Vegan Baking Made Easy: Reverse Creaming
For the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing with you some of the lessons I learned while writing my latest cookbook, Vegan Baking Made Easy: 60 Fool-Proof Plant-Based Recipes, which will FINALLY be published next week!!! Woo-hoo!!
Just to recap:
Today, we delve into reverse creaming.
So, if the creaming method involves beating together your fat (usually in the form of vegan butter) and your sugar to create a fluffy cake, then how can reversing that process result in the same fluffiness?
I use reverse creaming to make my pie crust. It makes for the most beautiful, flaky crust, with zero butter or lard.
Reverse creaming involves mixing together all your dry ingredients (flour, leavener, salt, etc), then adding in your fat. When you do this, the fat coats the flour molecules. When you then add your liquid ingredients to this mixture, it helps to inhibit the formation of gluten, because gluten is formed when water and flour mix, so the fat, in a way, protects the gluten formation.
The more you mix something, the stronger the gluten bonds become. This is great if you are making a loaf of bread. But if you’re making a pie crust, you want the final result to be tender, not strong. So you want to inhibit too much gluten formation, and reverse creaming works great for that!
I explain more in the video:
See you next week, and ’til then, happy baking!