eli5 Why do we mix the liquid and the dry separate when we baking
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Typically you only do this for doughs that use an acid-base reaction to produce air bubbles, like muffins. The reason you do it is because you’re using baking powder (which is a powder containing both acid and base in it,) and when you mix baking powder with liquid it causes an acid-base reaction, which creates CO2. You want to trap that CO2 inside of the finished baked good as much as possible, so if you spend a lot of time mixing the dough before baking, you’ll vent most of your CO2 out of the mixing bowl.
Keeping your wet and dry ingredients separate and then only mixing as much as it takes to get an even mix is a good way to ensure that you don’t lose all that CO2.
It’s not important with other kinds of baking, like yeasted breads – you can just dump your flour, water, salt, and yeast in the same container and mix them all together and it’s no problem.
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