Some bread recipes, and almost all cake recipes, tell you to grease and flour a pan. Some just say to flour a pan, but it means the same thing. It’s just coating the pan so that the baked goods don’t stick.
Usually they assume you already know how. If this is your first time, here it is, in two quick steps.
Rub a stick of butter around the inside of the pan until it is completely coated. Pay attention to the corners and edges, make sure you get them.
Add about a cup of all-purpose flour.
Tip the pan all around, tapping with your other hand, to make sure the flour sticks to all surfaces, then dump out the excess.
And that’s it.
This works better than any spray, and it’s all real food, too.
UPDATE: As a few people mentioned below, you can use cocoa powder instead of flour if you’re doing a chocolate cake.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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21 Comments
I love the look of that pan.
What do you think is the advantage of flouring over just greasing?
Batters need something to adhere to… better the flour than the pan! In other words, you grease the pan so nothing sticks to it. But you flour the grease so the batter has something to climb up as it rises during baking. Is that correct, Drew?
I’m sure Jenni will correct me if this is wrong, but here goes.
Flour doesn’t get sticky until it hydrates — or absorbs moisture. Unless the butter is melted, the flour won’t absorb moisture from it very quickly.
This dry barrier keeps the batter from touching the butter while the outer layer of the batter starts to cook. Once the batter has formed a crust, the butter keeps it from sticking.
My grandma would use cocoa powder when making a chocolate cake. Any thoughts on that?
So, if I use Baker’s Joy is that considered cheating? LOL
Stephanie, if that works as well as flour does then I’d have to reconsider my explanation for why it works. Hopefully Jenni will drop in to set us straight.
April, usually I don’t like non-stick sprays because they add flavor. Then there’s the MSDS (Materials Safety Data Sheet). And finally this from their FAQ:
Q: What type of oil is used in Baker’s Joy spray?
A: Baker’s Joy spray includes heart-healthy soybean oil, considered the healthiest of all cooking oils. In fact, 85% of its composition is made up of polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats…the ones that are good for you.*
*United Soybean Board, Consumers’ Perception of Soy: Why it Might Pay to Have it on Your Label, 3/17/2000.
So the United Soybean Board considers soybean to be the healthiest of all cooking oils. Well, that certainly settles that issue. :-/
The hottest part of the batter is the part that is right up against the hot metal pan. Since most cake batters contain a lot of sugar, the outside caramelizes fairly quickly. That’s why you get a nice golden crust on cakes and such–caramelization plus additional browning due to Maillard reactions. Caramel is sticky. The flour or cocoa powder–like Stephanie’s grandma, I use that, too, for choc cakes–acts as a barrier between the caramel and the pan.
No greasing for angel food cakes, sponge cakes or chiffon cakes, though. In these cases, if the batter (which is very egg-heavy and may only be leavened w/an egg or egg white foam) wasn’t allowed to stick to the sides of an aluminum pan, it would have a hard time rising–the sticking gives the starches time to set up. This is also why lots of these types of cakes are cooled upside down, to keep them from collapsing before the structure is completely set. Having said that, I agree w/B.Cool that most American style butter cakes rise better in floured pans because they have a rough surface to climb.
Drew, I think you’re on the right track, too. Bottom line: I don’t think there is one definitive answer as to why the greasing/flouring keeps cakes from sticking–all these reasons are viable.
I had no idea about not greasing the angel food. How do you get it to release wen it’s done?
As for my explanation, I was basing it on what I know of frying battered foods. You need to let them rest for a while after dipping to let the flour hydrate and glue the layers together, or your batter will all come off in one big layer when you fry it.
With cakes it’s the exact opposite. You need to get it into the oven immediately after pouring it into the pan because you want those layers to stay separate.
Fascinating discussion.
Hey, Drew. Yeah, for angel food cakes (and similar), you just bake them in a 2 part angel food pan and let cool upside down. Then, you do the skinny knife trick to release the sides, slide the two sections apart and do the skinny knife trick again to get the cake to let go of the bottom and cone of the pan. Kind of a pain, but there you have it.
If I am making a chocolate cake I like to use coco powder to “flour” the pan. This keeps a white dusting off your cake.
