Experienced cooks and bakers, especially those who are professionally trained (which we aren't), often use the mise en place* method of organizing their ingredients. Mise en place means, simply, "put in place." It involves measuring all your ingredients out ahead of time and putting them in individual bowls, dishes or piles so that they are ready to add to your mixer, mixing bowl or pot when you need them. If you've ever watched a cooking show on TV, you've seen the cook using this method; you usually don't see them doing the measuring. They just pick up the bowl of chopped onion, green pepper, or pre-measured spices, which has probably been prepared by a crew member, and toss it gaily into the mix.

The advantage of doing the prep work ahead of time (let's remember that "prep" is short for "preparation," not "preparatory," as in "preppy") is that you are far less likely to forget an ingredient in the heat of the moment -- and who among us has not, at one time or another, forgotten to add some small amount of an essential ingredient? Salt, herbs, lemon zest -- or, worse, baking soda or powder -- if they are sitting there in a row with the other ingredients, you will remember them. It is also much faster, in the final analysis, to do all the measuring at once, and then be able to add things in quickly as you mix. If you are working with a hot mixture on the stove, and time is of the essence, mise en place for at least a few ingredients might be required.

Small custard cups (like the ubiquitous Pyrex ones) are good for mise en place. I recently bought small multi-colored silicone cups that will be useful, as well as a set of stainless-steel Indian cups specifically designed for Indian cooking, which uses many different spices, often added at different times. You can use cupcake papers or silicone cupcake cups, which also come in many different colors (useful if you have ingredients, like baking powder and baking soda, that look identical but get added at different points). Of course, for larger amounts, use larger bowls or measuring cups. Don't use a cupcake pan; how will you get one ingredient out while leaving the others in their respective cups?

I've been resistant, myself, to mise en place, but Betty has shown me the True Way, and I've come around to it. You may end up with a few extra little bowls to wash -- but that's better than ending up with a ruined cake, or racing around the kitchen looking for the vanilla while your cake over-mixes. Be Prepared!

* pronounced "MEESE ehn plahs."

Bakers' Tools: Essentials and Favorites

There are certain tools without which one shouldn't even think about baking, let alone opening a bakery: whisks, rolling pins, a good stand mixer, rubber spatulas. But the more time you spend baking, the more tempting certain supposed time-saving tools become. For me, cookware stores hold the same promise that hardware stores, art supply stores, and fabric stores offer; "So many projects, so little time, but here are some things that will make you more efficient!" But how many of those things are really useful?

Unsurprisingly, you can purchase many or few items, and, depending on how ambitious you are, how deft you are with your hands, and how patient you are, you might find that you can get by with very few items -- or that you need a lot, and make use of each one.

For example, if you want to cut the fat into flour when you make a pie crust, you can do it with two table knives from your silverware drawer (cost: $0), used in opposition to each other (think of cutting in different directions); or a pastry blender, which has 5 or 6 curved wires attached to a handle and makes short work of the process (cost: $7-$10); or you can use a food processor (cost: $200 and up, depending on size). Of course, you already have the table knives, and they get used for other things (we hope!) and the food processor may already be in your kitchen, and it is also handy for other things. But if you are a beginning baker, and want to get a few good items for your batterie de cuisine, we'd recommend the pastry blender -- it is more efficient than the knives, cheaper than the processor, and will give you more of a feel for the dough and the process than the processor would.

The processor has become essential for other things, at least in our kitchen. It is indispensable for chopping nuts, making crumbs out of graham crackers, grating carrots for carrot cake, and grinding chocolate into a powder for babka. A blender doesn't do any of these things well, since solids fall to the bottom and clog the blades. Of course, you could chop the nuts by hand, smash the graham crackers in a plastic bag with a rolling pin, grate the carrots (and your knuckles, no doubt) by hand, and -- well, maybe grate the chocolate, or chop it. But you'd have a mess (the chocolate held in your hand will melt, and about a third of it will fly all over the counter), and the food processor will do each of these tasks in mere seconds.

A recent development (at least, since we were young) has been heat-proof (usually silicone) spatulas. These come in a lot of fun colors (which is useful if you want to remember which one you are using for what) and can stand high heat, typically up to 450˚ or 500˚F. When you are melting butter, chocolate, or cooking anything on the stove, you can stir and scrape the pot with one of these, and you'll possibly prevent your mixture from burning. (For omelette lovers: I don't know how anyone ever managed to make an omelette without a silicone spatula and a non-stick pan. The combination is unbeatable.)

I've already written in a previous post about the usefulness of both digital scales and instant-read thermometers; you can go back and read what I have to say about them. I consider both of them essential to accurate baking.

My mom had one set of measuring spoons and one set of measuring cups (clear Pyrex ones, intended for liquids). Somehow, she managed to be a top-notch cook, but I'm not sure how! I've lost count of how many measuring spoons I have; it seems a great luxury to be able to snatch up a clean spoon to measure, say, baking powder, when I've already used one of the same size to measure vanilla. Instead of having to wash and dry the spoon in between, I just keep working. And measuring dry ingredients in a liquid measuring cup (assuming you're trying to work with volume instead of weight) is a headache; using the dip-sweep-pour method is so much faster and more accurate. And do beware of clever, cunning, beautiful, yet inaccurate measuring spoons and cups; there seem to be many out there in gift shops, and I wouldn't tell you not to buy them, but they are often best used for decoration, not measuring. Check them against utilitarian utensils of known accuracy (or proven utility). I would think that two sets of measuring spoons, one for wet ingredients and one for dry, would be a minimum. Get different sets, so you can tell them apart at a glance; if you are buying plastic, get two different colors, or get one set of plastic and one of metal. And please get a set of dry measuring cups (these are the ones that look like little saucepans) that measure up to the very top; a few indicate that to measure one cup, or one-half cup, one fills to within a fraction of an inch of the top lip. These are worse than useless; you will end up with failed cakes and cookies, if you use them, or will end up throwing them away in frustration. Any of the major brands of oven-safe glass is fine for liquid measuring cups; Pyrex, Anchor-Hocking, and Fire King are some of the best-known ones. They can go in the microwave and the oven (but not on the stove-top) so you can melt butter or heat liquids in them. In the past decade or so, Pyrex has started making cups with handles that are hooks instead of loops, so the cups nest, and some have a lot of head-room at the top (above the measuring markings) so that you can, say, measure a half-cup of milk and a quarter-cup of oil, and then beat into those a couple of eggs. Now you've mixed up all the wet ingredients needed for scones, pancakes, or other quick breads, and only dirtied one cup. Aren't you smart?

A Weighty Subject

When I was learning to bake, I measured everything in my mother's glass measuring cups. They were intended for liquid, and she didn't have dry ingredient measuring cups. Sugar wasn't too difficult to measure this way -- you could pour it into the cup, give the cup a little shake, and it would settle into place so you could read how much was in there and adjust the amount. Flour, however, was a pain in the neck to measure. You'd have to spoon it into the cup, level it carefully with the tip of the spoon while bending over so that your eye was at the level of the line you were aiming for, and keep shifting bits of it around, hoping you were getting the right amount. Brown sugar has to be packed into the cup for an accurate measure; sometimes you'd pack it down so hard that it would hold the shape of the cup when you were done, and sometimes you just didn't want to put all that energy into it and you'd pack it less firmly.

And then there was shortening. What a mess! My mother's method was probably more accurate than most; she employed the Archimedes Principle. If you needed a quarter of a cup of shortening, you'd take a one-cup measure, put three-quarters of a cup of water into it, and add shortening until the level of the water reached the one cup measure. You'd tip the water out into the sink (holding the shortening in with a spatula or spoon and hoping it wouldn't fall into the sink) and there was your 1/4 c. of shortening -- wet, but accurate. The cup, your hands, the spoon and counter-top were probably all smeared with the stuff. (This method also works for peanut butter.)

For years, I read that weighing was the most accurate way to measure ingredients. It makes sense. If you pack that brown sugar in tightly, you've got more in there than if you don't pack it at all. If your flour is compacted, you've got more in there than if it's sifted and fluffy, and the difference can mean a heavy cake or a light cake. If you like the way a recipe turns out and you want to be able to repeat that success, you need to measure the same way every time -- but if you are using volume (cup) measurements, it's hard to do.

How much does a cup of flour weigh? How about sugar? Is white sugar the same as brown? How tightly packed should the grated carrots for a carrot cake be? How about coconut? Finally, with the publication of Shirley O. Corriher's books "Cookwise" and "Bakewise," I got the information at my fingertips. The books have ingredients and their weights in a chart in the back. The information is also available at several places on-line, including the King Arthur Flour website, and there's a calculator at this site that has more information than you will need in a lifetime.

Just to get you started: a cup of all-purpose flour weighs 4.4 ounces. A cup of white sugar weighs 7 ounces, and a cup of brown about 8 (I say "about" because dark brown sugar weighs more than light brown, but 8 oz. seems to work with either). A cup of butter is 8 oz. Please don't use shortening, but if you must, a cup weighs 6.7 oz. Those carrots? 3.9 oz per cup. Walnuts and pecans are 3.5 oz. per cup. Cocoa (remember to sift it!) is 2.9 oz. per cup, and chocolate chips are 6 oz. per cup. You can keep using those glass measuring cups for liquid -- a cup of milk is a cup of milk, and you can't pack it any tighter! E-mail me if you want a weight measurement that isn't here and that you can't find on-line.

My next post will be on how to weigh ingredients!