I get more baking-how-to questions about oven temperatures than any other query. Home bakers have been duped into thinking that somehow oven temperature and baking time are the keys to successful baked goods. It’s not true.

The greatest amount of baked good worry from home bakers comes from what happens in the oven. “How long should it bake?” “What’s the correct temperature?” “How do I know when it’s done?” These are all concerns expressed to me that the baker has very little control over.

Once your cake, pie, cookies, or bread enters the hot box, there’s very little you can do at that point to affect the outcome. When you add the fact that most ovens are mis-calibrated and are lying about their temperatures, it becomes even more difficult to control the baking part of baking.

I’m going to reveal that it is not the BAKING at all that causes most of the problems for bakers, but the MIXING. The biggest impact you can have on home baked goods in greater scrutiny of the method used to combine all the ingredients. You have much greater control over how something is mixed than how it is baked.

If you really want to solve all your baking-how-to questions, start with mixing-how-to answers. Think about it, ALL baked goods are made with the same handful of ingredients; flour, butter, milk, eggs, leavening agent, and flavors. It’s HOW these same ingredients are put together that makes such a wide variety of cookies, cakes, pies, pastries and breads. Mixing is the most important part of creating great baked goods, and the most often misunderstood step.

The object of mixing a dough or batter is to combine ingredients into a consistent form. This is obvious. However, there are chemical and biological elements going on behind the scenes that make this more important than just combining things.

Mixing is also meant to incorporate air, giving texture to the finished product. In a Creaming Method, fat and sugar are creamed together first. The gauge of success for this step is much more than just mixing them together. This is the first opportunity to trap air in the combination of fat and sugar.

“Add the eggs”, a recipe might say. What they don’t tell you is that egg yolks are the necessary ingredient to form an emulsion between the fat and liquids, two unmixable items. Creating a complete and smooth emulsification using egg yolks is a critical stage in any baked good.

The baking-how-to doesn’t stop there. When flour is mixed with liquids and agitated, gluten is formed. Gluten is the fibrous protein web that makes pizza crust and bagels tough and chewy. You don’t want a tough and chewy cake, so using the correct mixing method to avoid gluten development in cakes is another critical step not explained in a written recipe.

Even just before your successfully mixed cake batter, pie crust, or cookie dough enters the oven, you still have opportunity to assure that when it emerges, it’s the best it can be by portioning correctly. Cookies of all different sizes will bake differently. That’s why some are doughy and others burnt.

You can worry less about times and temperatures when you apply a little behind-the-scenes comprehension, a little baking-how-to that will make any written recipe suddenly deliver improved results.

What’s your biggest baking challenge? Please leave your questions in the comment box below: