Cooking is an art while baking is a science.
Cooking is jazz, baking is classical.
Cooking? Follow your heart. Sure you can add more butter! A bit of garlic! Shit throw a bay leaf in no one knows wtf it does! Throw in some vodka no one will know, maybe a shot for the chef too, fuck it this is your kitchen!
Baking? You will follow the fucking instructions like checklist and double check it like submitting an SAT for college approval and the oven will be testing your answers, because unlike your SAT theres no multiple choice or “fill in the blank” only the harsh reality of a zero on your paper and that you didnt add enough butter and now your bread is so blackened and hardened the children are trying to take it from you to build a portal to the Nether.
I don’t make the rules I just have try again to make my stupid cookies.
Honestly this fear is overblown. Unless you’re making pastries, baking is relatively straightforward and forgiving. Breads, cakes and flatbreads love you and want you to have fun. Experimenting with vegan substitutions, gluten free baking and scaling batch sizes helped me feel much less intimidated by recipes, you learn what role the ingredients are playing and how to adjust if you add too much, too little, or too not the right thing.
Baking is pretty forgiving, so many old baking recipes are written with add flour until it looks right as part of the recipe. If your baking sucks it’s most likely super old ingredients or you did something stupid like substitute strawberries for butter.
Wait, so I shouldn’t be greasing my pans with strawberries?
IDK, I’ve been having a hell of time trying to make my pizza doughs rise. On the other hand, cookies have been piss-easy, hardest part is that cookie dough is sticky af.
I love baking precisely because it is a science.
The creativity comes later in the proportions of things like how much icing/filling to make.
Yeah. Baking is chill because the ingredients are effectively standardized and fungible so if you just follow the steps it’s hard to screw up. You usually only heat the baked good once and that happens in isolation.
Meanwhile, cooking is anarchy. Just because one piece of chicken breast took five minutes on medium heat doesn’t mean that the next one will. You constantly have to monitor and adapt to changing conditions and everything from ingredients to measurements to the very steps of the recipe itself is up for negotiation. And you have to do half the steps while heating the meal and if you ever take too long for something you burn it and it’s ruined.
When I bake I’m relaxed. When I cook I’m in nonstop crisis management mode.
I’ve found that cooking with lots of veggies, kind of towards East Asian cuisine, is a lot less crisis management.
You can chop your veggies in whatever pace you want, before you start heating anything. Just put them into individual bowls until you’re ready.
But you even can start boiling some water and then later throw in rice+lentils, and it doesn’t require much multi-tasking either, because rice+lentils doesn’t need much attention while cooking.
You can generally just set a timer and once that goes off, pause chopping veggies to turn off the heat. Your veggies can’t get burnt while you do that either, so you can also take however long you need with that. 🙃
The only dough that knows my fears was the hamantaschen but every since I started only using King Arthur flour, they’ve never failed again.
Not sponsored
(But if they want to sponsor me, I’m open to this)
