Interested in baking? Or getting into baking? It’s a pretty fun (and tasty) hobby. But sometimes having the right tools makes it a lot more enjoyable, as well as easier. Make sure you have these 7 essential items in your kitchen.
Digital Food Scale
Food scales are essential in order to help you get the precise amount of ingredients into your recipe. For example, you could scoop out a cup of flour, but your cup might not equal a true cup, whether you have clumps in your floor, or over-scoop.
Leveling out with the back of a knife can sometimes work. But if your recipe calls for 250g of flour, then 250g of flour will always weigh 250g no matter how you look at it. Food scales just help you be much more precise in your baking.
Silicone Baking Mats
If you haven’t tried baking with silicone mats, you definitely need to start. Brown parchment paper is still one of my favorite go-to’s but you can get the same non-stick feeling from baking mats.
The baking mats are also re-usable, and you can buy ones with pre-printed shapes and lines to help you get the perfect size cookie.
Silicone Spatula Set
In case you haven’t noticed, silicone is the ultimate cooking and baking materials. I don’t know what I would do without my silicone spatulas. They get every little bit (rice, sauce, batter, you name it) from the pan so I never feel like I’m wasting anything. Plus, they make your pots and pans easier to clean too, when there’s not a bunch of food left on it.
These edged spatulas will help get every last part of the batter out of your bowl and into the cooking pan. Which actually might be a downside, since you won’t have much batter left to lick.
Aluminum Baking Sheets
Aluminum is definitely a superior metal when it comes to baking. First of all, not only is the baking tray pretty light for ease of use. But aluminum has better and more even conductivity than other metals. This means that the bottoms of your cookies are going to brown and bake pretty evenly.
Cooling Wire Racks
When baking, it’s important to let your cookies cool off right after they come out of the oven. If you try to lift them from the cookie sheet at this time, they’ll most likely fall apart into a big, goopy mess.
However, you really don’t want your heat-conducing cookie trays to keep on cooking your cookies! This will be your cookies tougher and more dried out. That’s where the wire racks come in. After 5 minutes of cooling, making sure to transfer your cookies to a wire rack to finishing cooling off and setting.
Flour Sifter
If you are more of a cake-baker than a cookie-baker, then I would definitely say this gadget is for you. Flour sifters help make your flour when mixing super light and fluffy and rid of any clumps. This is more important for a temperamental batter like a cake batter, than doughy like for cookies.
Glass Mixing Bowls
Having mixing bowls is very important when baking. Normally, you are going to be mixing your dry ingredients altogether, but separate from your wet ingredients.
I like to make sure I have all my ingredients as prepared as possible when baking. It’s not about being as quick as possible, but I definitely don’t want to let things sit out longer than they have to.
Glass is also an important material here since metal bowls will affect the temperature of your ingredients.
