Before the existence of the recipe, skilled practitioners had their own folklore, built from decades or centuries of trial and error and experience. Now, anybody can simply copy a recipe and inherit that experience, no matter how skilled.
It takes skill and/or time and effort to discover a recipe in a field like baking, where the desired chemical reactions are fragile and easy to disrupt. The message of the post is: don't try and discover recipes in difficult fields like baking, unless you know what you're doing.
You mean before it was written down? Old recipes were transmitted orally from generation to generation and from master to apprentice. If you mean how the the recipe was originally developed, this happened (and still happens) through trial and error. But if you know how the ingredients actually work and interact, you can experiment a lot safer.
Of course trial and error is perfectly fine as long as you are prepared to accept "error" as a potential outcome.
Heavy imho: My girlfriend and I cannot cook together. She‘s more of the freestyle type, while I like to follow the recipe (programmer here). My reasoning is simple: Someday, someone tried the recipe and came up with a good way of achieving what we are trying to achieve. Which doesn‘t mean you should never alter it. But that‘s a task for another time, and shouldn‘t be performed while you are expecting guests. :)
I follow this rule when making new food, and when trying new food. I will typically order something from the menu directly when at a new restaurant, but if I come back I'll make changes.
In cooking (to a greater degree than baking), there are certainly people who lean towards improvising and people who follow the recipe.
I tend towards improvising but it depends both on the source of the recipe--if it's from something like Cook's Illustrated I can be pretty confident it's been pretty thoroughly tested and compared with alternatives--and how familiar/opinionated I am about the general type of food. As I've gained experience over the years, I definitely have increasingly tended to make changes and not sweat details that don't seem critical. (e.g. this ingredient is close enough or is used in such small quantity that I'll feel free to substitute or omit rather than make a special trip to the store.)
How then to explain the huge variations in recipes? Most recipes (there are exceptions like baking) are simply a suggestion to me and I improve upon them to great result. Although I will admit I am naturally gifted at it, and also have loads of experience. If a soup tastes bland and needs more salt, I am going to make the soup taste good and not worry about respecting the recipe.
When I want to make a dish I'm unsure of, I will usually read a handful of recipes to get the idea, and then just cook it how I'd like. It helps to have a base of knowledge and experience to understand what each ingredient and cooking technique will do to the dish. So instead of having to go line by line through a particular recipe, you understand how the dish is supposed to work and can execute how you are comfortable executing. It likely won't turn out how any of the recipe creators intended, but it'll usually turn out recognizable as the dish in question, with your own touch to it.
Also a programmer here but I agree more with your girlfriend's style.
You can either use battle-tested libraries or you can try to understand and reimplement them to suit your use case. The former is safer but the latter is necessary if you want to truly understand and build skills. That said, yea, not when there are deadlines (expecting guests).
Much of the art of [non-professional] cooking, in my view, lies in knowing what must be rigid and what need not be. Baking is a science, relying on precise chemical reactions that must happen within pretty tightly defined windows. Making a curry is not a science, in that you can get a good curry by just making it up on the spot, tasting as you go, and fixing it if it needs fixing. (Maybe following a recipe precisely will get you the best results, but you can get most of the way there with just a few rough signposts; nothing will go disastrously wrong if you shake things up a bit.)
One of the things I found most annoying about watching someone trying to teach someone else how to cook (while at uni) was that the teacher never pointed out when something didn't matter. Whether it was "now you put in 1.5tsp of salt to the sauce" or "now you put in 1.5tsp of yeast to the dough", the method was presented as unyielding. In fact the sauce can be made in infinite variety, while the dough must be made just so. Know when to yield to the expert, and know when not to bother.
> Baking is a science, relying on precise chemical reactions that must happen within pretty tightly defined windows. Making a curry is not a science, in that you can get a good curry by just making it up on the spot, tasting as you go, and fixing it if it needs fixing.
Playing a fugue vs playing jazz: For one, you need a carefully-constructed score and you really do have to follow it for all the voices to come out right, and for the other all you need is a fakebook and a good ear.
This is part of the stages of mastery, as well: You go from being a rigid rule-follower to someone with an intuition as you gain experience, but for some things, even the masters are quite rigid.
> The third stage is competence, the point at which an individual is capable becomes qualified in their desired area. [snip] Towards the latter part of this stage, the individual begins to acquire the ability to problem solve. That is, the individual begins to say "I tried this, but the results are not what I wanted. What do I do now?" This is very different from the procedure-following approach that might be expected from someone in the advanced beginner stage.
