“Hey Alex, what does ‘mise en place’ mean? How do I ‘fold’ stuff? What the hell is a tart ring for!?”
Have no fear. Here’s a handy reference glossary for you. Will probably be updated repeatedly.
General Terms
Mise en Place: French for “get ur shit together.” No, seriously though, it’s more like “everything in its place” but the sentiment remains. Mise en place means getting all your utensils and bowls and stuff together, measuring out your ingredients, prepping your bakeware if necessary, and generally getting all the stuff you’re going to need to make something together in one place before you start. The last thing you want to do after you’ve cracked six eggs and separated the yolks out for custard and put milk on the stove is find out you’re out of sugar. Getting your shit together before you start will prevent this.
Baker’s Percentages: The casual home baker will probably not need to worry about this, but baker’s percentages can be super handy if you need to scale a recipe up or down. The edited-for-TV version: professional baking recipes (aka formulas) generally give you percentages in addition to the usual straight up weight measurements. Baker’s percentages are a little weird in that the percentage of all the ingredients will add up to more than 100%. This is because they’re not the percent of each ingredient relative to the whole recipe, they’re the percent of each ingredient relative to the amount of the main ingredient, and the main ingredient is always 100%. Like, usually in a baking recipe your main ingredient is flour, so you’ll see flour shown as 100% in the baker’s percentages and then the other ingredients as a percent of how much flour there is.
Formula: fancy word for “baking recipe.”
Oven spring/oven rise: You know how your stuff puffs up real fast when you put it in a properly preheated oven? That’s oven spring. That’s the moisture in your product vaporizing and possibly your yeast throwing one last big “hooray! we’re all gonna die in a fire!” party just before the heat kills it off.
Preheating: turning your oven on and letting it get up to the correct temperature before you put your shit in it. There are a few rare recipes where you start in a cold oven but unless the recipe specifically says “PUT IN COLD OVEN, DO NOT PREHEAT” you should assume that the oven needs to be preheated.
Gluten: When wheat flour comes into contact with a water-based liquid, proteins called glutenin and gliadin start holding hands, and thus gluten development begins. Gluten is a protein scaffold upon which your bread is built. You may have a genuine intolerance for it (celiac, Hashimoto’s, wheat allergy, etc.) but gluten is not Of The Devil. It’s just protein. It’s sometimes eaten as a protein, in fact. You’ll see it called fu in Japanese cuisine (sometimes it comes in really cool brightly colored balls) and it’s the basis of a meat substitute called seitan, sometimes affectionately referred to as “wheat meat.”
Dry Ingredients: generally flour, baking soda/powder, salt, and sometimes sugar; what counts as a “dry ingredient” in any given recipe depends on what kind of product you’re making and what mixing method you’re using. Like, sugar counts as a dry and goes in with the flour when you’re making scones, but if you’re doing a creaming method cake it goes in at the very beginning, with the butter.
Leavener: Something that makes your baked goods puff up. Yes, this includes stuff like baking powder and baking soda and yeast. It can also include eggs, steam, and air. Pâte à choux, for example, doesn’t contain any baking powder or yeast or anything, but it puffs up into fillable little hollow balls in the oven because it has a buttload of eggs and water and air in the batter, which all help your future cream puffs …puff in the oven.
Meringue: A fluffy mass of whipped egg whites and sugar. Generally spotted atop pies, or piped into cute lil kisses, or sometimes in fancy shit like pavlovas. Can also be hiding in your frosting, particularly royal icing and meringue-based buttercreams. You’ll see three types of meringue out there:
- French or “common” meringue: egg whites with plain old granulated sugar whipped into them. You’ll only see this one used as a) a component of egg foam cakes or b) things that get baked, partly because an uncooked meringue is unstable and will break down over time and partly because it’s chock full of RAW-ASS EGG WHITE and you shouldn’t eat that!
- Italian meringue: egg whites whipped while you very slowly pour in boiling hot simple syrup. Easy once you get the hang of the timing, as long as you have a stand mixer and a good digital thermometer and a steady pouring arm and no fear of molten sugar lava. Very stable and can be eaten without further cooking, as the boiling hot simple syrup cooks the egg whites to a safe temperature.
- Swiss meringue: egg whites and sugar beaten in a double boiler or bain-marie. Stable and safe to eat without further cooking but kind of a pain in the ass to make on account of the double boiler, and given the choice most cooks (including yrs. truly) would probably rather take their chances with a pot of boiling hot simple syrup than fart with a double boiler.
