Simply stated, Cooking is art, Baking is science.
As a former professional baker, nah.
Most of these home bakers talking about how “precise” their baking is aren’t actually that precise. They:
- measure ingredients by volume rather than weight
- have home ovens that vary in temperature wildly
- never consider ambient humidity/outdoor temp at all
Cooking and baking aren’t that different, there are hard and fast rules in both, but also if you’re good at one, you’re also good at the other, because they are the same thing. Can you follow a recipe that involves cooking meat in the oven? Then guess what? You can also bake a cake. I’m sorry to be the bearer of good news
so you are saying i could put like twice the amount of eggs in the cake, and quarter the amount of flour in and it will still be an awesome cake? Like I can do when cooking?
Real and true
You haven’t seen me bake. There are no maps where we are going. I follow dark magic and shepherd the carbs to their full potential.
I feel like this is the kind of opinion held by someone who has never worked with food professionally.
As an amateur cook I can confirm this. The results of my baking experiments all fail disastrously. However I can experiment wildly with starter and main courses and almost always make something edible.
Knowing the science behind all methods of cooking is what made me a better cook. Alton Brown is the shit for teaching the science behind why things are done. No other TV cook has taught me more about how to cook with my own ideas and not simply follow someone else’s recipes.
My issue is, I like to cook culture accurate (e.g. a japanese diah is something japanese like to eat and is considered domestic/localized.
Fusion kitchens usually do not apply if I am not specifically looking for itYou gonna back that up with a SOURCE, senator?
(Please I need to learn how to cook before taco bell forecloses on my boat)
Also check out the Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt, he also talks primarily about techniques rather than recipes
Alton Brown on YouTube for his recent stuff. Good Eats for his original show.
Teaches why you do stuff and not just what to do.
Grilling: FIRE!
Grilling is the superior method
Gas stove top: half civilized half FIRE!
My fiance is a professional chef who can’t really bake, and I’m a schmuck who can’t cook but can bake no problem. It wouldn’t be a bad deal, except all her food allergies mean I have to find substitutions for practically everything. So you have any idea how many fucking things include corn byproducts? Almost all of them.
You’re both way healthier for avoiding those. Lucky for the incentive.
Oh I still eat plenty of junk food lol
Cooking is an art, baking is a science.
People complain about their baked goods not coming out right but they treat the recipe as a suggestion. That works for cooking (sometimes) but almost never for baking.
Recipe IS suggestion. If you look at 10 recipe, all have some slight variations of ratio. You can get cookies that required 2 eggs while some suggest 1 egg and a yolk, some 1 egg, some required oil, others only need soft butter, while some suggest melted butter. A slight variation of ingredient won’t really kill the baked goods, it’s usually the process of making it and the temp we baked on, because we all use different machine and different supplier of ingredients to make our stuff. You need to understand why stuff works, that’s the most important part of baking.
If one does not look at the recipe and then throw it out the window and not measure stuff, it usually won’t goes horribly wrong. That’s why i feels like the saying is terrible, and it unnecessarily turn people away from doing it.
I basically do that when baking bread, but I also know that the result isn’t going to be ideal. Basically I’m trying to experiment to get a good multigrain bread that’s packed with extra fiber, but at the same time doesn’t use hard to get or very expensive items. Each time I get closer to perfecting the recipe, and learn something new about baking in general. Worst case, I eat the parts that still turn out OK, and feed the rest to the birds.
I always fucked up making pizza dough. I’d weigh the ingredients to the gram, work it per the instructions, and it always ended up a sloppy mess or dry clusterfuck.
I finally figured out hydration based on how the dough reacts. It took me 50 pizzas to get it right. Now I don’t even measure.
But I can only make pizza dough :) Bread works out slight differently
What you can fuck with in baking is vanilla. Douse to your hearts desire.
Ingredients I always ignore the amount given in recipes:
Garlic, lime juice, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, chocolate chips, raisins. There’s probably more.
Always more with garlic. Calls for “2-3 cloves” means at least half bulb. On spice, I’ll hold off if I’m cooking for others that can’t deal and just leave that on the side when serving.
I’ve put double the garlic a recipe called for before and it was still not enough. Who the hell are these people writing recipes for? Vampires? Or do recipe writers live in some place that has really strong garlic??
It is technically possible to use too much garlic, but at that point you’re concerned about the amount of money being used to season a single item.
Oh I’m compassionate on hot spices, but if it’s just for me? GAME ON, LET’S SWEAT
I may add extra chocolate chips to my banana bread
Just scrape all the seeds into a mortar and pestle, grind them, throw the beans in some alcohol (rum, bourbon style Canadian whiskey, sherry), soak then leave them in a sugar bowl and save the sugar.
Now take the vanilla bean paste from your pestle and put it directly in my mouth.
Former head chef: Yes. Our pastry chef was the alchemist and I was the magebomb.
and this is why i don’t bake. I’m more of a “throw shit together and hope for the best” kinda cook.
Cooking: Heaven help you if you have a different version of known dish with a name. The gatekeepers will descend upon you.
This is how my S.O. make sourdough. It ALWAYS works🤷♂️
Baking bread is wild. When you start you do everything by the book and it’s meh. Then once you get a feel for what each stage is supposed to look and feel like you can just slap some flour around and it comes out awesome.
As a former line cook and a baker this is correct.