I have made some loaves of bread and I don't think it needs as much precision as you imply. You still get a pretty good bread even if you use double the yeast or half the salt. There of course things that ruin the bread, but the again, there are ways to ruin curry too.
Bread is forgiving, cakes are much harder. You can make edible bread with flour, water and heat. It’s a little hard to mess up totally.
Cake is different. If you’re lucky, or really know how the chemistry works, messing around with a cake recipe will make a different, yet still edible kind of baked good.
A simple 4 ingredient bread is a lot more forgiving than, say, cupcakes. As long as you have fresh ingredients, you can have good bread even if the dough comes out a little wetter or dryer or you use a little less or more yeast. You only need to adjust for time at that point.
> Making a curry is not a science, in that you can get a good curry by just making it up on the spot, tasting as you go, and fixing it if it needs fixing.
Or it may be that the standard for curry in this example is lower than the standard for bread, perhaps because there is no set expectation for the taste of curry -- maybe one has it much less often and is less familiar with it -- while bread is something one has almost everyday and expectations are higher.
As an Indian, we don't even call any of our dishes 'curry'. They are all specific dishes with very specific tastes. If you're making a Rajma Masala, or a Punjabi kadhi, or a Gujarati kadhi, or a Khadi Dal, or a Shahi Paneer: it's very easy to screw them up and in most cases you wouldn't be able to fix them after one mistake. You might make a good enough something, but it wouldn't be Rajma.
There's no Mutter Paneer Police! It's just that maybe 80% of all Matar Paneer served in homes and restaurants will have a specific amount of ginger (and definitely no solid chunks) and if you go over or under, there may be some tut-tutting dealt quietly.
I can't tell you how many times I've tried to make dal makhani like Moti Mahal (Deluxe) does and it always comes out wrong. Definitely a science (there are a lot of ingredients that must emulsify just so, the spices must retain their bite, it must simmer and reduce for hours, etc.), and it's ridiculous how many different "dal makhani" recipes there are and they almost never taste remotely alike.
This implies you're using the same ingredients with the same attributes as what the recipe designer used.
For instance, that your baking powder has the same "power" as what the original creator used, or that your flour has the same gluten content.
Ingredients vary by brand, and if you're in a different country, can be quite different (for instance, the majority of cream in Australia has added gelatin).
I came here to say something similar. You're right to point out baking powder, because it's a mess. Think it's all the same chemically? Nope. Different brands use very different chemicals that can affect lift, and it can vary over time for the same brand.
Just about everything is like that. Whole wheat flour? Different bran and gluten percentages create really different loaves.
Pretending weights will solve everything is nonsense too. If humidity affects mass per volume, it's going to affect chemical identity per mass too.
Finally, everyone has different tastes. You might like a finer crumb to your bread; your spouse might like it more holely.
Recipes are like guidelines. Always. Experience matters because it reflects knowledge of how variations on the recipe matter.
Finally, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that a lot of things in cooking get passed down as critical when they're not, or even worse, are detrimental. This goes for traditional knowledge handed down, as well as half-baked "scientific" approaches to recipe development that are bad science and driven by a desire to establish authority above all.
Not following the recipe risks experiencing recipe anxiety: the fear that you are going to eat something gross. Ok, maybe it only applies to me, but I actually am scared about not following the recipe.
My husband modified a recipe to make it easier to read, but in doing so had also corrected a "mistake". He's not a pastry chef. He changed the butter cream recipe from "until the syrup is at 238 degrees" to "until the syrup is at room temperature". It wasn't too bad, but it was off. I got upset when I realized the modified recipe differed from the original.
I'm surprised it turned out at all. Cooking syrup to a specific temperature serves to produce a syrup of specific concentration, i.e. ratio of sugar:water. So under-cooked syrup ends up containing a lot more water than desired, as well as not being hot enough to cook and stabilize the egg whites that are presumably in the buttercream recipe.
Great post! Reading recipe reviews on sites like AllRecipes is both frustrating and annoying. Most times you will see something like “5 stars!!! I loved this recipe. I changed these four ingredients and it was amazing!” And I just think, you didn’t actually make the recipe!!!
That's a terrible article. Improvising is half of the fun of cooking. Once you learn some basic principles there's a lot of room for modification of what you're doing. Granted that baking is less forgiving than e.g. pan dishes (where you can sample and adjust), but even baking is not some unobtainable mystery.
