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Ask food network, February 6

The Rocky

Published February 6, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Why is it important to bring certain ingredients like eggs and butter to room temperature before baking? Some recipes call for that and others don't. How does it make a difference? - Amanda Love, Galivants Ferry, S.C.

Depending on what you're trying to make, the temperature of your ingredients can play a huge part. For pie crusts, you want your butter to be cold, since cold butter makes the flakiest crusts - but if you're making a cake, you want your butter to be at room temperature, since room-temperature butter makes the most-tender cakes. Similarly, eggs will whip up highest if they're at room temperature.

If you don't have time to wait for your butter or eggs to come to room temperature, there are fixes. Submerging whole eggs in hot water for five to 10 minutes should do the trick, as should judicious use of the microwave for your butter. For perfect pie-crust butter, try putting it in the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes and then use a cheese grater to grate it into your flour so it spends as little time as possible in contact with your fingers.

Can half-and-half be used the same as cream in cooking? - Judy Bounds, Monroe, La.

In cooking, the major thing you have to be aware of with half-and- half is that, since the fat content is substantially less, it will behave differently. So it might not be prudent to add half-and-half to, say, a lemon sauce in place of cream, as the acidity would cause half-and- half to curdle where cream would not. Similarly, you can't reduce half- and-half the same way you would cream, so anything that calls for boiling would be problematic. If it's simply a question of flavor and mouth feel, though, like adding a splash to pasta sauce, go right ahead.

With baking, on the other hand, it most likely won't work, as recipes were developed with the assumption of a certain level of fat and liquid, so adding half-and-half instead of cream would throw off the whole recipe.

And "fat-free half-and-half" is essentially a combination of powdered milk and corn syrup, so it would technically work in cooking if absolutely necessary, but definitely not in baking.

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