Basic Baking - Want To Learn How To Bake? It’s Easy!

At its most basic form, it is simply the cooking of food in an oven. Now, you might think that this sounds a lot like roasting but there are very important differences.

First of all, roasting involves food that contains moisture. So things like chicken, beef and lamb fall into this category as they contain juices within them. Roasting allows these juices to be released thus flavouring the food.

Secondly, roasting food generally involves the use of oils or fats to coat the food being roasted. Sticking to our examples of chicken, beef and lamb, you usually cover these foods with oil to help with the cooking. Similarly you might use oil of some other type of fat when roasting potatoes.

Baking, on the other hand, it doesn’t require the addition of oils or fats. Try to think of it as cooking with dry heat. The foods you cook via this method also usually don’t contain trapped moisture that you want to keep. Cakes, for example, go into the oven as a semi-liquid mixture but come out with a nice, fluffy texture. Can you imagine eating a roasted cake?

So, we’ve established that baking involves using dry heat to cook foods than will remain fairly dry. There’s lots of foods you can cook this way, such as potatoes, quiches, fish, bread, cookies, cakes and muffins just to name a few.

Baking is also very simple and often doesn’t require any extra equipment. If you want to know how to bake a potato, then all you have to do is wash them and place them directly on the oven rack – no need to peel them. Things can't really get much easier than that!

Baking is also a very healthy way to cook as it doesn’t involve the addition of fatty oils. All you get out is the food’s natural goodness. Of course, if you want to add flavourings after cooking then go ahead. Sour cream and sweet chilli sauce is fantastic with potatoes!

Most people want to learn to bake due to its simplicity, but also because every kitchen has an oven these days. However, don’t think you’re limited to your kitchen oven; any enclosed oven with indirect heat can be used, such as a kettle barbecue.

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