You can totally yolo baking, just don’t expect consistent results.
Actually, even if you do everything exactly the same it’s best if you don’t expect consistent results.
Cooking is art.
Baking is science.
Source: username checks out
With sufficient experience, understanding, and intuition it is possible to yeehaw baking and get delicious results. I have enough of none of those things to do it, but there are at least several people who can.
My philosophy on recipes when cooking a new dish, is read at least 5 recipes, then follow none of them. I’ve made quite a few dishes with this method, most came out just how I wanted, and none yet have been bad. It’s a bit free, but not full yeehaw.
I remember one of the first days in my high school chemistry class our teacher said she was bad at baking and could never get recipes to work.
That was the moment I knew chemistry if I was going to learn anything it would have to be from the book that year.
Anyways so I don’t think I ever learned chemistry
Opposite, dude! Or let me redefine that. Cooking is also a no holds bar situation. Kitchen is a fuck around space and we can fail any way we want to as long as no one sees it. Do you want to try some garam masala pesto on my basil orange bread?
Isn’t that the situation described in the post, not the opposite?
I’m just saying that baking is the same if you’ve got the balls or lack of self-preservation to experiment.
I didn’t get that you were talking about baking since you didn’t mention baking and explicitly mentioned cooking
One requires specific chemical reactions to happen in specific orders.
One make food hot
Why does this get repeated so much as if it is some kinda rule when it often isn’t.
I do all my baking on vibes. The sourdough feels about right, in it goes. Nothing at all was measured. Even temperature is vibe based.
Because a lot more people regularly cook than bake
The more you learn about something the less complex it gets. People say things like this that don’t have a clue about baking. No, for the most part it is not true at all.
Why does this get repeated so much
Because of the longer feedback loops. If you aren’t an experienced baker, you might not notice that the hydration is off, or that you’re not building enough strength in your dough, or that the temperature will cause the dough to rise slower than normal, and then you’re left asking why your loaf didn’t rise as much as you’d like, why the end result is dense, why the dough stuck to the pan instead of cleanly releasing, etc.
Once you’re experienced you’ll know when you need to add more water, when you’ll need to adjust times, whether the dough is too sticky, whether you’re tearing the gluten strands too much, whether your finished loaf is going to be more or less sour than you prefer, what adjustments should be made with the new flour you’re working with, etc.
But until you know how each step feeds into the next, being unable to taste the steps in between makes it a lot harder to learn quickly, and requires a longer working memory to connect how you handled the dough during an autolyse versus how the bread loaf turned out hours later out of the oven, and eventually learn the lessons of smell, touch, feel that aren’t easy to learn from written recipes.
I used to be able to bake like this, but I recently moved to an area that is at a much lower elevation than where I learned to bake and I’m finding now that if I eyeball I end up slightly fucking up all of my baking.
It is a hard rule but a lot of baking had more to do with managing your chi and conditioning your body. Very little of baking has much of anything to do with following recipes. Baking is about guts, sweat, tears and style.
I think you might have the Baker’s God Hand, because of restricted capillaries in your arms your hands are several degrees colder then normal plus your hands intuitively lower their sweat and oil production based on what you’re baking, because of this your sourdough turns out perfect.
Most bakers spend years training to achieve the Baker’s God Hand. Unfortunately there are no shortcuts. For the longest time bakers believed that the only way to gain the Baker’s God Hand was by having a white tiger lick the skin off your fingers tips. This was after renowned Indian baker Vikram Rao revealed that this had happened to him as a child on the popular Japanese battle royale bake off show Akogare Baker X Kami-Sama.
Then in early 2004 after a South African baker achieved the Baker’s God Hand the reigning belief became that the only way to achieve this amazing ability was to be have both hands pierced by a charging rhino. You should be thankful that you were born with the God Hand, it’s quite rare and I wouldn’t be surprised if some deranged baker were to try and steal your hands, so watch out.
Because there are certain recipes that are notorious for failing if you don’t do so the extra steps. That’s it a few bad apples to spoil the bunch
Sure, but the same applies to cooking as well. Could go a step further by saying where is the line between cooking and baking.
Take it a step further, flatbread vs lasagna? Although we often say baking if you put something in the oven, even though it isn’t baked goods at all. Meanwhile bread is usually thought of as baking, but small flatbreads can be done in a frying pan.
You asked why, i told you. Doesn’t mean it make sense but it is the reason. Notoriety
Yes because sourdough is baking lol
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
It never made sense why baking is put on this weird pedestal compared to “cooking”.
100%! This is what I’m saying. If you can cook, you can bake. Sorry/not sorry.
From what I’ve seen, bakers can usually cook. The reverse… eeeeh…
They just haven’t practiced it. If you’re a good cook, you absolutely have capacity to be a good baker, because they’re only semantically different things. If we called it cooking a cake, no one would draw this distinction, and some other languages/cultures don’t.
If you can prepare, mix, and properly cook ingredients then you can prepare, mix, and properly bake ingredients.
I don’t always measure for baking - for bread and pastry I do weigh everything (ETA not because there is an ideal - there is still a range of amounts that will work - but because I want to know what the hydration % is) but for cakes I do them like cornbread, it’s more proportions - I know that for 3 eggs I need a certain amount of flour, I know how much baking powder and salt per cup of flour, and how much fat, milk or buttermilk or yogurt or ricotta, whatever - know it will work if I get it in the ballpark.
For cooking yep I am a yeehaw no recipe anarchist. Or more accurately, I read recipes for inspiration then don’t look at them while cooking, but I am old and have made so many mistakes over the years I know what I’m doing. It feels like intuition but is experience.
