Part of my Baking Fundamentals series:Have you ever wondered why recipes need you to combine dry and wet components separately? This page explains why, as well as what may happen if you don’t!

The real reason

It’s really rather simple: you want to combine the dry and wet components separately to ensure that the dry ingredients are distributed evenly.

It’s important to remember that baking is a science, and it’s not always as forgiving as cooking, so taking the additional time and steps to correctly combine your ingredients ensures that your recipe has the highest chance of success!

Delicious, delicious success.

What happens if you don’t separate dry and wet ingredients?

For example, lets say youre making cookies.

To be specific, peanut butter espresso cookies. The flour, espresso powder, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt are whisked together in the first stage of the recipe.

In a separate dish, add the butter, peanut butter, brown sugar (and, finally, the egg and vanilla).

Then you combine the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients, which is why I always specify that the wet ingredients bowl be the bigger of the two since there is where all of your components will end up.

We may risk having an uneven distribution of all the leavening agents and tastes if we didn’t handle it this way. As a result, you may wind up with cookies that are deflated on one side, lack espresso taste, and have much too much salt.

And I don’t believe I need to explain why uneven, strange-tasting cookies aren’t a good appearance.

Does it matter if you mix wet into dry, or vice versa?

In general, yes, you should add the dry components to the wet ingredients.

Adding the wet components to the dry ingredients might result in clumpy and untidy results. You know how there’s an erupting pocket of flour in your batter or dough? That’s not good.

batter, which might result in excessive gluten development in the flour.Another disadvantage of combining wet and dry components is that you will have to work harder to thoroughly integrate the ingredients, which may result in overmixing the dough.

What about alternating adding wet and dry ingredients?

Sometimes a recipe may instruct you to alternately add portioned amounts of wet and dry components, i.e. alternately add your dry ingredients and milk, finishing with the dry ingredients. That is for a purpose!

For certain recipes, the amount of dry ingredients may be such that adding all of the dry ingredients at once causes the batter to be overly thick and difficult to combine (resulting in overmixing, as previously described).

And if you add all of the liquid at once, it may oversaturate the mixture, resulting in separation that is difficult (or maybe impossible) to fix.

By rotating them (and mixing until barely incorporated between each one), you give everything a chance to integrate equally.

Why is sugar considered a wet ingredient?

Doesn’t it seem ridiculous? Sugar is measured as a dry ingredient since sugar is, well, dry, but it is frequently mentioned in recipes as a wet ingredient to be blended with all of the other wet components. Why? Because, well, science.

The proportion of moist to dry components is crucial in all types of baked products. A particular balance is required to make a fluffy cake or a chewy cookie; if that balance is incorrect, your cake will be chewy and your cookie will be fluffy. Yikes.

The sugar should be combined (or, more precisely, dissolved) with liquid substances to block the gluten-forming proteins. This enables you to add the appropriate quantity of liquid to a recipe to get the correct consistency and texture.

Boom! Science.

I hope this was helpful! Is there anything more I should have spoken regarding this topic? Please let me know in the comments section below.

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