Ina Garten's Top Tip For Perfectly Leavened Baked Goods

Food Network phenom Ina Garten may have coined the phrase "store-bought is fine," but that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of exceptions. She has been on the record advocating for store-bought mayonnaise, peanut butter, frozen pie crust, and frozen puff pastry, but when it comes to baking a cake, she doesn't leave the leavening to chance. "I prefer instead of using flour that has leavening in it to do my own leavening," she said about making chocolate cake in a recent episode of her show, "Barefoot Contessa" (via Food Network on YouTube).

There are a lot of choices when it comes to flour these days, including self-rising products that can make an easy batch of muffins or a quick pancake. The trouble is, if you don't get the leavening amounts just right, the texture of your bakes can come out all wrong. Not only that, leavenings have much shorter shelf lives than flour, and if your self-rising flour is past its prime, they won't work right and you can end up with a dense, sad cake that never really rises.

When Ina Garten makes a cake, she knows the recipe has to work every time, which is why she measures out her own baking soda and baking powder. "You don't want a cake that's too light, and you don't want one that's too dense," she says at the beginning of the video of her chocolate cake episode.

Self-rising flours, which includes popular boxed cake mixes, are convenient because you can skip the steps of measuring out baking soda and baking powder (there is a difference between the two, by the way). Unfortunately, you're also putting the control of the most crucial part of cake baking in the flour manufacturer's hands: the rise. Without leavening to create the air pockets in the batter, which creates the crumb, a cake mix is just a sweet puddle of goop. 

Most of the time, self-rising products work just fine. However, both baking powder and baking soda lose their mojo after about 18 months in an unopened package, and can stop working after only six months if the package is open. Thankfully, cake mixes all come with "best by" dates printed on the package, but if you use self-rising flour for your bakes, and you're not labeling and dating the flour container, you're taking a chance on a disappointing batch of muffins or a half-risen cake.

No matter what you're baking, it's also important to make sure that the leavener gets thoroughly mixed into all of the dry ingredients before you add anything wet. This is to make sure that the crumb of your bake is even and you don't end up with big bubbles from pockets of leavener. Some people do this with a fork or a whisk, but Ina Garten takes the extra step of sifting all the dry ingredients through a mesh sieve, which you can see her do in her chocolate cake video. 

Sifting your dry ingredients not only distributes the leavener evenly, it also breaks up clumps of flour, cocoa, salt or anything else that might be sticking together that could affect the texture of your bake. The easiest way to do this is to place a fine mesh sieve or strainer over your mixing bowl, then measure all of the dry ingredients into the sieve. Once you have everything portioned out, push all the dry ingredients through the sieve with a spoon or your hand, making sure to break up the clumpy bits leftover at the end.

Baking is all about creating the perfect conditions for your batter to rise, and shortcuts will often end up with disappointing results. So, if you want your cakes to come out as perfect as Ina Garten's, don't cut any corners when it comes to your leaveners.