Bake It 'Til You Make It: How Do I Become a Better Baker?

Have you ever wondered why, despite meticulously following a recipe, your bakes sometimes don't quite rise to the occasion? It's because baking is far more than just mixing ingredients. This culinary art form involves precise chemical reactions, exact measurements, and an understanding of how environmental factors can truly make or break your masterpiece.

Learning to strike this intricate balance is precisely what makes someone a better baker: a keen eye for detail, a commitment to precision, and a willingness to understand the why behind each step. It’s why what looks deceptively simple on paper can be surprisingly challenging in practice. 

But fear not, for mastering this craft is entirely within your dough-main!

Tip 1: Read the Entire Recipe Before You Start

"So, how do I become a better baker?" you ask. 

Start by reading the recipe before you start—all of it. This might seem like a no-brainer, but trust us, it’s the golden rule for becoming a better baker. Imagine getting halfway through a recipe only to discover that you need to chill your dough for four hours, or that a key ingredient should have been at room temperature for several hours.

Taking a few minutes to read the whole recipe before you even crack an egg helps you avoid surprises, missing ingredients you assumed you had, misunderstanding precise timings, or improper preparation (like forgetting to grease a tin). To minimise these mishaps, mentally walk through each step as you read. Highlight or make notes about critical timings or temperatures. Even better, gather all your ingredients and equipment before you start.

Tip 2: Pay Attention to Ingredient Temperature

The temperature of your ingredients might seem like a small detail, but it profoundly affects the texture, structure, and consistency of your final bake. Think about butter: cold, it's solid; melted, it's liquid. Both behave very differently in a batter and create unique outcomes.

For instance, using cold butter cut into flour for scones creates pockets of steam, which are essential for those desirable flaky layers. Conversely, melted butter in cookie dough can cause it to spread too much, resulting in thin, crispy biscuits instead of chewy ones. Even seemingly simple things like eggs at room temperature emulsify better with other ingredients, creating a smoother, more uniform batter.

Tip 3: Weigh Your Ingredients for Precision

If you're still scooping artisanal flour with a measuring cup, we'll let you in on a little secret on how to bake better: invest in a kitchen scale.

Why? Because volume measurements are notoriously inaccurate, especially for flour. A cup of flour can vary by as much as 30%, depending on how tightly packed it is. This seemingly tiny difference can drastically alter your dough's hydration, leading to tough bread or dry cakes.

Weighing ingredients provides unparalleled precision, resulting in far more consistent and reliable results. In fact, precise ingredient measurement, particularly by weight, consistently yields more accurate and reproducible baking outcomes than volume-based methods. 

If a scale isn't an option just yet, try the "spoon and level" method for flour: gently spoon flour into your measuring cup until it overflows, then level it off with a straight edge. It's not as accurate as a scale, but it's a significant improvement over simple scooping.

Tip 4: Use the Ingredients the Recipe Calls For

Remember, baking is not like cooking. In cooking, you can often freestyle, swapping out herbs or adjusting spices with relative ease. In baking, however, every recipe requires precision. Every ingredient plays a specific, often irreplaceable, role in the final structure and flavour.

Swapping ingredients, such as substituting fats, leaveners (like baking soda or powder), or even different types of flour, can drastically alter the final product. For example, trying to swap self-raising flour for plain flour without adding the necessary leavening agents will result in a dense, disappointing bake. 

Tip 5: Invest in the Right Equipment

Like how a chef always tries to work with a sharp knife, a baker who wants to achieve great results uses the right equipment. 

For example, an oven with inconsistent temperatures can lead to uneven bakes. Similarly, relying on a hand-held whisk might work well for thin mixtures, but it just won’t hold up in thick doughs and batters.

Investing in a quality, reliable kitchen oven with consistent heating and sturdy kitchen mixing equipment—such as a spiral mixer for making large quantities of dough or a planetary mixer for a more all-purpose machine—increases your chances of getting more consistent results. This is especially true for specialty recipes, like those taught in our bread-making classes in Singapore. Having these foundational tools can truly make all the difference to your final product.

Bonus Tip: Embrace Mistakes & Enjoy the Process

Even seasoned professional bakers occasionally forget a timer or misread a step—trust us, it happens! Mistakes are an inevitable, and frankly, invaluable part of the learning journey.

So, instead of getting frustrated, shift your mindset. Baking isn't solely about achieving a flawless result but about enjoying the craft, embracing the creativity, and yes, even laughing at the glorious mess. Learn from what went wrong and celebrate your progress, no matter how small.

Practice Makes Better

Ultimately, to become a better baker, it all starts with mastering the fundamentals: prepping, measuring, investing in the right equipment, and most importantly, truly enjoying the journey.

You don't have to bake the perfect sourdough on day one—you just need to keep practising, keep learning, and keep rising to new challenges!

Want hands-on experience and expert guidance on how to be a better baker? Join a beginner’s baking class at Bespoke Bread and learn alongside a community that loves baking as much as you dough!