baking: does it come easily to you?

xxxxpost i can follow a recipe but i hate following recipes! i always think i can do things better/more resourcefully than what's written down. which works for cooking, but i guess not for baking.

I definitely am dependent on recipes; I can't bake from scratch, or at least I don't like the idea of it. I like rules. Guidelines. I need a handrail.

bread is p much beyond my level of interest -- too complicated, not enough flavor payoff for the work involved, prefer to let someone else make that for me
i have made some breads, but they always wind up stale. every thanksgiving i make some p amazing butter rolls. but that's 1x a year.

and yeah cooking is def separate to baking -- I'll wing meals all the time. But I learned early on: with baking you pretty much have to follow the recipe to the letter, at least until you get a feel for it and can substitute to your own tastes etc.

yeah, cooking is far far more amenable to invention than baking is. i mean, add some cranberries to the dough or whatever, but don't fuck with the amount of baking powder or the flour quality.

i would love to make good bread. i tried the no-knead method twice -- the first time the dough barely rose, the second time it overfermented and smelled like bad beer.

yeah i never do that kind of experimentation -- i don't want to eat a bunch of shitty baked goods, might as well follow the recipe and add the flavors i want rather than try to cheat the system

also yeah i tried that no knead bread once and it was blah, not worth the effort as meager as it was. why bother.

i know a few p amazing bread bakers and it's v clear that i am not one of them

and i speak as a regular user of alternative gluten-free/low flours... let the experts do the trial and error, then just follow their recipe.

the first time i made irish soda bread, i was like "fuck you, my ancestors!"

because seriously, if you can make real bread, make it

I used to make bread a lot when I was a kid, but I don't do it at home now - my tiny kitchen is a big deterrent.

once when I was a kid i accidentally put bulgur instead of wheatgerm in the dough (mum used make a lot of tabbouleh back in the day) -- uugggh it was like gravel bread, I'm surprised we didn't break our teeth

i made bagels once when i was 12 or so
once
what a pain in the ass that was for a fucking BAGEL. i'm not disciplined enough to do that enough times to be good at it.

i guess i just don't like baking all that much. i am ok at it, i just don't really enjoy it.

we're supposed to learn bagels in class this semester. that's going to end in tears.

just remember that it's an exercise, not a judgement on your worth as a human! school is so cruel sometimes.

for some reason my program combined baking with the garde manger class -- so it's a bit of cognitive dissonance to be making pate brisee and then learning about aspics and chaud froid an hour later.

Cookies, scones, cakes are kids stuff and if you can't bake them that is OK! I will bake it.

The real task is pastry, frozen store-bought pastry is grody and a lot of recipes are like "add vinegar now" or "sift a pinch of salt" or "cut in with two knives" and there's that tragic moment when you're lifting your pastry from floury surface to quiche tray and it's all falling apart in your hands, or you prebake and the sides cave in, or your butter is too hot or too cold, or you're being pressured to crimp an edge or something

The nice thing about pastry in my experience is that every failed pastry bake will still produce a mass of crumbly flaky refuse that is nice to nibble on as you roll out a new one

Graham cracker crust is delicious but it tastes like cheating

Homemade bread is a con game imo, like "brew your own beer"

In my experience the only shitty things about baking are a) making sure you have all the correct tools, like a sifter or an angel food cake tray, and b) having to deal with oz vs. mL vs. Tbs vs. g vs. cups

gb - the only words in there that i know for sure are pate and aspic, neither of which I have ever eaten, much less made -- the rest i'm not 100% sure about = you are waaaaaay ahead of me
you are becoming an expert and learning the secret language -- i salute you!

i'm totally kiddie stuff when it comes to baking, there i said it!

pastry baking in summer = surest way to end up in the loony bin

soft butter has broken my heart many a time

pâte brisée is pie dough, it's not like goose liver pâté.

see? i didn't even know that! i'm pretty sure that the art of baking is something i would rather leave to the experts who take the time to do what they do well.

People at work seem remarkably impressed by my baking and the baking of a colleague. We're very much in the "i just followed the recipe to the letter, it's not that hard" camp. Bread and cakes are really easy. Cooking is harder.

I have the French Culinary Institute's 'The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Pastry Arts' at home, which looks like it would present more of a challenge, but i rarely want to bake for the office and can't be bothered to do much at home.

Homemade bread is a con game imo, like "brew your own beer"

I've kinda been like this with bread: it takes so long to make, and if yr fuckin with standard white, it always ends up being tasty direct out of the oven and then stale like .000334 seconds later >>:(

I've had some success on that front by using the ready bags of bread mix for the machines, but baking freehand. They add those preservatives and salts to it that give it a bit more oomf. BREAD NEEDS SALT.

Fruit bread? Now that I can get with. Ive made some damn tasty raisin toast loaves in my time.

I used to love baking butter bundt cakes and scones, but I lost my sweet tooth so I dont do it much now. Rrob is right tho: baking's a science, nothing like regular cooking. Only time I'll religiously follow the instructions.

