You Should Be Baking With Milk Powder. Here's Why
A lot can go wrong when you're baking a seemingly simple dessert. A batch of cookies, for example, might bake unevenly if not rotated during the baking process (via All Recipes). If you use cold eggs, the wrong kind of flour, or unsoftened butter, the texture of the cookies might turn out all wrong. Additionally, not leaving the dough to chill overnight, prior to baking, can create unwanted over-spreading.
There are many tips and tricks that can go a long way into making home-baked cookies look and taste like they've been bought from a top-notch cookie shop. Mastering your ingredient list and perfecting your technique can make all the difference in your baked goods.
One tip that you can start adapting right away is swapping your liquid milk for milk powder. When the woman behind Milk Bar, baking goddess Christina Tosi, suggests using milk powder in your desserts, you'd be wise to follow. In an interview with Epicurious, chef Tosi went so far as to deem milk powder her "secret weapon ingredient" and claimed that there's no dessert in the world that a bit of milk powder couldn't make better. If you've ever wondered what made Milk Bar's desserts so darn good, now you know.
Milk powder can make baked goods more flavorful
While milk powder doesn't have a particularly noticeable taste, Tosi told Epicurious that adding it to other dry ingredients in any baked treat can enhance the flavor.
Powdered milk is just liquid milk in a powdered and concentrated form. This means that when you use milk powder in your bakes, it adds everything that liquid milk does — fat, protein, and flavor — without adding too much moisture into your batters and doughs. Powdered milk helps baked goods rise more, making cookies and brownies chewier and more tender.
Per Woman's World, when heated in an oven, the sugar present in milk powder can caramelize and give your baked goods a lovely brown hue while making the flavor more rich and nutty. Adding milk powder to desserts where the dough is fried, like doughnuts and gulab jamuns, makes the skin of the fried snacks crisp while keeping the dough inside soft and fluffy, just as it should be.
According to Woman's World, you can add a teaspoon of milk powder to any baking recipe and blend it with other dry ingredients. You can also add it to boxed brownie and cake mixes for a bit more oomph.