room temping eggs and milk?

It's something I fall back on when things go wrong. In general, I don't bother but it is the IDEAL standard. Rather than letting things sit at room temperature, I just warm them quickly. I'm often a spontaneous baker. To warm liquids, I just put them in the microwave for a few seconds. I put eggs (in the shell of course) into a container of hot tap water for a few minutes or until I need to add them to the batter or dough.

I've heard the only reason for eggs is that they incorporate better when warm, than they do when they are cold. Haven't heard it about milk though.. just eggs or butter lucy

The other reason is that very cold things tend to brown too much on the surface before the interior gets done. This is true of meat also. If I have a large cut of meat that I am going to roast, I try to let it sit at room temp for about an hour before roasting it. An exception is pie pastry and puff pastry. It is best to bake them while they are very cold.

Thanks, Vox.. you explained why my roasts turn out like they do. lucy :)

I'd also make a bit of an exception for cookies and cakes that use creamed butter, especially if something warm is added to them (such as melted chocolate). In that case, the warm thing may partially melt the butter, and it's best if the butter not melt. Thus adding any eggs and/or milk cold will bring the temperature down, offsetting the addition of heat from the melted item and thus minimising melting.

The other case is if you have a very warm house (e.g. non-air-conditioned Southern-State house in the middle of the summer). Again, in that case I'd prefer to keep everything cold until the last minute.

With muffins, however, generally it's best to have things at RT. The ingredients will disperse more uniformly, and you won't have to mix so long, which reduces the risk of hockey-puck or foam-mattress muffins.

For simple cake baking operation that is the norm....all ingredients should be at room temperature. But.... Technically it is still feasible to use cold eggs or milk as long as the other ingredients are warm enough . The critical thing is that the finished batter temperature is still within the limit that allow the leavening components to interact with each other.. A cold batter will slow down the intial release of CO2 from the baking powder . The main difficulty with using cold eggs is that it rakes time to aerate it, but when its aerated at that conditions the foam is more finer resulting in cakes of more uniform crumb grain than eggs used at room temperature. Besides there is more tolerance to overbeating with cold eggs thatn with eggs whipped at slightly temperature.( room temperature to warm termperatures. But with muffins wiher the mixing involved is not that strenous and the resuting batter temperature change is not significant, it is best to have all ingredients at romm temperature before use. Roy