Cooking and baking result in two things: delicious foods that make your kitchen smell good and you can’t wait to eat, and more often than not, messy countertops. Trails of granulated sugar, little piles of flour, and smudges of baking powder and soda always seem to end up all over your work area when you are measuring them out. But the easy solution for ensuring a neat and tidy space is to place a piece of parchment paper on your countertop and measure your dry ingredients over it.
Not only will it keep your surfaces clean, but using parchment paper will save you a few pennies. Baking ingredients aren’t cheap, and when you line your workspace with parchment paper, you can pour those spilled dry ingredients right back into the container where you store them. You can also use this hack when you are decanting your bags of brown sugar, cocoa powder, salt, or whatever else you might keep on hand for your culinary endeavors.
Toss the flour
However, the one ingredient you probably do not want to put back into its container is raw flour. If this gets all over your parchment paper, feel free to toss it along with the paper. Raw flour, which includes most flours, is not treated to get rid of those pesky germs that can cause you to become ill. Grinding and bleaching do not eliminate bacteria like Salmonella and E.coli. Flour isn’t good to eat until it has been baked. So, while you can still use the parchment paper to save on the clean-up, skip saving the flour.
Parchment paper can also save on other kitchen surface messes. It can help protect your countertops from messes caused by sticky ingredients like honey, molasses, warm liquified sugar if you are making candy, and all of those lovely colored sugars and sprinkles that the kiddos like to use when decorating cookies, cupcakes, and hot fudge sundaes.
