Baking can be a very intimidating process, juggling between weird whisking techniques to understanding complicated and homonymic baking terms. We here at The Skinny Bakers aim to alleviate your worries and help you in your journey to becoming a Baking Master through a series of posts breaking down the basics of baking cookies! So let us begin with an essential ingredient, the EGG!
So, What Are Eggs?
Eggs are an incredibly versatile and multidimensional raw ingredient for cooking in general, where almost each of its component play a different role in the texture, appearance and taste of your final baked good.
What Role Do They Play?
The whole egg's purpose is to generally hold the other ingredients together to provide proper structure and strength to the batter. They are able to do so because of their 13% protein content.
Furthermore, due to their high water content eggs also act as a great leavening agent that would help the dough rise and give an airy texture to your final product!
But What About the Egg Whites?
Egg Whites are essentially 86% water hence its mainly responsible for the leavening part of baking. Egg whites are typically whipped until they form a light airy foam that is usually incorporated to make light desserts such as macaron and meringue cookies. Nevertheless, one must be careful when incorporating egg whites as they tend to dry out your cookies more since there is no fatty yolk to balance out the high water concentration in the egg whites.
How about the Egg Yolks?
In a way, the yolks tend to have the opposite function when compared to egg whites. Egg yolks are high in fats therefore it mainly acts to emulsify other ingredients together into a homogenous and even mixture. In relation to that, due to its high fat content, the yolk also contributes to the richness in flavour as well as the velvety texture of a cookie, hence they're the perfect ingredient when baking soft and chewy cookies!
Interesting how eggs can do so much and we haven't even gone through the grades yet! (That's right, there's different types of eggs categorised based on grades but that's for another time). We hope this information has helped you in your baking journey but if it still hasn't and you're about to absolutely lose it, might we suggest you instead purchase some of our ready made cookies? Here's some of our absolute favourites that you should try:
The French Butter Crunchy Cookies For That Deliciously Rich Taste But Light Texture