Two friends who are pro bakers will make small adjustments based on the outside humidity, how much gluten they can feel in the flour and so on. Baking to high levels of quality and consistency is actually very hard and requires precise measurement. The article rightly educates folks on some of the factors.
OK great, that's pro bakers who are presumably selling what they're producing, and need 100% consistency. I make bread weekly, and it turns out great weekly (for our home consumption). I'm constantly experimenting with different balances of whole wheat and white, different brands of flour, different amounts of leaven, different percentages of hydration, etc. If I hadn't experimented I wouldn't understand bread as well as I do. Dough, like pan cooking, is very forgiving if you understand what you are looking for.
"Follow the recipe" is an awful philosophy. Learn the recipe and then improvise is much better, because it helps you understand the domain much more significantly.
You're still missing the point that baking is far less forgiving about getting measurements wrong. No one is saying you shouldn't experiment and learn if you want to. The point is that you should be prepared to witness just how delicate some of the chemistry is. It's not pan cooking, where extra carrots won't matter at all.
With forty years experience cooking and some formal training, I'm much more comfortable experimenting with procedures and the technical aspects of a recipe, than with creative flavor combinations.
To be honest, I don't believe that creative flavor combinations often work, even in a $100 restaurant. It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people. And actually believing one "needs" to do something different, to make one's mark? It's hard to be a good cook, but it takes the barest modicum of emotional control and self-awareness to avoid falling into this trap. Just don't.
As in mathematical or scientific research, one is actually most creative and original when one is channeling with clarity what everyone else meant to say, wanted to say but didn't know it. In cooking, the hardest thing to do is to express a classical recipe using modern methods and ingredient sourcing, better than an entire people had managed before with conventional methods. Either this is too hard for elite restaurant chefs, so they instead play with their food, or there's no market, because one has to be on the same level to taste the difference? I don't believe that; perfecting the thoughts of others is the ultimate challenge.
Baking is easy. I have a spreadsheet going back fifty versions for sourdough bread ground from whole grains. It's a careful search algorithm in a high dimensional space, not cooking. Corn tortillas from scratch, via nixtamalizing and grinding landrace Oaxacan corns from masienda.com, is an ultimate baking graduation exercise. There's much conflicting information out there, but no reference recipe that guarantees success at home. Within a month one is at the research frontier for home cooks in a modern setting. One needs to be comfortable with research, not with following direction. And the results can be as truly spectacular as anything one can produce in a home kitchen.
I'm a competent cook (self taught, cooking for 20 years or so), and at home cooking western dishes, as well as thise from around the world (Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, all sorts), yet baking is the one thing I seem to find difficult.
Firstly, it seems you have to get your measurements right - there isn't much room for experimentation with quantities, just follow the recipe. Aside from that, my mixture/dough always seems too wet, too sticky, too dry, too whatever it shouldn't be! And I don't seem to have the knack for how to fix it, or an intuition to know when it's "right". Same deal when it makes it to the oven; things often end up over or under baked, because I just don't have the knack of knowing when it's done.
Weigh your ingredients. Get a scale that is accurate to the gram and if your recipe calls for cups and such find a conversion chart. I only follow recipes that give amounts in grams and milliliters. I'm American and baking is the only time I use the metric system. 90% of baking is technique and that only comes from practice so taking notes can help a lot while learning.
I do, and don't really have a problem with weighing things; my point was simply that I feel like I can't experiment. But you're probably right about needing practice - I tend to feel like I've failed when it goes wrong, and don't try again for ages.
I'm British, so always use grams/millilitres when cooking - TBH, I wouldn't even know what "a cup of flour" was!
If you get the measurements wrong, your end product will be 'wrong'
Cooking gives you ways to fix your mistakes.. (add water, cook it more, add spices etc etc)
Not to single you out for an oft repeated phrase, but I've never like this set of comparisons.
Baking surely requires you to precisely follow recipes in a way cooking usually doesn't, but merely following instructions precisely isn't science. Really, there is an art of and a science of both cooking and baking. Understanding some of the science of baking is actually what enables one to productively modify and create recipes.
Bread kneading and shaping can require considerable technique and experience. There are tomes written about this stuff (and some good youtube videos that can shortcut some of it.) I’ve been baking maybe 5 years but it wasn’t until I started making pizzas several times a week that I got a feel for how dough should behave. Then other hydrations require more experience. Make one bread 50 times and I guarantee you will be a lot better.