Windowpane Test: A method of checking bread dough to see if it’s ready for its first proof. Pinch off a ball of dough about the size of a walnut. Flatten and try to stretch it thin enough to see light through. If you can do this without tearing the dough, it’s ready for its bulk ferment.
Bulk ferment: A yeasted dough’s first proof, done between kneading and shaping. Can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more, depending on the recipe and the type of yeast you use and the temperature and humidity of the place you’re letting your dough hang out. Important for leavening reasons but also gives your dough flavor and improves its texture.
Mixing Methods
Biscuit: Start by cutting your COLD fat into your dry ingredients with a pastry cutter, a couple of knives, a grater, or a food processor. Once you’ve got your fat in your drys, add liquid and mix gently just until combined.
Muffin: Similar to biscuit, except your liquid fat goes with the other liquids and it all gets dumped into the drys at once.
Creaming: Start with softened fat and beat it (usually with sugar) until light and fluffy. Add eggs and beat some more. Alternate adding dry and wet ingredients, usually in a dry-wet-dry-wet-dry pattern. Usually for cakes, also for many cookies minus the wets.
Straight dough: Usually for bread. Put everything in a bowl and mix, then knead until it passes the windowpane test.
Preferment: Usually found in bread recipes, particularly sourdough. A blanket term covering stuff like levain, biga, poolish, yudane, and other situations where you mix part of the flour and part of the water and possibly yeast and/or some sort of starter like sourdough or raisin yeast, and you let that start fermenting before you mix it with the rest of the ingredients.
Egg foam: Start by separating eggs and beating the yolks with part of the sugar until they turn into something that looks like yellowish mayo. Then whip the whites with the rest of the sugar. Then fold the white stuff into the yolk stuff, then fold in flour. Makes a spongy, flexible cake that can be rolled up without cracking (i.e. Swiss rolls) and soaked in tasty liquids without turning to mush (i.e. tres leches cake).
Techniques
Folding: Gently mixing stuff like egg foam cake batter so as not to beat the air out of it. Best done with a big spatula or bowl scraper. Gently scoop your mixture from the bottom and plop it on top. Repeat, turning the bowl with each scoop-and-plop, until your stuff is mixed. You can’t really do this in a stand mixer.
Kneading: Generally for bread. Pat your ball of dough flat-ish. Grab the top edge, fold it towards you. Smush the folded dough down and forward with the heel of your hand. Give it a quarter turn. Fold. Smush. Turn. Fold. Smush. Repeat until dough is smooth, stop and let the dough rest if it starts getting hard to fold and feels like it’s “fighting.” Can also be done in a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment.
Beating: Will continue until morale improves… just kidding. Can refer to what you do to a whole egg to mix the white and yolk; you can do this by hand with a whisk, a fork, or chopsticks. Can also refer to vigorously mixing stuff to combine ingredients and introduce a little air but not too much. Can be done by hand with a big spoon or stiff spatula, with a hand mixer, or with a stand mixer with the paddle attachment.
Whipping: Done when a problem comes along. Sorry. Couldn’t resist. This is vigorously mixing stuff with a whisk or the whip attachment on a stand mixer when you want to incorporate a lot of air and fluff your stuff up. You’ll see this in egg foam cakes, meringues, whipped cream, and some frostings.
Docking: Poking holes in something like a pie crust or cracker dough before baking, to keep bubbles from forming. You can do this with a dough docker, or you can just stab the hell out of your dough with a fork.
Scoring: Slashing the top of bread dough before it goes into the oven. You can do this with a very sharp knife, a razor blade, or a lame (razor blade on a stick). You can do just a straight slash across the top, or you can do lots of little slashes in a cool pattern.
Separating eggs: Taking the yolk out of the white. You can do this with the eggshell halves, carefully pouring the yolk from one half to the other until the white glorps out, or you can crack the egg into your CLEAN!!! hand and let the white ooze through your fingers while you cradle the yolk, or you can crack the egg into a bowl and just reach in with your CLEAN!!! hand and carefully scoop the yolk out. Some people use a water bottle or similar implement to sort of vacuum the yolk out of the white; I’ve never been able to do it without breaking the yolk. Which brings me to: don’t break the yolk. A little white in your yolk is fine. Yolk in your white, if you’re making meringue with the whites, is a disaster. Keep the goldfish out of the water.
Rolling dough: Get your dough into a disc or ball; the rounder your dough starts out the easier it’ll be to keep it that way. Flour your work surface. Flour your dough. Scrape off any dough clumps that stick to your rolling pin, they will snowball. Turn your dough frequently both to keep it from sticking to the work surface and to keep it round; flip it over and dust it with a little more flour as necessary. If you’re going to take cookie cutters to the dough or trim it to fit in a pie pan, keeping it round while you roll isn’t such a big deal. If you’re making tortillas, it is. Or you can just get a tortilla press, I guess.
