Sometimes, you get so busy with work, family, and other commitments that it becomes difficult to find time to prepare food at home. This is especially true during the winter, when many people are hungry for warm, delicious foods after a long day of staying indoors or skiing/snowboarding/sleeping off your diet.
Many grocery stores now offer bakery-style services where customers can pick out recipes and supplies and have them made fresh right there in the store! These services range from having someone make cookies or cakes for service, to making breads and pastries, to even baking whole meals.
With how easy it is to access such great baked goods, it seems crazy to not enjoy them unless you really cannot cook. Luckily, our friends over at The Food Lab wanted to give you more options than just boiling, broiling, or toasting your breakfast sandwiches!
This article will discuss some ways to rewarm baked items before eating them like putting rolls in an oven, using low heat to reheat chocolate chip cookies, and cooking meat as we do normally!
Healing Powers Of Broccoli
We’ll also talk about one of broccoli’s most powerful compounds — sulforaphane – which helps retain the shape and texture of cooked vegetables. When you eat broccoli raw or lightly steamed, Sulforaphane is unable to be absorbed into the body.
Only if it needs to bake longer
Many recipes call for baking your dessert “in the oven” or having it “bake in the oven” before serving. This is typically because the recipe contains ingredients that will toast, burn, or dry out while the dessert bakes.
Most people are familiar with this tip when it comes to cakes. When a cake looks done, you can take it out and plate it, but it may need another few minutes in the pan to finish cooking. That’s okay! Because most of the time, that’t be too much time.
If you just want to give your child their favorite milk bar cookie as a gift, letting them take the cookies out and eat them immediately would not be ideal. If they don’t like them right away, they probably won’t love them.
It depends
Some recipes call for baking with the oven still hot, which is called cold baking. This can be done either way depending on what type of recipe you are making!
Recipes that require cooling the baked good before serving often do not work if you bake at this stage. Because heat will continue to affect the finished product, most people agree that it’s better to just let the cookies or cakes warm up naturally in the pan as they would in the oven.
Some people believe that leaving the cookie or cake in the oven longer is more effective than taking it out earlier, but there is no proof that one method is clearly best. What kind of cookie/cake you make and how long it takes to cool down will determine that.
Why would you want to?
Even though some recipes call for baking cakes or cookies right after they are finished, this is not always the best way to do it!
When baking with sugar, glucose (a simple carbohydrate) will cause the cake to brown or burn depending on how long it bakes before being cooled down. This can sometimes change how taste-sensitive people perceive the dessert!
Granted, most people do not eat much of the batter beyond what goes into the pan when these types of baked goods are made, but still – we should be careful about how quickly we cool them.
We cannot assume that every person who eats the leftover bits will like the dessert due to this reason. Obviously, personal preference is a factor, but using warm instead of cold ovens could be the difference between someone liking or disliking your recipe.
This article will talk more in depth about why putting baked foods like cakes back in the oven to finish cooking is not a good idea and tips on how to avoid this problem.
It can damage the cake
Many recipes call for baking your dessert right after preparing the other parts of the meal, which is what makes it hard to re-warm or re-bake the dessert. When this happens, the moisture in the warm dessert may combine with the dry ingredients already mixed together, creating a crumbly mess that cannot be spreadable anymore.
This could also cause the texture of the dessert to suffer as the melted sugar and chocolate might seep back into place. If you find yourself in this situation, try reheating the dessert in the oven! This will take longer than if you were just to bake the dessert directly from hot air, but it should be done in temperatures lower than 350°F so it does not burn.
You have to check it more often
When baking, your recipe may call for putting a pan or vessel with dough or batter in an oven to cook. This is typically done when starting with hot butter, then adding other ingredients which contain raw materials that can burn easily.
Most people are aware of this concept, but some may be guilty of thinking that if you take the pot out before everything browns, then the whole process will not hurt anything. This is false!
Baking does not end once the initial cooking takes place. There are two main reasons why this is untrue. The first is time – depending on how long the bake time is, there is still enough time for things to overcook and become burnt or overbaked.
The second reason is temperature – even though the top of the food may be warm from being exposed to heat, the rest may be cold as well. If you took the pot away too early, the uncooked material could cool down and potentially congeal or even harden due to exposure to the air or leftover liquids.
Yes, but only for a short period of time
After putting your bread in the oven, check it every few minutes until done, then remove it and let it cool down! This is called “toasting” or “browning” the loaf.
Once it is fully cooled, you can store it properly, either in an airtight container or under a lidded bag so that moisture does not get trapped and spoils the dough.
The temperature will be different
There’s one more major difference between baking and roasting, and that is temperature. When you bake food at a higher temperature, it can burn quickly, so your must watch the barometer of the oven carefully!
When cooking meat or vegetables under 250 degrees F (120 degrees C), this process is called roasting. To roast something hotter than that, like a carrot, you have to re-heat the pan until the carrots are browned and done. This way, they cook faster and retain more flavor.
By using lower temperatures for longer, people with baked-food allergies can enjoy all types of foods! That’s why studies show that most people can eat cooked meats and veggies without too much trouble.
It could burn the cake
Many people have a tendency to think that if a recipe calls for baking then you can just leave the oven door closed and go do something else! This is usually not a good idea, however.
When recipes call for baked goods to be cooked “in the oven” it means that the dough or foam must still contain oxygen. If the air and heat are removed too quickly, the molecules of oxygen will not be ableto change into other atoms and lose their energy as they normally would, thus preventing chemical reactions from occurring.
This is why we bake with open flames – so that fire has an opportunity to take away and use up some of the oxygen around it.
In the case of most cakes, this doesn’t matter very much because the whole process takes only about half an hour max. However, there are some types of cakes that take longer to cook than that!
If your cake looks like it needs to cook for another 30 minutes after it comes out of the oven, maybe because it took more than 10 minutes to set up before, try opening the oven door and see what happens.