Nigella & New Bakers

I enjoyed Nigella's column today that attempted to dispel the myth that cooks and bakers are two different things. It's written towards an audience of novice bakers and includes three simple recipies, one of which sounds like a creature from a Harry Potter novel: "Jumbleberry Grunt".

If you don't bake or don't think you can bake, this is the article for you.

From NYTimes, registration required:
http://tinyurl.com/co6nd

Best,
Michael

Well, now you've dropped the gauntlet.
I cook, I rarely bake. My wife predominantly bakes, but will cook.

Baking appears to me to require a few attitude differences:

• A greater willingness to come in contact with the sticky parts of food (I will admit that meatballs and the like require this)
• A greater degree of patience in waiting for food to develop (to me, smoking meats seems an awful lot like baking)
• A taste for raw dough

and to add to Joel's list:

The ability to follow a formula/recipe

In our home, I prefer to cook and the wife is the baker. While we both take on the other's strength (with my wife being more successful than me in the transition), our preferences usually boil down to one key difference.

She enjoys following recipes. I enjoy reading recipes and can follow them, but hate the prairie dog feeling of reading, doing, reading, doing. In our experience, flying by the seat of one's pants is rewarded in straight ahead cooking, but not baking.

z

Who says cookers and bakers are alike??!! Nigella? HAH! what does *she* know?

I cook, won't bake.
The Other Dr. Gale loves to bake, will cook, but pretty much lets me do that job.

There's waaaay too many of these sorts of familial divisions of labor for it to be accidental...

Geo

Queijo wrote:and to add to Joel's list:

The ability to follow a formula/recipe

And actually measure ingredients

I definitely think there is a difference in temperments between those who consider themselves cooks and those who consider themselves bakers. Cooking, in general, is much more forgiving. It's easier to correct mistakes as they come in cooking than with baking. Too little or too much baking powder or yeast or whatnot, and your baked goods are toast. You have to start all over again.

That said, I think any decent cook can become a decent baker, but you do have to have the discipline to follow measurements religiously (or at least until you can develop a sense for how your doughs and batters should feel). There are certain dishes--like, say, a clafoutis--that are very forgiving of imperfect measurements, but something like an angel food cake is a bit more exacting. It just takes discipline and an understanding of your ingredients.

But I don't agree with the underlying premise that cooking and baking are the same thing. There is certainly overlap between the two, but they are different disciplines.

Vital Information wrote:

Queijo wrote:and to add to Joel's list:

The ability to follow a formula/recipe

And actually measure ingredients

And that's the 1-2 punch that has always kept me away from baking.

Not professing to be an expert at either one but I cook and bake. Everyone says what ever I make is really good (known for my cheesecakes) and try to cook/bake stuff that's not "easy". What I'm *not* good at is dreaming up something from scratch. I can modify recipes but just can't toss things together (including salad but that's another show).

I clean as I cook/bake, which I understand is rather unusual...most cooks/bakers clean when they're done. I clean as I go....drives me NUTS (well, nuttier! ) to have dishes in the sink/on the counter.

As much as I love to cook, baking, especially breads, is a passion and a source of deep satisfaction. A loaf of bread rising in the kitchen is like money in the bank. After a lot of trial and error, I think the skills I use in bread baking and cooking are very closely related, part science and part art. But for me, baking has been a skill much harder to master.

With my favorite breads, I do not follow formulas nor do I measure. Flour and water are balanced by feel and need to be adjusted based on relative humidity and dryness of the flour and desired texture. Yeast culture amounts are adjusted based on their apparent activity, smell, ambient temperature, amount of time planned for fermentation, retarding, and proofing. Balancing the salt is usually a function of mood or intended use of the bread. And kneading with the right amount of energy to just the right texture, and fermenting and proofing and baking defy formulas and measuring. And to top it off: fire management, baking to just the right point in a wood-burning brick oven with no temperature controls is something most cooks, except BBQ'ers, don't even consider.

IMHO, there are plenty of great cooks, but far fewer great bakers.

Bill/SFNM

Bill:

I agree heartily with all that you say about the complexities -- generally underappreciated complexities -- of baking but I can only accept your final suggestion with considerable qualification. True enough, there are few great bakers but when you say that there are lots of great cooks, I'm not sure I can go along with that.

