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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2324 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 15, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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the phrase cooking is an art, baking is a science, is dead wrong…It's just practice, reading up on the chemistry of food, and experimentation.

Literature reviews, chemistry and experimentation certainly sound like science to me!

The phrase is usually used to mean that cooking is much more forgiving than a lot of baking, where a few extra minutes in the oven or too much mixing or not enough or not rolling things out exactly to the right thickness or not getting the flour butter ratio exactly correct etc etc can very quickly and easily ruin a recipe.

A lot of cooking, by contrast, allows for some experimentation and variation, and a little too much oil or butter or a couple minutes too long on the tomato sauce or the casserole isn’t usually as ruinous. You can decide that you feel like sauce that’s a little thicker or a batter with more pepper or add a little garlic and some tinned sardines into a tomato sauce where you also slightly increase the amount of oregano you use and all those changes are mostly immediately obvious and easy and predictable.

Most pro bakers use scales in their work even when making the same pastries every day, whereas even in professional kitchens in many cases chefs just eyeball things because minor fluctuations are irrelevant or can be fixed during cooking.

Most pro bakers use scales in their work even when making the same pastries every day, whereas even in professional kitchens in many cases chefs just eyeball things because minor fluctuations are irrelevant

This is just as true of baking. Minor fluctuations don't actually matter that much for most recipes. For example, when baking I always eyeball the shortening because I can't be arsed to clean out a measuring cup after measuring it. It's always fine. Similarly, there's no actual need to measure flour or sugar by weight. Even if your measuring cup isn't always the exact same amount because you don't perfectly level it, it's not going to matter. Lots of people even in the baking world feel like you have to be super precise, but you really don't.

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