CI used cocoa power on my last chocolate cake after I read that it would work like flour, but my cake stuck like I hadn't used anything on the pan. When I finally got them out of the pan, they were in pieces and I had to use frosting to hold them together
. Tasty, but not ideal. What did I do wrong? I coated the pans with butter, then used the cocoa powder in place of the flour.
Wow, sorry to hear that. It's hard to guess without knowing what recipe you did, and a whole lot more details, like: how warm was the butter, how long did the batter sit in the pan before going into the oven, was the oven thoroughly pre-heated, etc.
I know I always over-do it with the flower or cocoa, because I hate sticking.
I’m catching up on back posts, because that’s what I do with blogs.
Drew, please get off your “real food” high horse. Cooking spray is no less food than butter, the ingredients are oil, soy lecithin (a natural product), and propellants (which will of course evaporate practically instantly). This soapbox moment is particularly egregious, even after reading two years of disingenuous comments.
‘Sides, didn’t you watch the waffle episode of Good Eats?
No, I missed that episode. I’m guessing AB said the sprays really aren’t so bad? If so, I’ll have to disagree with him on this one.
The oil in cooking sprays is always a vegetable oil, all of which are industrial products that shouldn’t be eaten. And soy lecithin may be “natural”, but so is uranium. I don’t recommend eating that, either.
Never mind. This is a hopeless cause. I hope you don’t ever eat soybeans, olives, any nut or seed, or any other plant that contains oils lest you keel over on the spot. Regardless of how they are produced, there are certain culinary applications where refined oils are just downright better than animal fats due to (generally speaking) having higher smoke points and remaining liquid at room temperature.
Lecithin is an emulsifier that’s responsible for your homemade mayonnaise (or any egg-based emulsion) existing or any vinaigrette containing mustard being even vaguely stable. I took the Good Eats thing at face value, if you actually do care, Alton Brown’s longtime contributor Shirley O. Corriher’s books are absolutely fascinating. I’ve got a degree in chemistry and work with it daily, and am still fascinated by food science.
“Uranium is natural, too” is just scare-talk for people ignorant of and unwilling to learn about science.
Anyway, I’m generally able to wade through the natural foods woo-woo on your site, but this one leapt out. And your Italian bread recipe, by the way, is my go-to for crusty white bread; I just keep reading backlogs in hopes of finding another classic.
Soybeans, no, not if I can help it.
Olives, nuts and seeds are fine. They are stable enough that they don’t go rancid quickly. That’s the problem with most vegetable oils — which, in practice, means corn, soybean, or canola (AKA rapeseed) oil. All three of those are basically rancid by the time they’re refined, then deodorized so they’re palatable.
When I need a high-smokepoint oil for frying, I use olive pomace.
In the amounts you actually get from using a cooking spray, it barely makes any difference. I just find it easier to keep to a simple rule: Avoid vegetable oils, except for olive oil.
For another classic, try my wife’s brownies. That’s by far the most popular recipe on this site.
“All three of those are basically rancid by the time their refined, then deodorized so they’re palatable.”
Except this is completely untrue, at least in a scientific sense. Rancidity implies oxidation, which fundamentally changes the molecule and its properties for cooking. Health advice is cool and all, but if you make scientific claims, you should have scientific evidence. (and no, natural medicine is not science.)
Everything I’ve read says polynsaturated oils are highly susceptible to rancidity. Yes, I know what rancid means “in a scientific sense”.
Do you know of research showing that what I said is not true? I could look up the research I’ve seen saying that it is, if you’d like.
Any yahoo with a computer can create a website decrying or lauding whatever foodstuff he chooses, so, yes, I would be terribly interested to see some real research showing that vegetable oils are already rancid by the time they are processed and that these oils are significantly worse for my health than animal-based saturated fats. There are literally thousands of peer-reviewed articles out there on soybean oil, so finding some should be a piece of cake.
Answering this will take longer than just a comment here. Give me a couple of days to put something together.
While I’m pulling together references, can you find the peer-reviewed articles that demonstrate vegetable oils — corn, soybean or canola, your choice — are nutritionally equivalent to animal fats?
Note that “chemically similar” doesn’t count. And not epidemiological studies. I mean controlled studies showing that replacing animal fats with vegetable oil has no adverse outcome.
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