Piping: Fancy cake-decorating piping has too many moving parts to address in a paragraph. But a piping bag by itself, with the tip snipped off, can come in handy for filling deviled eggs, portioning out thick batters, drizzling sauces, and evenly applying a base coat of frosting to a cake. You can use plastic ones, or you can roll your own with parchment.
Tools
Knives: Most people will only ever really need three knives: a chef knife or santoku or similar (big, straight edge, for most jobs), a long serrated slicing knife (very long, wavy or toothy edge, for slicing breads, cakes, and interestingly, citrus wheels), and a paring knife (small, straight edge, for delicate cutting jobs like hulling strawberries or peeling fruit). Don’t get knife sets. Don’t get pre-stocked knife blocks. They’re full of shit you don’t need. You don’t need to buy a super expensive knife, either. Farberware, Cuisinart, and Mercer make perfectly good knives fairly cheap (like, sub-$40 for a decent chef knife).
Spatula: The two main kinds of spatch you’ll use in baking are the “scraper” kind (plastic or silicone/rubber bendy scrapey blade thing on a long handle) and the cake decorating kind (straight or offset). If the blade of your scrapey spatch is silicone, it should be safe to use in hot stuff. If it’s plastic, it will probably melt. Get a couple different sizes if you can, tiny ones are handy for scraping shit like honey out of measuring cups.
If you can only get one of the cake decorating kind, get the offset. The bend makes them easy to use for smoothing batter in a pan and slathering frosting on a sheet cake.
I guess spoonulas fall under this heading; the only thing I ever use a spoonula for is scooping whipped cream into a piping bag but your mileage may vary.
Whisk: The wire thing. Or it could be a silicone thing these days. You mainly use this to whip stuff you want to incorporate a lot of air into, or to beat eggs. Get a couple sizes of these, too. A tiny one is handy for making egg wash.
Pastry blender/cutter: Use this to cut fat into your drys for biscuit, scone, and pie dough. You can also use it to mash potatoes in a pinch.
Piping bags and tips: For decorating cakes. Different shape tips make frosting squirt out in different shapes. Some have to be held in a certain position, or manipulated in a certain way, to get the effect you want and that’s a rabbit hole far too deep for this glossary. You can probably get by with a small round, a large round, and a couple of open and/or closed stars for casual cupcake decorating. Sets aren’t super expensive but it’s better to find a shop that sells individual ones if you want to build a collection… and you’ll probably want to once you start farting around with them.
Bench scraper: your new best friend. My absolute can’t-live-without-it tool. Has SO many uses. Will cut butter better than any proper knife. If you’re a student or a pro, get at least two of whatever kind you fall in love with, they WILL grow legs and walk off and you will be sad.
Bowl scraper: Bench scraper’s flexible plastic or silicone cousin. Use for scraping sticky doughs out of bowls, pre-cleaning bowls, and even folding airy batters and stuff. They come in lots of different shapes, sizes, colors, and materials and they’re cheap. Collect and experiment. My favorite is a stiff silicone one I got at PopShelf for like $3.
Tart rings: Basically just plain metal rings. Use to help you build tartlet shells out of pie dough or shortbread, or corral freeform pies, or make perfect breakfast-sandwich-size fried eggs or griddle cakes.
Stand mixer: For mixing jobs that would make you cry if you attempted them by hand. You try making Italian meringue by yourself without one and let me know how it goes. Or please don’t do that, because trying to hand-whisk egg whites with one hand and slowly pour boiling hot molten sugar into them with the other is an ER trip waiting to happen. Generally these come with three default attachments: a paddle (use where you’d use a spatula), a whip (use where you’d use a whisk), and a dough hook (for bread dough). Some of them can also use aftermarket attachments like pasta makers and meat grinders and spiralizers and all kinds of cool shit.
Rolling pin: for flattening your dough. Some have neat little guide rings that will help you roll your stuff out evenly. Don’t submerge wooden ones in water, just scrape off any clingy Bits, scrub, and splash to rinse, and immediately wipe it as dry as you can.
Sifter: For removing lumps and clumps from your dry ingredients, particularly flour and powdered sugar, and fluffing them up for more even mixing. Comes in crank style (like your grandma had), “tami” style (looks like a cake pan with a mesh bottom), and just plain old sieve style. I use a plain old sieve at home.