The best thing about baking is that you can make hundreds of thousands of different delicious things using the same few ingredients. Cakes. Cookies. Brownies. Pastry. They all start out more or less the same wayāflour, butter, sugar, eggsāgive or take a few ingredients, depending on the recipe.
And often, mastering perfectly textured springy cake or supremely chewy-crisp cookies is more about baking technique than it is about ingredients. But recently, I learned that there is a single ingredient that can make almost every baked good better: milk powder.
Milk powder, also called powdered milk (not to be confused with malted milk powder), is what happens when you evaporate all the liquid out of milkāitās essentially milk in its most concentrated form. That means it offers fat, protein, and flavor in a medium that doesnāt mess with the liquid portion of your baking, adding a bonus layer of richness, sweetness, and creaminess to pretty much any treat. Whatās more, milk powder is ideal for the baking-heavy times weāre in: Its low moisture content means that it doesnāt have to be refrigeratedāit can sit in your pantry for more than a year.
Chef Christina Tosi, author of Momofuku Milk Bar and Milk Bar: Kids Only, says she canāt think of a dessert that milk powder wouldnāt improve. āMilk powder has an amazing way of adding a terrific baseline flavor,ā she explains. āIt can make ice creams milkier, denser, silkierāand cookies chewier.ā Itās the sort of āsecret weapon ingredientā that doesnāt taste like anything special straight out of the container, but works magic when itās included in a recipe. Tosi says you can experiment, adding a tablespoon of milk powder to your dry ingredients in any baking project: āIt just makes things taste better.ā
Her Mint Cookies and Cream Cookie Pie calls for a tablespoon of nonfat milk powder, which gets mixed in with the flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda before you combine them with softened butter and sugar. Tosi says it adds depth, āintensifying the flavor of chocolate too, making those dark vanilla notes of a chocolate chip cookie taste more magical and regular chocolate taste more luxurious.ā
This isnāt just a Milk Bar move, though. Epi contributor Ramin Ganeshram, author of Sweet Hands: Island Cooking from Trinidad & Tobago, says that ānothing is better than milk powder to give cookies a chewy texture and a slight crust.ā Itās the ideal addition, she notes, for classic chocolate chip cookies.
And though Ganeshram often makes cookies with milk powder, she finds the ingredient especially useful when baking bread. It helps sandwich breads rise higher, she says, and it makes flatbreads, like her paratha roti, more tender.
Liquid milk, she says, āallows leavened dough to retain more gas,ā therefore making it lighter. But liquid milk also adds water to batters and doughs, too much of which can ruin the texture of the finished baked good. Using milk powder instead of liquid, Ganeshram says, gives you the benefits of milk without adding extra water, with āmore intense concentration of the milk sugars and proteins that help the dough.ā
Whisking about two teaspoons of milk powder with the flour, sugar, and baking powder before adding in any water is her foolproof trick to making soft and tender rotiāa challenge she wrestled with for years.
Ganeshram cautions that the fat in full-fat dairy makes the end result of any baked good more moist. For roti, she recommends nonfat milk powder to avoid weighing down the crumb.
When making brownies, Lani Halliday, pastry chef and owner of Brutus Bakeshop, says milk powder is a little bit about texture, but mostly about flavor. While you could just add a tablespoon of milk powder to the dry ingredients, she likes to take things a step further by making brown butter milk powder.
In this episode of Epiās Ingredient Swap, Halliday instructs us to stir a cup of milk powder into brown butter and strain the mixture to separate the solids from the liquid. The liquid portion gets mixed in with melted chocolate, then both the solids and liquid chocolate-butter mixture get added to the brownie batter. While liquid milk is mostly water, āmilk powder is all protein,ā says Halliday. āYou want to caramelize the protein solids to get a toasty nuttiness. When you use butter solids plus milk powder solids, youāre concentrating the flavor even more.ā
In this application, milk powder is a highly concentrated flavor addition, similar to blitzing dehydrated fruit and adding it to a dessert. Given that, her next answer isnāt that shocking. When I asked Halliday about the best kind of milk powder to use in brownies, she had one thing to say: Full-fat forever.
Milk powder also works wonders in doughnuts and other fried doughs. āMilk powder gives gulab jamun dough an incredible rich creaminess, which, when fried, turns into a super soft dough, not dissimilar to brioche,ā says Meera Sodha, author of East: 120 Vegetarian and Vegan recipes from Bangalore to Beijing and Fresh India.
In India, gulab jamuns are often made using khoyaāthick concentrated milk solids made by reducing milk down over a slow heat. āKhoya isnāt widely available anywhere else,ā Sodha explains, āso milk powder has become a time-saving ingredient for Indian cooks and a khoya substitute for the wider Indian diaspora.ā
Her recipe calls for more than a cup of full-fat milk powder, which helps to create perfectly spongy treats that are burnished and bronzed on the outside and white and cakey within. āYou couldnāt use liquid milk because you need the dry texture to be able to form the dough,ā says Sodha. So milk powder is not just a nice option for making gulab jamun, but a necessary ingredient. Which is one more reason to follow Sodhaās lead and always keep a stash of the powder on handāthe same way you do with flour, butter, sugar, and eggs.
