thats thr beauty of cooking. all those ingredients scribed so precisely benefit greatly from a liberal fudging
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.
Real and true
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?
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!
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.
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.”
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?
Not having to wash up the measuring spoons and cups :P
One scale, one bowl, brothaaaaa
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?
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?
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.
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
If your egg whites taste of sulfur, you dun goofed
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.
I hate myself and decided to get into Italian and BBQ smoking… Everything is done on a timeline with fine heat control and time does not care for you readiness. You really have to memorise and learn from experience before you can get to the level of autopiloting stress-free.
As a former line cook and a baker this is correct.
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
The dash at the end implying that there is also a secret fourth thing is just 🧑🍳🤌
What you can fuck with in baking is vanilla. Douse to your hearts desire.
I may add extra chocolate chips to my banana bread
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.
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.
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.
Oh I’m compassionate on hot spices, but if it’s just for me? GAME ON, LET’S SWEAT
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.
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
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.
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
Former head chef: Yes. Our pastry chef was the alchemist and I was the magebomb.
Baking - scientific? With so scientific measurements like “cups” or “spoons”?
Grams-only recipe or no deal. Liquids, dry ingredient, all in grams.
Except eggs, they get a pass.
Dash = less than ⅛ teaspoon
1 teaspoon = ⅓ tablespoon = 5 ml
1 tablespoon = ½ fluid ounce = 15 ml
1 fluid ounce = ⅛ cup = 30 ml
¼ cup = 2 fluid ounces = 4 tablespoons = 59 ml
⅓ cup = 2.7 fluid ounces = 5 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon = 79 ml
½ cup = 4 fluid ounces = 8 tablespoons =118 ml
⅔ cup = 5.3 fluid ounces = 10 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons = 158 ml
¾ cup = 6 fluid ounces = 12 tablespoons = 177 ml
1 cup = 8 fluid ounces = 16 tablespoons = ½ pint = 237 ml
2 cups = 16 fluid ounces = 32 tablespoons = 1 pint = 475 ml
Still confused?
But what’s a pinch, smidge, and “to taste”?
I never thought I’d have to give this advice, but if you don’t know what ‘a pinch,’ ‘a smidge,’ and ‘to taste mean’ you need to watch more porn.
[jk, you already watch too much porn]
jk
“Fluid ounces” are not exactly scientific measurements. Milliliters are.
It’s a brownie, not a nuclear war head.
The point is that ounces are not scientific. They are only used by excplicitely non-scientific countries and people.
Got it.
The Egyptians and Greeks can’t be considered scientific because they didn’t use metric, never mind that they measured the size of the Earth using shadows.
Newton used ounces, obviously not scientific.
I don’t know where you live, but you sound like you were educated in a bad american school.
I’m too European and too sober to understand this.
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 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.
Baking us empty carbs, yeast, and gluten. Who needs it!
Why enjoy life when you can just survive!
Cooking is art.
Baking is science.
Source: username checks out
One requires specific chemical reactions to happen in specific orders.
One make food hot
This is maillard reaction erasure.
Yeah it’s a bit tongue in cheek, stuff happens when you cook too, but if you screw up baking a little bit…whatever you were trying to make isn’t going to be what you were trying to make :P
