Christina Tosi's Tip For Staying Organized While Baking Cookies
We've all run into the issue before — we're pulling together a cookie dough but mix up the order for adding ingredients, or worse, forget one altogether. It happens ... even to the best of us, but since it's just a matter of keeping a clear head, who better to ask for tips on staying organized when baking than the reigning queen of cookies Christina Tosi? After all, she's never stingy with her best baking hacks, like how to make extra crackly oatmeal cookies or that her secret weapon at Milk Bar is clear vanilla extract.
As Tosi notes in her cookbook, "All About Cookies," the order that ingredients are added to a cookie recipe is crucial. If you mix it up, you'll end up with tough, flat cookies. Adding all the ingredients and keeping the order straight can be especially challenging for Tosi, who is often churning out multiple cookie doughs at once. So how does the NYC-based baking guru keep it all together in the kitchen? With a little bit of help from painter's tape.
Use painter's tape to keep track of your ingredients
While you may think of it as a home improvement tool, painter's tape gets plenty of use in professional kitchens, from dating stored sauces to labeling boxes of pantry items. Tosi no doubt became familiar with the use of painter's tape while she did her circuit at numerous restaurants, but she has another revolutionary use for the tape outside of labeling.
Tosi places a piece of tape on the ingredients column of her cookbooks and checks them off as they're added. Then, once it's all said and done, she simply removes the tape. This tip ensures that you never miss an ingredient and always add them in the correct order. One note of caution: be sure you're using painter's tape and not transparent or duct tape, as the painter's tape peels off cleanly and easily. Another tape is likely to lead to a sticky residue or even ripping the pages of your cookbook.
Of course, this works for so many other kitchen projects outside of just cookie baking. Consider using this hack the next time you're making a 12-ingredient vinaigrette or complicated, multi-layered stew. You'll soon discover the painter's tape is the MVP for an organized chef's kitchen.