surface that will be exposed to heat, and I do it at least a few minutes before cooking.
Other spices don’t work the same chemical magic as salt, so usually the only concern is how the heat will affect the flavor of the spice itself. Paprika, for example, is prone to burning. Black pepper is supposed to be somewhat carcinogenic when burned, I add it later just to be safe. Spices like cumin and turmeric hold up quite nicely to heat, I’ve found.
Indeed - it may be that some of the ordered instructions are bullshit, but it’s quite funny that Ximenean gave an example where timing is quite critical. If you overcook garlic, it’s terribly bitter tasting.
For other recipes, it might not be quite as important as this one, but still, it’s often important to add spices at the right time - either because they need to toast before the wet ingredients are added, or because their flavour components are oil-soluble, or are just plain nasty if they’re not cooked in the right way (which will happen if they’re added at the wrong time, because the consistency of the dish changes throughout)
But garlic does cook quite a bit faster than onions do; think of how small the pieces are. Also, spices themselves often are changed in the process of cooking; they can also burn.
Like everyone else said, in this case, you’ll be screwed if you don’t do it that order. And you’re actually lucky that you have a recipe that says to fry the onions first; I see recipes all the time that want you to saute the onions and the garlic at the same time, resulting in burnt garlic. Yuk.
Totally wrong; you should salt meat before it touches the heat.
Learning how to salt well is actually one of the secrets to cooking well, and is not easy to learn. I tend to salt throughout the cooking process by tasting as soon as it’s safe to do so (meaning, any meat is cooked). Salt needs time to blend with the food, and there’s not time to do it if you just salt at the end. It just lays on top of the food.
For a simple example of this, think of scrambled eggs. If you add salt to the raw eggs, everything tastes great. Scramble eggs without salt and add it on top? Disgusting.
I wouldn’t call the eggs disgusting… but they are definitely different if you add the salt at the end rather than early on.
As you say, salt takes time (and solvents and mixing) to blend with the food.
Of course, sometimes, you want the effect of food and salt as two separate things. Pretzels, for example, depend on the salt being added on top at the end. One of my favorite overpriced deserts is a chocolate-covered dark caramel with a large chunk of smoked salt on top. The contrast of salt-sweet-salt-sweet as you chew is amazing. Mixed in, you wouldn’t have anything like that.