Using Nuts, Spices & Salt for Better Baking

Explore how to boost the flavor of your baked goods with nuts, salt, spices, and vanilla in this lesson with pastry chef Colette Christian. Nuts are a wonderful ingredient to add texture and flavor to your recipes. Colette covers everything you need to know, starting with buying and storing nuts to keep them from going rancid and producing off flavors in your baked goods. She also shows you how to toast your nuts to get the most flavor out of them in doughs and batters as well as an easy method for quickly removing skins.

Next, salt and baking spices are used to intensify other flavors in baked goods and allow you to create different flavor profiles. Discover the perfect amount of salt to use in your baked goods and how it affects your yeasted doughs. Dive into the different types of cinnamon and find out the perfect ratio for cinnamon sugar.

Finally, Colette shares with you everything you need to know about the beautiful floral flavor of vanilla. Whether you use vanilla extract, vanilla bean paste, or whole vanilla beans, Colette shows you how to use each type and provides a conversion ratio for using them interchangeably in your recipes. Included are tips on storage, what to do with leftover pods, and a side-by-side comparison of a classic flan with two types of vanilla. Explore the possibilities of new flavors in your baked goods with Colette!