Certainly, there are lots of people who can make a set of dishes that come out tasting very good and then also a good number who go beyond that and have mastered various more or less difficult techniques and have a broader repertoire of things they can make with success. Then, to my mind, the next level up involves the ability to improvise and improvisation is, in effect, culinary creativity.

What constitutes excellence in the two endeavours is partly different: one of the key things a great baker must do is react to a vast array of variables to achieve consistency, whereas, to my mind, a great cook should , at least in my opinion, embrace variety in the finished products. Now, I know some will respond: but in restaurant cooking, consistency is of the essence. But I guess to me that's not especially interesting (though I agree it's important and difficult and demands considerable skill and ingenuity).

A further point in reference to the point in the o.p. above connected to the Lawson article that I'd like to make is that in some culinary traditions the line between cook and baker is less sharp or not sharp at all, whereas in others it is relatively more distinct. And need it be said that in some social and economic settings the division is largely institutionalised and in others it is or has been almost completely nonexistent?

Finally, there are to be sure some attitudinal or dispositional factors that may incline some to prefer baking over cooking and vice versa, but for some, be it a result of personal factors or cultural background, the two seem to go together naturally. And for me personally, the great divide is not between cooking and baking but rather between making savoury dishes on the hand and sweet dishes and specifically desserts on the other. The latter interests me far less than the former.

It's an interesting set of issues that this thread has brought up.

Antonius

I used to both cook and bake. I think what stopped me from getting to be more of a baker was less the skill set-- I loved my chemistry set when I was a kid-- than the increasing feeling that it wasn't really very practical. I could buy what baked items I wanted, pretty good quality, and anyway having a lot of cakes and pastries around is not good for our weight. I'd rather have my boyfriend throw away a half-eaten pie than consume it all, but if I've made it he won't throw it out. Then I got out of practice with baking which, as with any kind of cooking, makes it hard when you do try. (When I make a dessert to bring somewhere now, it can sometimes take two or three tries.)

In contrast, cooking main courses is good for our budget and to some extent our weight (if I resist the urge to use super-heavy ingredients). I don't cook because it's practical, entirely, but it has a lot of practical payoffs.

When I was in college someone once told me that there were two kinds of people in the world: those who wanted to grow up to become rock stars, and they went on to be artists, writers, etc; and people who wanted to grow up to be astronauts, who went on to love science, math, whatever. This cooking/baking thing sounds like more or less the same debate. People who love order and logic go for the baking, people who like to improvise as they go and chaffe under rules go for the cooking. But, in the end, I love eating far more than I love cooking or baking, and I can't imagine any technique getting in the way of me producing something I long to devour.

Antonius wrote:Bill:

True enough, there are few great bakers but when you say that there are lots of great cooks, I'm not sure I can go along with that.

Antonius

Antonius,

Yes, perhaps you're right. I too often fall in the trap of sweeping generalities. Let me say it another way: I have met many more talented cooks than I have met talented bakers. Of course, the population of bakers is smaller, so I it could be said I have met more cooks than bakers.

Regardless, in my quest to make the best meals I can, the path to great bread, something I come close to achieving only on the rarest of days, has been the more difficult and the more rewarding. This may very well have to do with the dispositional/attitudinal isues you raise, but I disagree with posters who credit this to some kind of rule-following rigidity on the part of bakers.

Bill/SFNM

Bill/SFNM wrote:Regardless, in my quest to make the best meals I can, the path to great bread, something I come close to achieving only on the rarest of days, has been the more difficult and the more rewarding. This may very well have to do with the dispositional/attitudinal isues you raise, but I disagree with posters who credit this to some kind of rule-following rigidity on the part of bakers.

Bill/SFNM

I think you're right there. And I really like the way you described some of the difficulties involved in producing a top-notch batch of bread. It really is something that deserves great respect.

A

Bill:

I agree and disagree with you. A formula is a set of guidelines, and what you describe for yourself is a kind of intuition - an innate understanding of these guidelines based on experience. When a professional baker develops a formula, many of the factors you discussed in your above post are taken into consideration and formalized. There is an understanding that wheat is variable depending on the time of the year, and that humidity (or the lack thereof) will also impact a formula, for example. Adjustments are made. Which is not to say the recipe/formula is thrown out the window, simply adjusted for factors that are beyond the baker's control. Is this what you regard as rule-following rigidity?

