My secret to delicious desserts / #004

Hello and welcome to Crumby Data #004!

Ooof, I’ve been busy in the kitchen! Here are some various experiments from the past two weeks:

Testing cinnamon roll geometries (upper left); stuffed cookies (upper right); intensely flavored pumpkin pie (bottom left); matcha cheesecake cookies (bottom right)

I recently read that Christina Tosi described milk powder as the “MSG of baking”. Maybe this is because milk powder and MSG (monosodium glutamate) are both powders added to dishes? An interesting thought, nonetheless, that got me thinking about MY favorite flavor enhancer.

In and of itself, yes: milk powder adds dairy flavors by providing a concentrated source of proteins, fats, and sugars.

I’m no stranger to milk powders; this is only a few of the shelf I mess around with in my “kitchen lab.” Each one has different characteristics and therefore preferred use cases in my baking experiments, but I suppose that’s a whole other post for another day!

Now, if we think about the function of MSG in foods, it adds depth of umami flavor by triggering a specific sensory pathway. And although milk powder cannot activate the same pathways, it can certainly offer strong dairy-forward, lightly savory undertones in baking.

And I’m sure milk powder does add some flavor, I mean, all this stuff aside, Christina’s recipes are pretty tasty.

But for me, I like to think about the difference between boiling a chicken breast and sautéing it in a pan. Yeah, both will add meaty chicken flavor to a dish, but sautéing adds even more delicious flavor complexity through surface toasting.

Which brings me to my key point.

One of my favorite ways to achieve remarkable, indescribably delicious flavor complexity in baking lies not in a single ingredient, but rather, a process: the Maillard reaction.

This reaction is a browning process that creates hundreds of aromatic compounds that give foods their delicious flavors (think: roasted steaks, toasted bread, roasted nuts, or coffee).

This table looks complicated without context, but all you have to do is look at the food items listed on the left to get an idea of the foods we could use in baking to increase flavor depth through the Maillard reaction! [Hellwig M, Henle T. Baking, ageing, diabetes: a short history of the Maillard reaction. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2014 Sep 22;53(39):10316-29. doi: 10.1002/anie . 201308808. Epub 2014 Jul 9. PMID: 25044982.]

And that’s where Christina Tosi and I agree regarding the milk powder.

It’s an excellent ingredient, yes, but if you’re looking to attain maximum flavor complexity, it’s only effective when used as a jump-starter for the Maillard reaction.

And that’s because it’s almost the ideal ingredient since it contains two of the three requirements for the reaction to work: proteins and a reducing sugar (lactose is one).

That said, you have to make a concerted effort to meet the third requirement and unlock its potential: high heat.

We need around 280–330°F/138-160°C to get the reaction going and produce all the delicious by-products. (Yes, the Maillard reaction does happen at low temperatures; however, the effects of these reactions typically take a very long time to produce meaningful flavor contributions. A good example of long-term Maillard reactions is seen in cans of condensed milk, which range in color from white to tan. The Maillard reaction is going, even when temps are low.)

However, it’s uncommon to reach these high temperatures throughout your baked goods.

Take cakes, for instance: I usually remove them when their interiors reach 190-200. Cookies vary, but I can pull mine as early as 160 in their centers.

See those spots on the top of my cake? It’s starting to brown! But we often pull the cake before any significant browning occurs. You’ll definitely see the edges that touch the pan bottom and sides brown, though.

Sure, sometimes you’ll get some browning on the exposed surfaces of baked goods, and those are certainly delicious. But it’s limited to the exteriors; rarely do the interior temperatures of baked goods approach the levels required for the Maillard reaction to work in earnest. A cake or cookies cooked to an internal temperature of 280 will be very, very dry! 🙁

So adding milk powder directly to these types of baking recipes will rarely yield the intense flavor profiles of the Maillard reaction.

How, then, do I get these complex, delicious Maillard Reaction flavor compounds into my baked goods? If you’ve baked a few of my recipes, you probably know the answer!

I use ingredients that have already undergone this process and then add them to the recipe before baking. Browning butter, with or without extra milk powder; dulce de leche; roasting ingredients; or add-ins that prioritize this reaction (such as caramelized white chocolate or pretzels) are among the tactics I employ.

Inclusions you can use in baked goods that prioritize the Maillard reaction: caramelized white chocolate, heath bars, toasted nuts, pretzels, caramel chips

You’re going to see me use this “secret” trick to make many of my baked goods intensely flavored:

1. Dulce de Leche Chocolate Chip Cookies (brown butter, milk powder, dulce de leche)

2. Triple Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (brown butter, milk powder, caramelized white chocolate, pretzels)

3. Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies (brown butter)

4. Carrot Lover’s Cake (roasted carrots in butter)

5. Chewy Blondies (brown butter, milk powder)

6. Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies (brown butter)

7. Fudgy Chewy Brownies and Fudgy Gooey Brownies (brown butter)

8. NEW! Matcha brown butter cheesecake stuffed cookies (brown butter, milk

   powder)

And if you need a fantastic pumpkin pie for next week, I have a recipe that should be the poster child for the Maillard reaction as the ultimate flavor enhancer.

Think about the flavors in a standard pumpkin pie. Here’s what I do to jazz it up:

I make spiced pumpkin butter by browning the butter and adding extra milk powder.

Then I fry warm aromatic spices in the hot butter: cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and lately some cardamom to release the fat-soluble aromatics into the butter.

Next, add the canned pumpkin puree. A bit of water is cooked off to ensure a nice, solid texture for the final pie, and bits of pumpkin are fried in that spicy, aromatic butterfat.

Add it to a food processor with some dulce de leche for sweetness and eggs, and bake it in a Biscoff cookie shell.

I make mine two days ahead, wrap it, and refrigerate it, then serve it on Thanksgiving Day with some whipped cream.

Here’s what a baker has said about this recipe:

I am a lifelong avowed pumpkin pie hater. It’s the squidgy texture, and although I like the flavor profile, there is a vacancy in it. It’s somehow hollow. This recipe fixes everything, and is the first pumpkin pie in 50 years that I not only liked, but loved.

Try my pumpkin pie recipe here!

✨ Sugarologie Honors Memberships are Live!

I’ve gotten requests to make my site ad-free. I’ve added that functionality to my site and am currently offering a limited number of Founding Honors Memberships.

In addition to accessing my recipes and guides ad-free, this initial cohort of bakers will retain this price for the lifetime of their membership. They will also get access to the features I will add later on with this founding membership.

And by the way, if you like the type of information I included at the top of this email (the more sciencey bits, graphs + tables, my notes from baking), I’m working on incorporating more of these supplemental notes (often by your request!) into more of my recipes in an Honors Members section of my recipe posts.

I’m a bit of an over-analyzer, and have tried to sort through the logistics of running a meaningful and valuable membership experience. The gist of it is that Sugarologie Honors is for the baker who wants to go a bit deeper into the science of baking; however, you don’t need any special knowledge or background to learn with me.

If you’d like to join me 🤗, you can learn more about Sugarologie Honors here.

Thank you so much for reading today, and happy baking!

🧁 Adriana

Cookie thinks the Maillard reaction is boring because he’s already studied the reaction in depth in his free time. He’s ready to move on to more intelligent conversations, such as “when will you stop writing and throw my ball”