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
From what I’ve seen, bakers can usually cook. The reverse… eeeeh…
I would argue that even measuring by weight isn’t all that important. Baking recipes are built as ratios. And as we all know, because we were awake in math class on that day, a ratio is simply a unit less form of measurement. And as long as we maintain the ratio we are good to go.
This is why you can bake a great loaf of bread with a scale, measuring cups and spoons, or the palm of your hand. Do you think Cavie Cave had a digital scale or a beautiful set of heavy stainless steel measuring cups in his cave 20,000 years ago?
It’s also a lot about experience.
If you don’t know when a dough ball should be smooth/sticky then you’re going to have a bad time.
Maybe because I live in an area with very high humidity gradients - I always adding a pinch of flour, or a tbsp of water to get it just right
Yeah, experience matters. But whether it’s learning to walk as an infant, baking bread, or having sexy sex, the more experience we have at doing something, the better we tend to get at it. As the old saying goes, “We tend to get good at those things we do often.”
If you’re concerned with maintaining ratios, volume isn’t going to be very precise when one of your ingredients is compressible (flour) and another isn’t (water). That said, the ratios used in baking are often less sensitive than people like to insist they are. Before we had recipes insisting you need to measure your flour down to the milligram, people learned how much flour to add by learning how wet/sticky/elastic the dough is supposed to feel when working it. Bakers learned by trial and error how wetter or drier doughs behave and how to get a preferred result, and then passed that knowledge on to their apprentices.
Volume is good enough. People lose sight of “just how good does good enough really need to be?” What you are talking about is a discussion of tolerances. I used to be a toolmaker. Perfection in accuracy and tolerances was part of my stock in trade. So many wasted hours spent telling customers that no, the tolerances do not need to be +.0005"/-.0000" or +.001mm/-.000mm for this or that it needs to be this accurate to function correctly. if you insist, I can do it your way, but you will be very unhappy.
When I bake my 2 loaves of bread at home, I use either cups and spoons or a digital scale depending on my mood. I honestly cannot tell you the difference in bread quality. Perhaps I’m just a bad baker and a worse connoisseur of bread - after all, I’m not Paul Hollywood. But I do know it’s still far, far better than store bought bread.
I have known 2 different people that owned and operated very successful family bakeries. They didn’t much care about weights of ingredients in the kitchen much beyond accounting costs per loaf to determine pricing. At 3AM ain’t nobody got time or the mood to scale everything. But yes, they did understand the dough itself allowing them to worry less about the exact measurement. We tend to get good at what we do.
Is baking as loosie goosie as cooking? Oh hell no! The tolerances must be respected. But you got more leeway than you, the home gamer, think you have. So worry less, and bake more!
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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?
My girlfriend experiments with cake recipes.
You can do anything you like and as long as there is sugar in it most people will think its edible and compliment you.
It might not taste right though…
Just be careful with egg whites. The sulfur taste will not go away with sugar
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.
Once you know your ingredients and how they work in recipes, you can start being creative.
The problem is I don’t understand how ingredients work in baking. I understand flavours, but not textures.
Simply stated, Cooking is art, Baking is science.
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.
You gonna back that up with a SOURCE, senator?
(Please I need to learn how to cook before Pepsico forecloses on my boat)
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.
Also check out the Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt, he also talks primarily about techniques rather than 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 it
Grilling: FIRE!
Grilling is the superior method
Gas stove top: half civilized half FIRE!
+cancer and asthma!
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.
This is my mother. Then she’s mad/disappointed the cake and cookies didn’t turn out well and more often than not they end up in the garbage. I do not understand her.
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.
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 double the garlic, at least.
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??
I honestly think that a lot of recipes are written for people who just don’t like things that have a lot of flavor
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
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.
I may add extra chocolate chips to my banana bread
Former head chef: Yes. Our pastry chef was the alchemist and I was the magebomb.
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.
So you have any idea how many fucking things include corn byproducts? Almost all of them.
My partner has a coconut and vinegar allergy, I can sympathize
Do you have any idea how many fucking things include corn byproducts? Almost all of them.
USA? Europe it’s not alot.
You’re both way healthier for avoiding those. Lucky for the incentive.
Oh I still eat plenty of junk food lol
As a former line cook and a baker this is correct.
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
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.
and this is why i don’t bake. I’m more of a “throw shit together and hope for the best” kinda cook.
At least bread you can eyeball once you get enough practice at a specific recipe, a lot of it is about the moisture content which changes in the air from day to day so it’s never precise anyway
