From what I’ve seen, bakers can usually cook. The reverse… eeeeh…
Comment on Chef
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They just haven’t practiced it. If you’re a good cook, you absolutely have capacity to be a good baker, because they only semantically different things. If we called it cooking a cake, no one would draw this distinction.
If you can prepare, mix, and properly cook ingredients then you can prepare, mix, and properly bake ingredients.
onlyhalfminotaur@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
It never made sense why baking is put on this weird pedestal compared to “cooking”.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
100%! This is what I’m saying. If you can cook, you can bake. Sorry/not sorry.
RBWells@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I don’t always measure for baking - for bread and pastry I do weigh everything 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.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
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.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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?
Rooster326@programming.dev 1 day 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
Bluewing@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.”
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 12 hours 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.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Again: How good does good enough need to be?
Dabundis@lemmy.world 1 day 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.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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!
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
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.
Rooster326@programming.dev 1 day ago
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
wieson@feddit.org 1 day ago
Real and true
bort@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
so you are saying i could put 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?
RBWells@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
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?
bort@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
Image
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
What recipe where you’re cooking can you change ingredients by such extreme amounts? Pasta bolognese with 2x as much meat and half 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?
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
bort@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
some examples:
80% meat lasagna sounds awesome.
That is something that needs to balanced, but even then I am ±20% i guess.
Rice is the one thing that needs exact measuring for water.
I know someone who cooks rice like pasta, i.e. with lots of water, and in the end uses a sieve for the access water. I may be crazy, but I am not that crazy.
Brimstone@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
RepleteLocum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Just be careful with egg whites. The sulfur taste will not go away with sugar
Akasazh@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If your egg whites taste of sulfur, you dun goofed