Your kitchen can get uncomfortably hot and sticky when you have the oven going to bake holiday goodies. The conditions in your indoor climate not only affect your personal comfort, but they can also impact the outcome of your baking. To ensure that you have the best climate conditions, it’s good to learn how temperature and humidity can affect your holiday baking.

Indoor Temperature and Baking

Recipes for batter-based baked goods like cakes and loaves often require having certain ingredients at room temperature, while recipes for pastry call for chilled. The temperature in your kitchen can affect these ingredients in different ways:

• In a chilly kitchen, “room temperature” eggs and butter will stay too cold to cream well or emulsify properly to produce an airy, light batter. This will result in baked goods that don’t have a tender, fine crumb.
• When the kitchen is excessively warm, “room temperature” butter will get too soft or begin to liquefy. When used in a recipe, this will cause a loose batter that’s prone to separating, and finished products with a coarse texture.
• If you attempt to make pastry in an overheated kitchen, your chilled butter can soften too much when you blend it with the flour. When your pastry is baking, the butter won’t produce sufficient steam to create the air pockets that make a pie or tart shell delectably tender and flaky.

High or Low Humidity Effects

The humidity level in your indoor climate will affect the moisture balance in your baked good recipes, and whether they come out dry and crumbly, too dense or chewy, or even fall flat. With high humidity, dry ingredients absorb extra moisture. Low humidity will make them dry out even more. To get perfect holiday cookies, cakes, squares and other treats, you can increase or decrease the amount of liquid in your recipes, adjust each recipe’s baking time, or take steps to more effectively manage humidity levels in your home.

To learn about different options for controlling temperature, humidity and other aspects of your Peachtree City home’s indoor climate, contact us today at Powers Heating & Air.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Peachtree City, Georgia and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide or call us at 770-487-2040.