9 Tips From the Stars of ‘Bake Squad’ and ‘Nailed It’ to Help Avoid the Most Common Baking Fails

This fall, Netflix is heading back to the kitchen and satisfying viewers’ cravings for all things sweet and funny with the return of fan-favorite disasterpiece Nailed It! (Sept. 15) and The Great British Baking Show, as well as a slate of new baking series’ that include Bake Squad (streaming now), Baking Impossible (premiering Oct. 6), and School of Chocolate (launching this fall).

Bake Squad is hosted by Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi and features four expert bakers and pastry chefs — Maya-Camille Broussard, Ashley Holt, Gonzo Jimenez, and Christophe Rull — as they engage in a friendly competition against one another for the opportunity to make dessert dreams come true for a special guest.

With so many taking up baking this past year, we asked the stars of Bake Squad and Nailed It!’s Jacques Torres for tips and recommendations to avoid the most common baking mistakes, because if there’s one thing we do know about baking, it’s that there isn’t much room for error.

1. Plan ahead: Before you bake, Torres recommends figuring out the steps. “If you do that, you don’t get surprised and it’s a lot easier to go from one task to another,” he says. It also means you’re less likely to forget something.
2. Use the freshest and best ingredients: This is true for everything you do in the kitchen. “The best ingredients are going to make you look better, because they just taste better,” explains Torres, who stresses using foods when they’re in season. “If you use strawberries in February, whatever you’re going to do to them, it isn’t going to be good. So if you use strawberries, use the best strawberries you can buy. Use them in season. Same for any kind of food.”
3. Don’t mix up the salt and sugar: This seems rather obvious, but it can (and does!) happen to even the most experienced bakers if they’re not paying attention in the kitchen. Making sure your items are properly labeled is an easy way to avoid it.
4. Combine ingredients fully: Stand mixers are an incredible invention that cuts down on work in the kitchen, but they can’t do everything. “If you’re working with a KitchenAid mixer or any other standing mixing bowl, please don’t forget to scrape the bottom of the bowl,” says Broussard. “Whether you’re making cookies or a cake, every time you add a new ingredient, take that silicone spatula and get to scraping. You want to make sure that your ingredients are well combined.”
5. Don’t use a double boiler for heating chocolate: A lot of recipes call for using melted chocolate, and even if you’ve been baking for a long time, there’s still a chance you’ve been doing this part wrong. “People use the double boiler quite a lot,” says Jimenez, who is known for creating extraordinary works of art out of chocolate, “but that creates a lot of steam in the kitchen and that could contaminate your chocolate with more water. That’s not ideal, so the easiest way to do it is just to simply use a microwave.”
6. Get to know your oven: “Everyone’s oven is different,” notes Broussard. “Somebody’s oven can have an attitude and someone else’s oven can be sweet as pie. Just because a recipe may say to bake for 35 minutes, you might have to bake for 45 minutes. So just get to know your oven and see how your oven likes a particular recipe.”
7. Be prepared to start over…: Not everything is going to come out the way you planned it, so be ready to adapt. “If you burn something or break something, you’ve just got to do it again,” says Jimenez. “In one of the episodes I burned a big batch of candied hazelnuts, and you just hustle and make another batch. Then you also have to adapt the rest of your creation as far as time goes.”
8. but know when to embrace your mistakes: Sometimes a flub in the kitchen can turn into something great, says Tosi, who estimates that half the items on the menu at Milk Bar, including the popular Cornflake Chocolate Chip Marshmallow Cookie, started out as something else. “I was trying to hide something that someone had over-toasted that was to be used for a different dessert,” she explains, “and what I got were these super-ultra caramelized, super-crunchy notes that were a total sneak attack thing in this cookie that I didn’t expect, I didn’t plan for, I didn’t intend. And yet this magic came out of it.”
9. Practice, practice, practice: “Baking is like a muscle. The more you do it, the stronger you’ll be at it,” says Tosi. “That’s everything from measuring your ingredients, mixing, tasting your batter, knowing your oven, and having confidence, etc. It comes the more you do it.”

Bake Squad is now streaming on Netflix. Season 6 of Nailed It! launches Sept. 15.