{"id":19824,"date":"2020-08-29T15:23:51","date_gmt":"2020-08-29T19:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bakeschool.com\/?p=19824"},"modified":"2024-08-06T12:49:47","modified_gmt":"2024-08-06T16:49:47","slug":"baking-ratios-to-remember","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bakeschool.com\/baking-ratios-to-remember\/","title":{"rendered":"How to use baking ratios"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you remember the ratios for the basic baking recipes, you can bake almost anything. Recipes can be very difficult to remember and to memorize, but ratios are generally more memorable and usually work out to a formula that is easy to commit to memory and use to scale up or down.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why work with ratios<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Whenever I come across a new baking recipe that intrigues me, I always try to work out the ratio to see if this \"new to me\" recipe fits into a ratio that I am already familiar with. It's a method to dissect a recipe to allow you to understand what makes it tick. It's also a way to learn how recipe writers deviate from the basics to come up with new recipes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In baking, it's very difficult to reinvent the cake recipe because at its core, the amounts of each ingredient relative to each other have to fit a certain mould, otherwise you risk throwing off the recipe.For example, if you have a basic vanilla layer cake<\/a> recipe that you like and you want to adapt it to make it lemon flavoured. You can't just add lemon juice to the recipe and expect the same results, though lemon-flavoured. You have to take away from one ingredient and replace it with the lemon juice, otherwise, you may end up with too much liquid in the batter, resulting in a gummy cake that is impossible to properly bake through. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same goes for frostings: if you like Italian meringue buttercream<\/a>, and you want to turn the vanilla buttercream into an orange buttercream, you can't just add in orange juice. The orange juice will probably lead to a broken buttercream where you've lost the emulsion and the solid fat is separated from the liquid. It would be impossible to fix at that point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to work with ratios and get creative, you need to understand the roles of the ingredients used in baking<\/a> and what each ingredient contributes to a recipe. You're also going to have to get very familiar with the ins and outs of baking substitutions<\/a>. The good news is that baking is pretty logical and once you understand the ingredients, the techniques, and the ratios, you can pretty much create anything you want, with a little dose of experimenting to perfect your final product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calculating ratios<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I'm trying to recall when did ratios make an appearance when we were in school? A ratio is a fraction, so ratios would have come up in math class: a 1-to-1 ratio can be written as 1:1 and we know that works out to equal parts. Another way to express a one-to-one ratio is 50\/50 or as 50 %. Why? Well, if you have two equal parts that are one-to-one, the whole is two parts. And each portion represents half of the whole, i.e. the fraction \u00bd or 0.5, which translates to 50 % of the whole. Clearly, I'd make a terrible math teacher, so let's move on...<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you want to calculate ratios, you divide all the components by the same number, usually the smallest number of the recipe. The goal is to bring the components down to the smallest whole numbers they can be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n