Cooking is art.
Baking is science.
Source: username checks out
Chef
Submitted 1 day ago by titty_wizard@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/042640a9-660c-4e43-b548-14e44e20ce24.jpeg
Comments
Chef@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
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
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 13 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?
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 9 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
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
From what I’ve seen, bakers can usually cook. The reverse… eeeeh…
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 9 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 13 hours ago
It never made sense why baking is put on this weird pedestal compared to “cooking”.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
100%! This is what I’m saying. If you can cook, you can bake. Sorry/not sorry.
RBWells@lemmy.world 23 hours 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 9 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?
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 9 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.
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
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.
wieson@feddit.org 1 day ago
Real and true
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
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.
Exusia@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You gonna back that up with a SOURCE, senator?
(Please I need to learn how to cook before taco bell forecloses on my boat)
jckwik@discuss.online 1 day ago
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.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Also check out the Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt, he also talks primarily about techniques rather than recipes
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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
EpeeGnome@feddit.online 16 hours ago
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.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
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.
PolyLlamaRous@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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.
Sidyctism2@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
Because a lot more people regularly cook than bake
musubibreakfast@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
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.
Jarix@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
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
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 21 hours ago
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.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
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.
Saffire@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
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.
lazyViking@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Yes because sourdough is baking lol
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
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
ummthatguy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What you can fuck with in baking is vanilla. Douse to your hearts desire.
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Ingredients I always ignore the amount given in recipes:
Garlic, lime juice, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, chocolate chips, raisins. There’s probably more.
ummthatguy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Hazel@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Always double the garlic, at least.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
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.
Malyca@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I may add extra chocolate chips to my banana bread
cloudshouter@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
What time do I come by for muffins?
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Cooking is an art, baking is a science.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
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.
cyberfae@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.
AbsolutelyClawless@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Bread is like cooking there, I’ll just throw stuff in and try new stuff while baking bread
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
It’ll be edible but sometimes it may be DENSE lol
Wren@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Former head chef: Yes. Our pastry chef was the alchemist and I was the magebomb.
AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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?
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
Isn’t that the situation described in the post, not the opposite?
AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I’m just saying that baking is the same if you’ve got the balls or lack of self-preservation to experiment.
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
One requires specific chemical reactions to happen in specific orders.
One make food hot
TIEPilot@lemmy.world 1 day ago
As a former line cook and a baker this is correct.
nullspace@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I feel like this is the kind of opinion held by someone who has never worked with food professionally.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
OryxAndCake@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Once you know your ingredients and how they work in recipes, you can start being creative.
Snapz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Simply stated, Cooking is art, Baking is science.
Etterra@discuss.online 1 day ago
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.
nightofmichelinstars@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
You’re both way healthier for avoiding those. Lucky for the incentive.
Etterra@discuss.online 1 day ago
Oh I still eat plenty of junk food lol
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Do you have any idea how many fucking things include corn byproducts? Almost all of them.
USA? Europe it’s not alot.
rumba@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 23 hours ago
I throw some flour into a bowl, what ever flour I happen to have. Wholemeal, plain, bread, its all flour. Then dump in how ever much sourdough starter I have currently minus a little. Finally add water until it feels roughly like dough, slightly on the wet side. Leave.
Come back later that day or forget about it and do it tomorrow, add some flour until it feels good and make the pizza base. Its just add flour/water until the dough can be formed into the right shape.
rumba@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
ohh yeah, I made 50 edible pizzas to get here, but the quality and consistency finally reach what i look for in commercial pizza kitchens.
HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is how my S.O. make sourdough. It ALWAYS works🤷♂️
bluelander@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
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.
CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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
dillekant@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
The process is chosen by the ingredients. Baking has very little variation in ingredients and even then the wrong flour can mess up a recipe. With cooking, there are natural variations in all natural meats and vegetables, so you might need to balance the flavours somehow. That requires a flexibility in the process. “Here’s what you want to achieve, you figure out how to get there”.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Baking - scientific? With so scientific measurements like “cups” or “spoons”?
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 1 day ago
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?
Rolive@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
I’m too European and too sober to understand this.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“Fluid ounces” are not exactly scientific measurements. Milliliters are.
Pistachio@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
But what’s a pinch, smidge, and “to taste”?
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The dash at the end implying that there is also a secret fourth thing is just 🧑🍳🤌
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Cooking: Heaven help you if you have a different version of known dish with a name. The gatekeepers will descend upon you.
osanna@lemmy.vg 1 day ago
and this is why i don’t bake.
saltesc@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Don’t bother me in the kitchen while I’m CREATING!!!
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 day ago
thats thr beauty of cooking. all those ingredients scribed so precisely benefit greatly from a liberal fudging
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
From the Questionable Content merch store:
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Grilling: FIRE!
rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Grilling is the superior method
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Gas stove top: half civilized half FIRE!