Mixing baking ingredients separately
Why would one need to mix the dry ingredients (flour, salt, soda) separately and before mixing into the liquid (butter, sugar) than just mixing everything into one bowl at the same time when making cakes? What would be the result if done ?
Best Answer
By mixing the dry ingredients separately and whisking them a bit before adding them to the liquid, you are making sure that the baking soda/powder/salt, gets evenly distributed throughout the flour. Also, the flour will be able to absorb the liquid easier and more uniformly without the flour becoming over-worked.
From my personal experience, when I didn't do it this way my cakes seemed to be drier than cakes I had made when I combined them as instructed. But this is from my personal experience, and others may have had different experiences.
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What: Mix wet ingredients separately. Combine all of your wet ingredients before stirring them into the dry ingredients. Why:?Overmixing batters and dough will toughen and strengthen the gluten in the flour, leading to tough, dense baked goods.Why is it some important to not over mix ingredients when baking?
The second problem revolves around gluten development: Mixing flour with liquids activates the gluten proteins that give baked goods their structure. Over-mixing, therefore, can lead to cookies, cakes, muffins, pancakes, and breads that are tough, gummy, or unpleasantly chewy.Does the order of mixing ingredients matter?
While mixing the dry and wet ingredients in separate bowls, and then combining, is in fact crucial, it turns out that the order in which they're added together \u2014 wet into dry, or dry into wet \u2014 doesn't hugely matter, except where cleanup is concerned.What happens if you mix dry and wet ingredients?
Generally speaking, yes \u2013 you want to add the dry ingredients into the bowl of wet ingredients. Adding the wet ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients can end up being clumpy and messy. You know that thing where you have an exploding pocket of flour in your batter or dough? No good.Ask a Vegan Baker: do I need to mix dry and wet ingredients separately?
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Answer 2
Getting it uniformly mixed is kind of the real reason. You want to get it all mixed as much as possible before you get the flour wet and it starts to develop the gluten. Regardless, you have to mix enough to make it uniform.
For cakes (mentioned in the question), its largely about avoiding 'over-working' the batter. You want a small, even crumb so (unlike breads) you're trying to avoid gluten. Mixing, like kneading, promote gluten. You want to make it so that as soon as the flour gets wet, you're doing the least possible mixing to incorporate the ingredients. You also want to use the batter quickly. Luckily, modern cake flour is very low protein. If you're using standard AP flour instead of cake, you really need to be very careful about overmixing.
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