I'll give a skeletal answer that will only make sense if one has read what's out there. These are just my choices where choices matter, leaving out the canonical:
Measure cal by weight as a proportion of total weight of corn and water (for comparison Paul Bertolli estimates the water weight of meats in "Cooking by Hand" for his brine formulas). I like 0.5% cal and 4x water to corn. This is on the light end (standardized by total weight, recipes vary 0.3% to 1.6% cal) which brings out corn flavor.
Simmer at least an hour, or more, till kernels are nearly al dente, not chalky. For less effort use a slow cooker, and start the clock hours later when it reaches 80 C. Leave overnight before rinsing well. The corn will have nearly doubled in weight. This is nixtamal.
As recommended in “Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico” by Bricia Lopez, grind 4:15 water:nixtamal for 40 minutes in a 1.5 liter Premier Small Wonder Table Top Wet Grinder. Indian cooks, chocolatiers on a budget like this wet grinder. She recommends 450g corn. More will push off the lid, which one can fix by drilling a 1" deep hole with a 2 1/4" Forstner bit in a 5" or so square block of hardwood, to rest just over the lid as a lid stop. Then one can use more corn, which needs less tending. This is a problem like designing the paper feed in a copier, a career I'm grateful I don't have.
If the masa is too wet, work in a bit of masa harina. Test by kneading by hand; it should be just shy of sticky, but not sticky.
I bake harder than some say (I like brown specks and the resulting flavor) on a Baking Steel. I plan to experiment with an actual comal, which might breathe better as my masa is on the edge of too wet, like an artisanal bread dough. It puffs nicely.
If one happens to have a VitaMix or VitaPrep commercial blender, one can get a reasonable approximation of this by blending corn with too much water, then thickening with masa harina. Masienda.com sells a masa harina from their white corn. Be aware that grind fineness is just one axis, and a VitaPrep can actually overdo this. One ends up 2:1 nixtamal:harina by dry weight, 2/3rds of the way there, with an inferior texture but much of the great flavor of different landrace corns. One will then decide a wet grinder is worth it.
> It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people.
Well there is no mythological singular way to cook a cultural dish. Notwithstanding many regional differences, the myriad of recipes out there tend to vary in some way even if it's minimal. e.g. curry, chili
> fifty versions for sourdough bread ground from whole grains. It's a careful search algorithm in a high dimensional space, not cooking.
I know the process, a bit. The way I see it is: first you _follow the recipe_ , until you think you understand it and are getting reasonably good results.
Then tweak it and take notes of the resulting improvements or setbacks. Repeat for life. As you say, it's iterative and multi-dimensional.
> It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people.
It's not just cooks and chefs, but all artists. What's the number 1 reason hollywood/publishers/author's guild are vehemently against users modifying their movies/books to better suit their tastes?
"It destroys the artistic intent of the creator. The artist intended it for it to be consumed in a specific way, and by [removing the mushrooms/censoring the swear words/making all the characters zombies/etc.], you've created something the artist did not intend for you to consume"
And my response is: well, obviously! It is the height of arrogance to get offended when someone modifies your (dish/movie/book) to be more to their liking as it implies your original creation was perfect and could not be improved upon!
I agree and just want to say that I find your writing style very easy to read. It's hard to string together those thoughts and words coherently all the way thru, it would take me a second pass to have it flow the way you do
There’s plenty of room for flavor experimentation that crowd sourced wisdom hasn’t explored. For one there are simply too many combinations of ingredients, and preparation to make the assumption that everything has been tried. Secondly, with cheap air travel, refrigeration, and a more fully integrated global economy it’s possible get regional ingredients everywhere that were totally unheard of decades ago. Also cultural palates change: in the US fancy food was French and Italian until the late 90s. Period. Now days it’s not uncommon to see Asian dishes elevated to new levels. David Chang, et al have been enormously successful in melding Western flavors into Asian dishes. The US, at least knows very little about Latin American food (outside of a some well known Mexican imports, eg tacos), and African food is almost completely unheard of. Mark my words we’ll all be enjoying flavor combinations no one dreamed of in the coming decades.
Some recipes are just substandard and don't work. Can somebody provide me with a WORKING recipe for making ORIGINAL injera bread? Preferrably working at Edinburgh altitude.
I always found it strange that in school our 'food technology' course focused on baking and not normal cooking.