Your last paragraph is just how my mom bakes. It’s entirely possible to bake without recipes once you have the experience, like you’re saying.
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?
What recipe where you’re cooking can you change ingredients by such extreme amounts? Pasta bolognese or lasagne with 2x as much meat and a quarter as much pasta would be all wrong. Do you put 2x as much oil in a sauce and expect it to go well? When you make a roux, don’t you have to like. Balance the amount of butter with the amount of flour?
When you cook rice, do you experiment with different amounts of water? Or do you just cook it until it’s cooked?
In general, though, yes, stylistic decisions like how much egg vs. flour is how you make different types of cake. There’s not one platonic ideal of cake because baking isn’t as precise as advertised.
What recipe where you’re cooking can you change ingredients by such extreme amounts?
some examples:
- chilli has lots of leeway in the amount of chillis, beans and meat, and seasoning.
- when I make potatoes with sauce and meat, I can add 50% potatoes and reduce meat by 50% and it’s still good (albeit less meat).
- frenchfries with very little salt is good
generally my exact compositions depends of packages sizes and what is available, and how cheap I am. i.e I usually put full cans in it, and thus round to the next full can. And when I want to save money, I put half as much meat in it)
Pasta bolognese or lasagne with 2x as much meat and a quarter as much pasta would be all wrong
80% meat lasagna sounds awesome.
Balance the amount of butter with the amount of flour?
That is something that needs to balanced, but even then I am ±20% i guess.
When you cook rice, do you experiment with different amounts of water?
Rice is the one thing that needs exact measuring for water.
Or do you just cook it until it’s cooked?
I know someone who cooks rice like pasta, i.e. with lots of water, and in the end uses a sieve for the excess water. I may be crazy, but I am not that crazy.
It would be something different but not bad. Clafouti is made like that, lots of egg not much flour. It’s lovely.
But if you know the recipe how would you miss by that much?
You wouldn’t put twice the salt and half the main ingredient in something you were cooking without expecting it to turn out very differently, right?
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Just be careful with egg whites. The sulfur taste will not go away with sugar
If your egg whites taste of sulfur, you dun goofed
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?
I would argue that even measuring by weight isn’t all that important.
You would be wrong due to the physical properties of flour and how it compresses, but we generally agree that most people who are getting fine results with measuring however they want should just keep doing whatever they want.
Again: How good does good enough need to be?
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!
At 3AM ain’t nobody got time or the mood to scale everything.
I mean, when I was a professional baker I did exactly that, and so did everyone I worked with. I think it’s more convenient and faster than measuring by volume, so it’s what I’d usually prefer to do at home or at work.
Yes absolutely.
You’ll see it in woodworking forums all the time.
I got my table saw to be .000001 degrees.
If you’re working with wood and measuring more specific than 1/16 inch - you’re doing something wrong. Wood can swell 1/8 inch for every foot with the season changes
Yeah, I just ask them for the traceable certifications for the accuracy of their measuring tools. I mean, I want to know you got that level accuracy. Not just have blind faith. I get a LOT of pissy responses and blank stares.
The worst thing to happen to woodworking is the availability cheap digital calipers, aka: Idiot sticks. They now think they a rocket surgeons.
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Real and true
Bread is like cooking there, I’ll just throw stuff in and try new stuff while baking bread
It’ll be edible but sometimes it may be DENSE lol. I love me some bread, so I’m going to enjoy it either way
Grilling: FIRE!
Grilling is the superior method
Gas stove top: half civilized half FIRE!
+cancer and asthma!
Less cancer and asthma than wood/charcoal though. But at some point you need to accept risk and enjoy life.
I’d rather grill outdoors 3-4 times a year than have who knows what coming out with that gas, in an appliance in my house almost every day.
Only if you get your information from Facebook!
You mean the measurable increase of NO2 and benzene the NIH recorded in homes with gas stoves?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10901287/
Side note: I’ve actually never read a news article on Facebook. I had to work on an early graph based website integration with their apis in the early 00s and decided never to trust it from that, and that was before news feeds and all the other bullshit really began.
Fair enough about Facebook, I think you did the right thing there! But I have already stumbled onto your link as a source for “gas stoves bad”, and it’s just not true.
This is part of the short abstract (from your link):
If kitchens are not well ventilated, benzene, nitrogen dioxide, and other VOCs may reach levels known to harm health.
I’d emphasize the If kitchens are not well ventilated so for me it’s as obvious as saying electric stoves are dangerous if the wiring isn’t well done. Or, gas stoves are not dangerous, like bicycles aren’t etc.
None of the apartments I’ve ever lived in have had actual extraction fan vents that went outside. They all sucked air in through a grease filter and blew them out in basically your face. 3 out of the 4 had gas ranges.
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
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.
What time do I come by for muffins?
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??
Yeah I think the right amount is either zero or a lot. There’s nothing I want a little bit of garlic in.
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
Always double the garlic, at least.
Unless the recipe calls for an absolutely egregious amount of garlic, I sometimes triple or even quadruple the garlic the recipe calls for. One clove is barely perceptible to me now.
That was 2 bulbs of garlic right?
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
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.
It does work for baking, but you have to know, what the ingredients actually do in there. You can substitute flours pretty much as you like, but then you have to adjust the liquid content, to match how much the flours used need in comparison. And same with, if you use different fats, or the type of sugar, or something else added in there, etc. So unlike cooking, and just eyeballing whatever in the pot, you need knowledge before you can start playing around with baking, and succeed. But it is very much possible to do.
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.
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.
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.
Former head chef: Yes. Our pastry chef was the alchemist and I was the magebomb.
