Baking-Pastry Questions

[HBJUL]

I am curious...what are your most common and unusual questions you get about baking and pastry making? I would like to have a series of questions for my radio show on Saturday, October 6th.
Thanks
HBJUL

[Suzanne]

I'm moving this to the Pastries and Baking board, where folks really talk about that stuff.

[siduri]

When i give recipes to people here, where most people don;t bake at home, people ask all kinds of questions, usually about why i go into such detail to explain technique (most recipes here just tell you the ingredients and people just mix everything together!) Once someone laughed saying "why do you say what sized pan" - and i explained that it's important, and it won;t come out with the wrong size pan. He called me a week later to say that the recipe didn;t come out like mine,. I ask all kinds of questions, did you mix too much after adding the flour? did you mix too little before adding the flour? did you measuire carefully? till finally i asked (thinking this is absurd because i had made a point about how important it was when i gave him the recipe) "did you use the same size pan i told you?" and of course he said "no, i didn;lt think it would be important". AARGH !!!

Another case was when i gave someone the recipe for no-knead bread. I wrote it out carefully as i always do, and they watched as i calculated the conversion from cups to grams, so they knew i was being accurate. Next time i saw them they said, kind of with a nasty tone, "your recipe didn;t come out, you know" - again all the questions about the method. Then he admitted that the amount of yeast seemed too little and it must have been a mistake and he put a whole envelope. AARGH! You know, i hardly could convince him that it didn;t come out because he didn;t follow the recipe, he kept saying it was a bad recipe!
Don;t know if this is what you're looking for.

[ShoeMaker]

Originally Posted by HBJUL

I am curious...what are your most common and unusual questions you get about baking and pastry making? I would like to have a series of questions for my radio show on Saturday, October 6th.
Thanks
HBJUL

At the moment, a common question 'bout my flourless chocolate cake is "How can you make a cake with no flour ???!!!???" LOL....

[HBJUL]

Thanks for your reply...I will pose the question to the professional pastry chef I am having as a guest on the show...anytime you or anyone else wants to "share" dilemmas or questions for me to use...that would be lovely! Thanks again.

HBJUL

[kuan]

How come my cake doesn't rise.

How come my cake falls?

How come my cheesecake cracks and how can I prevent it?

How do I get those holes and that crust on bread?

Heh... got any recipes for gluten free bread?

My apple pie always turns out soggy. Why?

[siduri]

how do you find time to bake?
that's actually the most common question.
the answer is that it takes ten times as long to write a recipe as it does to execute it!

[GranolaGirl8819]

I'm not a pastry chef, just a girl who likes to bake and cook. My room mate once asked me what canola oil was. (and she buys everything pre-made, like sandwiches. A terrible eyesore in the refrigerator!)

[siduri]

Yes, actually, though a major home baker and cook, i also want to know what this canola oil is, they started talking about it only recently, and i've been abraod too long to know what it is. I keep thinking some kind of industrial waste product being remarketed, but maybe i'm wrong? Olives make oil, corn makes oil, sesame makes oil, but i never heard of canolas.