Q&A for How to Grease and Flour a Pan

Yes. If you'd like to slice and make the bread easier to remove, you can grease and flour the loaf pan.

The pan has two parts - a round or square base, and sides, all one piece. The sides fit into a small ridge on the edge of the base of the pan, and when you pull the tab on the sides toward the pan, it tightens slightly and forms a waterproof seal with the base. You base your item as usual, remove the pan from the oven, let it cool, then pull the tab away from the pan. This allows you to lift the sides of the pan and leave your baked goods resting on the pan base. It's most useful for things like cheesecakes, which are otherwise extremely difficult to remove from a pan.

You should use whatever the recipe calls for.

If you want, but it only takes a couple of minutes to grease pans the day you make bread. You could grease them when the dough is rising.

Here's a tip, save the packaging used to wrap the butter, you can use it when you need to grease your pan. Sometimes I don't bother flouring a pan, but just to be on the safe side, dump in a tablespoon of flour and tap it along the pan. Then tap out the excess flour.

Yes, you can use butter to grease a pan.

The greasing and the flouring of the pan isn't to help the cake rise, it is to keep the cake from sticking to the pan and making sure the outside of the cake doesn't burn. Using baking powder in the cake makes it rise because it causes air bubbles.

The flour adheres to the oil or butter in the pan.

Powdered milk might give your baked good an unwanted flavor. Flour is the best, since it does not have a taste.

First grease your pan, then put your parchment or wax paper down. Recipes call for this to help stop the paper from curling and to ensure that your baked good will not stick to the pan.

You should not bake with wax paper, only parchment paper. Use parchment paper instead of greasing the pan with butter because adding fat could affect the spread of your cookies while baking.