Why mix dry ingredients first

Part 11 of my Baking Basics series: Have you ever wondered why recipes call for mixing dry and wet ingredients in separate bowls before combining them? It helps to keep in mind that baking really is a science and not always as forgiving as cooking — so taking the extra time and steps to properly incorporate your ingredients gives your recipe the best chance of success!

Peanut butter espresso cookies , to be precise. The first step of the recipe calls for whisking together flour, espresso powder, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. The next step is to use a separate bowl to combine the butter, peanut butter and brown sugar and eventually the egg and vanilla.

So you could end up with cookies that are deflated on one side, have none of the espresso flavor and entirely too much salt. Generally speaking, yes — you want to add the dry ingredients into the bowl of wet ingredients.

Some say that adding dry into wet leads to clumps of dry ingredients floating in the batter, while others say that actually the opposite, adding wet to dry, leads to, well, also clumps. It would appear that the jury is still out, and everyone despises clumps. But one thing is definitely true: It is much harder to successfully add dry ingredients into wet ingredients neatly. That order tends to lead to a giant puff of flour wafting toward the ceiling, and settling all over the counters, while a steady, viscous stream of wet ingredients will instead narrowly ribbon its way down into the bowl containing dry ingredients, and nowhere else.

When in doubt, you should usually abide by the combining orders of the recipe you're following because the author may have a specific reason for writing it that way, whether or not the reasoning is clear to you. Until the midth century, most cookbooks were simply lists of ingredients with only superficial instructions for the cook.

The assumption was that the reader already knew how to cook or bake and could successfully prepare the recipe as long as the correct ingredients were chosen. Modern recipes don't make that assumption. They provide detailed explanations for crucial steps such as separating the wet and dry ingredients in baking.

Although baking offers tremendous scope for creative artistry, at its core it is a very precise science. For baked goods to reach their full potential, the ingredients must be mixed in the correct ratios. They also need to be combined correctly for ingredients such as butter, sugar, eggs and flour to fulfil their respective roles. This is why wet and dry ingredients are handled separately for baked goods as diverse as delicate cakes and chewy, artisan-style breads. One of the primary reasons for separating wet and dry ingredients is that they interfere with each other during the mixing stage.

If you take flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and spices and drop them in a bowl containing milk and eggs, the ingredients won't be able to mix properly throughout the dough. Finally the milk and dry ingredients are usually added alternately, starting and ending with the flour. The creaming method produces a finer more tender crumb due to:.

Sugar is a tenderizing agent among many other things due to its hygroscopic nature ability to attract moisture from surrounding atmosphere. Look here for more on sugar. Adding the flour first helps to coat the proteins gluten with fat so that it can't form strong bonds with other gluten strands, thus "shortening" the gluten strands and producing a more tender cake. If liquid is introduced first, the gluten won't be lubricated as well by the fat and if too much liquid is added to the fat particularly if it the liquid isn't at room temperature it can cause the fat to clump and the mix will appear curdled.

This will lead to a coarser texture in the cake. The liquid needs to be emulsified in the fat rather than having the fat surrounded by the liquid. When I mix mortar for stone work in the wheelbarrow, I put the water in first then add the cement, mix it in, then the lime, mix it in, then the sand and adjust the mix to get the consistency I want. The reason I do this is to keep the dry ingredients from sticking in pockets in the corners of the barrow. With cooking or baking, we have really nice tools to scrape the sides and bottom of the mixing bowl, removing any chance of having pockets of unmixed dry ingredients anywhere.

It may produce a better distributed mix to add the wet to the dry, for example when I make pancake or waffle batter I put the egg and milk mixture on a well in the dry stuff and then add the melted butter.

If I did that first, the milk mix, cooling the melted butter might make it clump up a bit before I could get the dry stuff stirred down into it.

When I put the wet on the dry, I always mix immediately, incorporating the wet well into the dry before any separation occurs. Seems like when I was a baker a long time ago we added the wet ingredients to the big commercial mixers first and then added the pre formulated dry concoctions a bit at a time as the dry became incorporated with the wet.

Which is the same way we used to make mortar using a small cement mixer. Other than as noted above, have never run across a regular cook book recipe that calls for adding dry to wet There are additional concerns with some of your examples. Some baked goods backing powder biscuits, cornbread degrade quickly once moisture is introduced to the dry ingredients. There's a point where good mixing degrades the end result.