Hot tips I've picked up from foodblogging

The other day, I made these scones, which involve buttermilk. For some reason, I can't get buttermilk at the store in smaller than 1L cartons. So until I learned this trick, I kept having a mostly-full carton of buttermilk going bad in the fridge every time I made something with buttermilk in it. But guess what? You can make buttermilk out of regular milk! Boom!

Here's how it works: just stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into a cup of regular milk, give it a little stir, and then let it sit for about 5 minutes. Voila! Adequate buttermilk substitute! Obviously, adjust the amounts for how much you need.

Other handy tips and tricks I've learned from foodblogs:

• Always fluff up your flour with a whisk or a fork before measuring it. It aerates it and makes your baked goods less dense.
• Speaking of flour, you can make cake flour out of AP flour by taking out 2 tbsp of the AP flour per cup, replacing it with an equal amount of cornstarch, and whisking it together really well. I don't know how to make bread flour out of AP flour, though - is there an easy way? Tell me!
• The reason recipes tell you not to overmix batter when you've added the flour is that it develops the gluten strands in the flour, which is great when you're making bread but not so great when you're making cake. Overmixing makes your baked goods have a screwed up texture.
• You can buy tomato paste in a tube. This is awesome because I had only previously seen it in the little cans, but you never use the whole can, and you wind up wasting the rest. Look for it in a tube, though. It costs a little more but the ability to re-close it, and therefore use it all, makes up for it.
• When you take cookies out of the oven, the longer you leave them on the sheet rather than transferring them to a rack to cool, the more chewy and less crispy they'll be. Sheet = chewy, rack = crispy.
• If you're going to juice a lemon, roll it on the counter a few times first. It makes it juice easier.

And one thing I learned in high school cooking class, and that's why flaky things, like pie crust, are flaky: you cut the butter into your flour mixture with a pastry cutter or what have you, which makes little tiny nuggets of butter surrounded by flour. Then you roll that out, so your little butter nuggets are flattened out. When you bake it, the butter melts out, leaving tiny flat spaces in between layers of pastry. Voila! Flakiness.

This concludes today's episode of Science For Your Face. Your regularly-scheduled existential food whining will return next week, unless I have something else on my mind.