An experienced baker can proceed without a written formula or recipe, but the key is experience. How many people have recollections of a grandmother who could make up anything on the spot without exact measurements, the results consistent each time? At the heart of any baking (and cooking, for that matter) is the science, the reactions between ingredients. The basic science doesn't change. Hence someone without a strong intuitive feel for a process could use a recipe and have good results, but if they do not use a recipe, it is likely that their results will not turn out like yours. The reaction simply will not be the same.

You pointed out in your post that you take bread baking very seriously, to a degree few would attempt or even imagine. For the majority of the bakers out there, a formula is a necessity, but the ability to adapt is also important, just as you say (paraphrasing quite a bit, do forgive).

For the record, I do both: bake and cook, equally well. I'm not a science person, and plenty of bakers I worked with were not either. I don't agree there is necessarily a correlation between having (or not having) a science focus/love/interest and a preference for baking. Although tempting, I don't think the handy heuristic applies. I hated baking in culinary school, and it wasn't until I had my second or third baking job that I began to love it.

Your bread sounds amazing, Bill.

I'd love to see MAG chime in

Queijo wrote:Adjustments are made. Which is not to say the recipe/formula is thrown out the window, simply adjusted for factors that are beyond the baker's control. Is this what you regard as rule-following rigidity?

Not really. I am simply trying to dispel the notion that baking is mainly the strict adherence to formulas and that careful measurement is the primary skill of a baker.

The fascinating thing for me about bread baking, especially breads like baguettes and pizza, is that the only ingredients are flour, water, yeast, and salt. It is amazing how seemingly minor adjustments in combining these ingredients can make such a big difference. Do you dump all of the flour at once into the water or gradually? Do you dissolve the salt in the water or do you mix it in with the flour. So many other considerations, but they really do matter. Forgive me for going on like this, but my kitchen has been torn apart for a remodel and I haven't baked bread all week (and maybe not until Thanksgiving!). Writing about it is an effective sublimation for the pent-up frustration. Thank you for understanding.


Bill/SFNM

I am a cook and a damm good one if I must say so myself. But as my son (VI) says I only made bundt cakes and bar cookies when he was growing up.

I too made loads of bread when the kids where young. I enjoyed bread making. I also enjoyed making pies. I never enjoyed making cookies.

I know baking must follow a formula whereas savory dishes don't always. But this never really bothered me. What did bother me in baking was patience. I have none (in case you wonder where Rob got his). Baking cookies was a chore. Bar cookies I could put in one pan and come back a half hour later and take them out. Baking bread was something you did in stages. Mix the dough leave it to rise go do something else until then. Punch it down, shape it let it rise again go do something until then. Bake it until done. This doesn't require a watchful eye you can multi task while baking bread. Kneading dough gets rid of fustrations, as well as a good arm excerse (I made bread before I had a Cuisinart), never did dough by machine, maybe it was the feel that made it fun.

After saying all that I still prefer cooking to baking but nothing tastes better than a good dessert from the oven brought by someone who enjoys baking and is good at it (like my daughter-in-law the condiment queen.)
Paulette

To what has been said, I'll add that there's baking and then there's baking. I've met a lot of avid bakers, both professional and home bakers, and they come in two varieties: Bread bakers and pastry makers. It's the latter who have (and need) the real patience with precision measurements and fussy decorations.

Further, while I've no real proof, it's always seemed to me that people who are really successful with pastry have cooler hands than most people.

gleam wrote:I'd love to see MAG chime in

Funny thing, I was just reading through this thread contemplating whether to pipe in and if so, what to say.

Like a few others on this thread, I bake and cook. I also probably do equal amounts of bread baking and pastry baking. I think all three disciplines appeal to different moods. When I'm in a home body mindset - nothing is better than two days of mixing, rising and kneading, but then I guess the same could be said about making a long-cooked stew. And while I think that cooking implicates creativity, no more so than making and decorating a tart or a cake. So, I'm not sure that that's the full answer.

I do know that the reason I do all three on a regular basis is a matter of layering flavors. In this, I mean that a hand crafted sausage cries out for a house made bun. Same can be said for pastries - while you can buy puff pastry at a price, it's still not as good as house made when done properly. And don't even get me started on croissants.

Speaking of the price of puff pastry, did anyone notice the cost of the DuFour in Williams-Sonoma's catalog. I almost called them to check whether there was a typo - $40 for a 1 lb. package that is available at Whole Foods for $10.00. Yikes.