Baking, aside from maybe bread or pizza bases or something, is basically pure luxury, whereas cooking is actually useful.
I can probably count the times I've baked in the last few years in the single digits.
If you put too much flour in a cake it's going to ruin the consistency, potentially be too dry, whatever.
If you put "too much" spice or oil or vegetables or whatever in a curry or casserole or soup it's just going to taste different. It's quite hard to make a meal that's not serviceable on the hob.
Baking requires more precision overall (in general) but cooking involves a lot of techniques that you don't find in baking. I think of them as two overlapping set of skills. Cooking certainly isn't a subset of baking.
This doesn’t ring true to me. As a bread baker I’ll just do the same recipe 1000 times, watching YouTube videos week after week, practicing different techniques, seeing if tiny variations in technique, weather, etc, affect the end product.
That’s completely different from cooking, which is about learning to Google, evaluating whether to trust a recipe, menu planning, seasonal ingredient management, knowing the personalities of the people you’re cooking for, understanding a wide range of cuisines... it feels like a fully different activity.
And being able to follow the recipe isn’t really the key to either. It’s the price of admission.
I can cook at this point, self made recipes and sauces and delicious foods.
But I find google (or ddg in my case) to be shit for finding recipes.
Too many results, lots of filler content about someone’s grandma and yada yada yada.
These days I just pick up a few well rated cookbooks (or I receive them as gifts) and go from there.
Let someone else do the curation, it’s very rarely the fun part of cooking, and I enjoy cookbooks because they have recipes for things I wouldn’t have thought to even look up.
Plus, there’s something very calming to me about looking through a cookbook. Maybe it’s the same for others.
Cooking and baking shows are similar. It’s just hard to be stressed watching someone make food.
The best thing that improved the consistency of my baking was better measurement. I started weighing my ingredients, as Cook's Illustrated found the mass of a cup of flour varied by as much as 15%. I bought a separate thermometer for my oven because I didn't trust its built-in thermocouple. After this, I never had bad batches of cookies.
71 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadIt takes skill and/or time and effort to discover a recipe in a field like baking, where the desired chemical reactions are fragile and easy to disrupt. The message of the post is: don't try and discover recipes in difficult fields like baking, unless you know what you're doing.
Or unless failure is an option! (And ideally, you're at least writing down what you did.)
Of course trial and error is perfectly fine as long as you are prepared to accept "error" as a potential outcome.
I tend towards improvising but it depends both on the source of the recipe--if it's from something like Cook's Illustrated I can be pretty confident it's been pretty thoroughly tested and compared with alternatives--and how familiar/opinionated I am about the general type of food. As I've gained experience over the years, I definitely have increasingly tended to make changes and not sweat details that don't seem critical. (e.g. this ingredient is close enough or is used in such small quantity that I'll feel free to substitute or omit rather than make a special trip to the store.)
You can either use battle-tested libraries or you can try to understand and reimplement them to suit your use case. The former is safer but the latter is necessary if you want to truly understand and build skills. That said, yea, not when there are deadlines (expecting guests).
One of the things I found most annoying about watching someone trying to teach someone else how to cook (while at uni) was that the teacher never pointed out when something didn't matter. Whether it was "now you put in 1.5tsp of salt to the sauce" or "now you put in 1.5tsp of yeast to the dough", the method was presented as unyielding. In fact the sauce can be made in infinite variety, while the dough must be made just so. Know when to yield to the expert, and know when not to bother.
Playing a fugue vs playing jazz: For one, you need a carefully-constructed score and you really do have to follow it for all the voices to come out right, and for the other all you need is a fakebook and a good ear.
This is part of the stages of mastery, as well: You go from being a rigid rule-follower to someone with an intuition as you gain experience, but for some things, even the masters are quite rigid.
http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/intro/preservice/stg...
> The third stage is competence, the point at which an individual is capable becomes qualified in their desired area. [snip] Towards the latter part of this stage, the individual begins to acquire the ability to problem solve. That is, the individual begins to say "I tried this, but the results are not what I wanted. What do I do now?" This is very different from the procedure-following approach that might be expected from someone in the advanced beginner stage.
Cake is different. If you’re lucky, or really know how the chemistry works, messing around with a cake recipe will make a different, yet still edible kind of baked good.
Or it may be that the standard for curry in this example is lower than the standard for bread, perhaps because there is no set expectation for the taste of curry -- maybe one has it much less often and is less familiar with it -- while bread is something one has almost everyday and expectations are higher.
