Are my ingredients at the right temperature?

When you're about to make a loaf cake, a cake, muffins, or any other baked treat, it's very common to wonder whether you can use the ingredients straight out of the fridge. In baking, people talk a lot about "room-temperature ingredients" — why is that?

The properties of the ingredients we use change a lot depending on their temperature, and this is especially true for butter. When butter is below 0°C (32°F) — that is, freezer temperature — it becomes very hard and almost brittle; if we want to beat it together with other ingredients, that's going to be a very difficult task.

On the other hand, when butter is between 32 and 35°C (90 and 95°F) it simply melts, which makes it very easy to blend with other ingredients — but at a high cost: that mixture will barely be able to trap any air.

Why is it a problem if my mixture doesn't trap air? There are 3 types of leavening agents — that is, everything that makes a cake, loaf cake, or similar batter turn out fluffy instead of dense like a cookie. These agents are physical, chemical, and biological. All three work by incorporating gases into the batter, which form tiny bubbles before or during baking, and that's what makes a preparation turn out nice and fluffy.

Chemical agents are ingredients added to our mixture, such as baking soda or baking powder — both release gases during baking. Biological agents are, for example, the microorganisms present in yeast, which, after you let a dough rest, consume the sugar to produce carbon dioxide, a gas.

And last but most important, the physical agents, which are the gases incorporated, for example, precisely when creaming butter on its own or with some other ingredient.

That's why using room-temperature ingredients is crucial in baking — not so cold that they're hard to blend together, and not so warm that they can't trap air when beaten.

-But Fede, I've always made everything with ingredients straight out of the fridge and it always turned out fine.

Recipes usually don't rely on just one type of leavening agent. Using cold ingredients means you won't be able to incorporate much air by beating, but that's most likely being compensated by a chemical leavener, such as baking powder.

- So if I add baking powder, I can forget about the problem?

Not necessarily. Baking powder provides the gas we could otherwise be incorporating by beating, so the final preparation turns out the same. But if we beat all the ingredients at room temperature, we could achieve the same result using less baking powder.

Using less of an ingredient means a cheaper preparation and, best of all, we wouldn't be adding the taste of a chemical to our recipe. Have you ever tasted baking powder? Try dipping your finger in it and putting it in your mouth — yuck!

-You're right Fede, from now on I'll always use room-temperature ingredients, I'm subscribing to your channel right now.