Cookbook author Emelia Jackson shares her essential baking tips, including the best butter to buy at the supermarket and how to avoid sifting icing sugar.
Finding the best baking ingredients can be confusing. I am often guilty of including phrases like “use the best-quality chocolate you can find” within my recipes. But what does that mean exactly? So, after many DMs asking for clarity, I thought it was time to put pen to paper and let you in on my favourite brands.
Butter
Good quality butter makes a big difference to the flavour of your bakes, especially for simple recipes such as Scottish shortbread. I always use unsalted butter for baking. It allows you to control the salt content so you don’t end up with overly salty cookies.
I love Pepe Saya (you can buy 4kg at a time online for a great price), but if I am at the supermarket, I turn to Westgold, a New Zealand butter of great quality at a decent price.
Sugars
Many baking recipes call for both brown and caster sugars, and for good reason. Sugar does more than add sweetness. It holds moisture (just as flour does), amplifies flavour (in the same way salt does), is pivotal in creating the desired texture, and acts as a preservative, extending the shelf life of your bake.
I use caster sugar most frequently in my bakes. It’s an inexpensive, fine-textured white sugar that dissolves easily when mixed into butter and dough. Generally speaking, caster sugar creates a crisper cookie.
Light brown or dark brown sugar is caster sugar with molasses mixed in. It adds a more complex, caramel flavour. More importantly, brown sugar is acidic and is best friends with bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), which is why you’ll often find them together in recipes. Combined, they create carbon dioxide, which helps the dough rise. This ultimately leads to less spread, more chew and more puff in your bake.
Icing sugar is white sugar that has been ground to a fine powder. A confession: I hate sifting icing sugar. As such, I always use icing sugar mixture – pure icing sugar mixed with anti-lumping ingredients such as cornflour. If you’re a purist, feel free to sift to your heart’s content, but in my recipes (even my macarons), it’s safe to assume I am using icing sugar mixture.
If you want to up the ante with your baking, play around with less-refined sugars. A few of my favourites are Tasmanian leatherwood honey, maple sugar (not syrup, but its crystalline counterpart) and golden caster.
Flour
Plain flour has a gluten content of about 9 to 11 per cent. This is the main flour I use in my cookies as it has a neutral flavour. However, I love working with cake flour for bakes such as short biscuits and cakes. The biscuit, pastry and cake flour from Lighthouse is fab. It has a reduced gluten/protein content and is milled extra fine, leaving you with a more tender, lighter crumb.
For sturdier bakes, such as bread, Lighthouse bread flour is ideal. This is also great for making choux pastry, which loves the reinforcement the extra gluten content provides, resulting in sturdy, hollow choux ready for filling.
Eggs
I always use free-range eggs in my cooking. While they are more expensive than the caged option, from an ethical standpoint, they are non-negotiable. I always use 59g extra-large eggs when I’m baking. A 59g egg consists of:
• 9g shell
• 50g whole egg, made up of 30g egg white and 20g egg yolk
Knowing this, you can adapt my recipes to the eggs you have – convert the egg quantities into grams and adjust accordingly. For example, 2 eggs equals 100g. This also helps if you are halving, doubling or tripling a recipe.
Cream
Thickened cream (known elsewhere as whipping cream or heavy cream) contains about 35 per cent fat and is stabilised with gelatine. It’s a good all-rounder for baking, and whips beautifully. I mostly use Bulla thickened cream.
When making ganache, I prefer Pauls Pure Cream. Unlike thickened cream, it doesn’t contain gelatine, so it won’t affect the set.
But my all-time favourite cream is Meander Valley double cream. Highest in fat content (56 per cent) and luxuriously thick, it’s delicious alongside a rich chocolate cake or piled high onto scones (I also like to add this into my morning coffee).
Baking powder and bicarbonate of soda
Both baking powder and bicarbonate of soda (or baking soda) are leavening agents. Bicarbonate of soda is often used in recipes that contain an acid, such as citrus juice or brown sugar. Baking powder is commonly used in recipes without a souring agent and instead reacts and rises when heat is applied.
Salt
Salt is a flavour enhancer – it balances sweetness and amplifies the flavours in your bakes. I like to use fine granular salt in my dough and flaked salt to garnish my cookies (love a salty pop!).
Nuts and nut meals
Using nuts in your baking adds so many things – roasty, toasty flavour; crunch; texture; and moisture. Nuts and nut meals are best stored in the freezer to prevent them from oxidising and turning rancid (bitter). You can buy roasted nuts if you plan to use them immediately, but I prefer to buy them raw and roast them as needed.
My favourite place to buy nuts is the Royal Nut Company. Based in Melbourne but also selling online, their nuts are always fresh and high quality. Apart from nuts, they sell an enormous range of baking ingredients – it’s like Wonka’s factory for bakers.
Vanilla
I love all things vanilla (it’s one of my favourite flavours – second to chocolate, of course!). You’ll notice my recipes call for more vanilla than you might be used to using. Feel free to cut back if you’re not a vanilla fiend like me.
I make vanilla bean paste from scratch using beans I order in bulk from Natural Vanilla Store. My favourite supermarket brand is Heilala from New Zealand. There is no other brand like it for quality and flavour.
Cocoa and chocolate
For both cocoa and chocolate, I use Callebaut. I like to use the darkest cocoa powder I can find, known as Dutch cocoa powder. It has been processed to reduce the cocoa’s natural acidity, meaning that the baking powder has the chance to do its thing. Dutch-processed cocoa is often labelled “unsweetened cocoa powder” or “100 per cent cocoa powder”. Callebaut’s cocoa powder is rich in both colour and flavour.
When adding chocolate, I use Callebaut’s 54 per cent callets (oversized chocolate chips) for most recipes. I like their size, and the fact that they melt easily and consistently. Plus, they have a great flavour and come in varying strengths of cocoa solids.
I’m not completely against supermarket chocolate – good options include Lindt or Nestlé Plaistowe. My general tip for baking is to use 70 per cent cocoa chocolate, which means it contains 70 per cent cocoa solids.
Gelatin
I usually use leaf gelatin, also known as sheet gelatin, in my cooking. However, I understand that powdered gelatin is much more accessible (and gives a more reliable set for recipes such as marshmallows).
This is an edited extract from Some of My Best Friends are Cookies by Emelia Jackson, photography by Armelle Habib, and illustrations by Andrea Smith. Murdoch Books, RRP $39.99.
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Emelia Jackson – Good Food’s Better Baking columnist is a former MasterChef Australia winner and author of two baking cookbooks.