As an Indian, we don't even call any of our dishes 'curry'. They are all specific dishes with very specific tastes. If you're making a Rajma Masala, or a Punjabi kadhi, or a Gujarati kadhi, or a Khadi Dal, or a Shahi Paneer: it's very easy to screw them up and in most cases you wouldn't be able to fix them after one mistake. You might make a good enough something, but it wouldn't be Rajma.
For instance, that your baking powder has the same "power" as what the original creator used, or that your flour has the same gluten content.
Ingredients vary by brand, and if you're in a different country, can be quite different (for instance, the majority of cream in Australia has added gelatin).
Just about everything is like that. Whole wheat flour? Different bran and gluten percentages create really different loaves.
Pretending weights will solve everything is nonsense too. If humidity affects mass per volume, it's going to affect chemical identity per mass too.
Finally, everyone has different tastes. You might like a finer crumb to your bread; your spouse might like it more holely.
Recipes are like guidelines. Always. Experience matters because it reflects knowledge of how variations on the recipe matter.
Finally, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that a lot of things in cooking get passed down as critical when they're not, or even worse, are detrimental. This goes for traditional knowledge handed down, as well as half-baked "scientific" approaches to recipe development that are bad science and driven by a desire to establish authority above all.
My husband modified a recipe to make it easier to read, but in doing so had also corrected a "mistake". He's not a pastry chef. He changed the butter cream recipe from "until the syrup is at 238 degrees" to "until the syrup is at room temperature". It wasn't too bad, but it was off. I got upset when I realized the modified recipe differed from the original.
"Follow the recipe" is an awful philosophy. Learn the recipe and then improvise is much better, because it helps you understand the domain much more significantly.
But if you lack the basic ability to follow the rules, you're just a bad cook.
To be honest, I don't believe that creative flavor combinations often work, even in a $100 restaurant. It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people. And actually believing one "needs" to do something different, to make one's mark? It's hard to be a good cook, but it takes the barest modicum of emotional control and self-awareness to avoid falling into this trap. Just don't.
As in mathematical or scientific research, one is actually most creative and original when one is channeling with clarity what everyone else meant to say, wanted to say but didn't know it. In cooking, the hardest thing to do is to express a classical recipe using modern methods and ingredient sourcing, better than an entire people had managed before with conventional methods. Either this is too hard for elite restaurant chefs, so they instead play with their food, or there's no market, because one has to be on the same level to taste the difference? I don't believe that; perfecting the thoughts of others is the ultimate challenge.
Baking is easy. I have a spreadsheet going back fifty versions for sourdough bread ground from whole grains. It's a careful search algorithm in a high dimensional space, not cooking. Corn tortillas from scratch, via nixtamalizing and grinding landrace Oaxacan corns from masienda.com, is an ultimate baking graduation exercise. There's much conflicting information out there, but no reference recipe that guarantees success at home. Within a month one is at the research frontier for home cooks in a modern setting. One needs to be comfortable with research, not with following direction. And the results can be as truly spectacular as anything one can produce in a home kitchen.
Hmm, not for everyone!
I'm a competent cook (self taught, cooking for 20 years or so), and at home cooking western dishes, as well as thise from around the world (Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, all sorts), yet baking is the one thing I seem to find difficult.
Firstly, it seems you have to get your measurements right - there isn't much room for experimentation with quantities, just follow the recipe. Aside from that, my mixture/dough always seems too wet, too sticky, too dry, too whatever it shouldn't be! And I don't seem to have the knack for how to fix it, or an intuition to know when it's "right". Same deal when it makes it to the oven; things often end up over or under baked, because I just don't have the knack of knowing when it's done.
I'm British, so always use grams/millilitres when cooking - TBH, I wouldn't even know what "a cup of flour" was!
If you get the measurements wrong, your end product will be 'wrong' Cooking gives you ways to fix your mistakes.. (add water, cook it more, add spices etc etc)
Not to single you out for an oft repeated phrase, but I've never like this set of comparisons.
Baking surely requires you to precisely follow recipes in a way cooking usually doesn't, but merely following instructions precisely isn't science. Really, there is an art of and a science of both cooking and baking. Understanding some of the science of baking is actually what enables one to productively modify and create recipes.
Measure cal by weight as a proportion of total weight of corn and water (for comparison Paul Bertolli estimates the water weight of meats in "Cooking by Hand" for his brine formulas). I like 0.5% cal and 4x water to corn. This is on the light end (standardized by total weight, recipes vary 0.3% to 1.6% cal) which brings out corn flavor.
Simmer at least an hour, or more, till kernels are nearly al dente, not chalky. For less effort use a slow cooker, and start the clock hours later when it reaches 80 C. Leave overnight before rinsing well. The corn will have nearly doubled in weight. This is nixtamal.
As recommended in “Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico” by Bricia Lopez, grind 4:15 water:nixtamal for 40 minutes in a 1.5 liter Premier Small Wonder Table Top Wet Grinder. Indian cooks, chocolatiers on a budget like this wet grinder. She recommends 450g corn. More will push off the lid, which one can fix by drilling a 1" deep hole with a 2 1/4" Forstner bit in a 5" or so square block of hardwood, to rest just over the lid as a lid stop. Then one can use more corn, which needs less tending. This is a problem like designing the paper feed in a copier, a career I'm grateful I don't have.
If the masa is too wet, work in a bit of masa harina. Test by kneading by hand; it should be just shy of sticky, but not sticky.
I bake harder than some say (I like brown specks and the resulting flavor) on a Baking Steel. I plan to experiment with an actual comal, which might breathe better as my masa is on the edge of too wet, like an artisanal bread dough. It puffs nicely.
If one happens to have a VitaMix or VitaPrep commercial blender, one can get a reasonable approximation of this by blending corn with too much water, then thickening with masa harina. Masienda.com sells a masa harina from their white corn. Be aware that grind fineness is just one axis, and a VitaPrep can actually overdo this. One ends up 2:1 nixtamal:harina by dry weight, 2/3rds of the way there, with an inferior texture but much of the great flavor of different landrace corns. One will then decide a wet grinder is worth it.
Well there is no mythological singular way to cook a cultural dish. Notwithstanding many regional differences, the myriad of recipes out there tend to vary in some way even if it's minimal. e.g. curry, chili
I know the process, a bit. The way I see it is: first you _follow the recipe_ , until you think you understand it and are getting reasonably good results.
Then tweak it and take notes of the resulting improvements or setbacks. Repeat for life. As you say, it's iterative and multi-dimensional.
It's not just cooks and chefs, but all artists. What's the number 1 reason hollywood/publishers/author's guild are vehemently against users modifying their movies/books to better suit their tastes?
"It destroys the artistic intent of the creator. The artist intended it for it to be consumed in a specific way, and by [removing the mushrooms/censoring the swear words/making all the characters zombies/etc.], you've created something the artist did not intend for you to consume"
And my response is: well, obviously! It is the height of arrogance to get offended when someone modifies your (dish/movie/book) to be more to their liking as it implies your original creation was perfect and could not be improved upon!
Most vegan recipes are trash, and in most cases we are only a decade or two into the global development of that recipe.
You really can “fuck around” and find new major advancements in vegan cuisine.
Many problems (pizza) are totally unsolved.
To use a missile metaphor: Stir-fry is guided, bread is ballistic.
Baking, aside from maybe bread or pizza bases or something, is basically pure luxury, whereas cooking is actually useful.
I can probably count the times I've baked in the last few years in the single digits.
If you put too much flour in a cake it's going to ruin the consistency, potentially be too dry, whatever.
If you put "too much" spice or oil or vegetables or whatever in a curry or casserole or soup it's just going to taste different. It's quite hard to make a meal that's not serviceable on the hob.
If you're teaching something, you might as well teach something that tells the student they were wrong, instead of hiding their mistake.
That’s completely different from cooking, which is about learning to Google, evaluating whether to trust a recipe, menu planning, seasonal ingredient management, knowing the personalities of the people you’re cooking for, understanding a wide range of cuisines... it feels like a fully different activity.
And being able to follow the recipe isn’t really the key to either. It’s the price of admission.
But I find google (or ddg in my case) to be shit for finding recipes.
Too many results, lots of filler content about someone’s grandma and yada yada yada.
These days I just pick up a few well rated cookbooks (or I receive them as gifts) and go from there.
Let someone else do the curation, it’s very rarely the fun part of cooking, and I enjoy cookbooks because they have recipes for things I wouldn’t have thought to even look up.
Plus, there’s something very calming to me about looking through a cookbook. Maybe it’s the same for others.
Cooking and baking shows are similar. It’s just hard to be stressed watching someone make food.
This pal hasn't watched "Babbete's Feast".