Beholdeth: a raisin loaf I did a while back:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/179947_10150856610967757_533719155_n.jpg

Home-made bread does go stale fairly quickly without commercial preservatives but it makes the most amazing toast for days afterwards.

i guess i just don't like baking all that much. i am ok at it, i just don't really enjoy it.

^^^ That's me, except substitute 'good' for 'ok'.

I never baked much when I was little/younger because my mom turns Generalissimo during Christmas cookie baking and otherwise, she didn't have the time for making much more than rice krispie bars. I've turned out to be really good at things that work in a small kitchen, like brownies and cakes. Bread isn't something I'm keen to try at home - and it's one of the things I buy that has to be nice/organic/from a small shop. So nice, in fact, that it's a false economy to invest in the infrastructure of bread baking to reproduce the quality here at home. Also, you can get really good prepared pastry here because Europe, but I'm more a fan of making savoury pies when I can be bothered with pies at all.

If you use metric measures and follow a recipe correctly it's almost impossible to fuck it up. However, pound cake is great for freestyling once you know what you're doing. I make blueberry, chai flavour (dates, chai spices and a shotglass full of very black tea), and this one, with figs:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8105/8454629037_c3fb16f7e5.jpg

This has dried figs, fresh figs, fig purée, marinated figs and stewed figs in the batter, and a mix of melted butter and fig jam coating the top.

i'm a good cook but i stink at baking

this is me, he says immodestly. baking is just too *scientific* and unforgiving but I'm getting better w/computer stuff so maybe there's hope

having to deal with oz vs. mL vs. Tbs vs. g vs. cups

god I'd like to put a cap in the ass of whoever decided that 'cups' should be a measurement. just a needless annoyance. I am adequate at baking I guess but don't do a huge amt of it

thankfully things like "cups" here have been metricized so a "cup" is 250ml for eg.

can't cook, can't bake

^obviously my option

the "baking is a science, just follow the recipe" thing should make it slightly easier for me than the pure unadulterated panic and stress of cooking, but nothing i've ever tried has happened like the recipe says it should. there's always one stage at which everything just went wrong and fell apart and i couldn't work out why.

my bf makes bagels - i didn't know til seeing him do it that you POACH them! i don't even dare approach the oven when he is doing that.

just had a banana, cardamom and orange cake baked for me this week mmmmmm all mine

I think this "just follow the recipe thing" is a little misleading, there are so many different variables you can't control - heat source, equipment, quality of ingredients, and even slight differences in quantities can make big differences to the end result. My general experience as a shit cook with following (non baking) recipes is if nothing else the timings given can be unreliable by as much as 100%, and ok I've got enough common sense to see if something is in danger of burning or boiling dry or is nowhere near cooked, but that's enough to give me the fear and make it a less than straightforward and enjoyable experience.

Ok cook, ok baker, rarely bother with latter dough

ledge otm btw

book instruction rarely give enough detail imo (for baking) so seeing eg british bakeoff is useful

i have no common sense. i can't tell, visually, whether any food is cooked at all, let alone cooked perfectly. even if it's just a ready meal i pretty much have to burn it to make sure

i'm an artist not a scientist, baking is annoying

talking more about bread and stuff than cakes tho obv

i'm still sulking from my last loaf attempt and that was probably like a year ago :/

You're right, Ledge - it shouldn't go without saying that a reliable oven is both necessary and hard to gauge if you aren't habitually cooking. If I'm considering a new baking recipe I read at least ten of them to get an idea about what I should be doing/which cooks are overcomplicating with ingredients/timings and then apply the law of averages. Metric baking is great because all the other science is in mg/ml, so.

I'm pretty fond of saying that baking is really shopping plus science and art, so if you've got all three, you're golden. So glad your boyf is a good cook, Lex.

i don't even understand why anyone bakes bread. even the best bread isn't THAT nice or mindblowingly flavourful and bread is super-cheap. if you're gonna go to the trouble of baking something make a CAKE or a PIE or BAGELS or something somewhat exciting, surely.

All the above give ones house the scent of baked goods. That is irrepressible.

I am sort of interested in baking but only marginally more than say, brewing my own beer. Neither feels essential, surrounded as I am by an ever-growing army of yuppie shops and offies.

even the best bread isn't THAT nice or mindblowingly flavourful

would tend to disagree.

super-cheap, do me a lemon

The best homebaked bread isnt that much better than yr yuppie shop loaf costing three quid tho

i do like the idea of having a pet sourdough starter though, just malevolently getting hungry in the fridge

maybe take it for walks and stuff

i'm maybe a better baker than I am cook. When I was growing up everyone else in my family cooked, but no-one else in my family baked, so when a friend got me into baking it was like 'oh this can be my thing'. I don't really get the "follow the recipe to the letter" thing - so many baking recipes contain the mysterious quantity "one egg"! How can you be super focused on having exactly 175g of caster sugar when "one egg" could indicate a huge range of sizes and levels of freshness? (though this comes from fancy baking: if you've made macarons and had make sure you have 90g of egg whites that are untainted with yolk and also three days old, and still found there's flexibility, then... who cares about going over or under on amounts for a cake that people have been making for years of variable ingredients and variable ovens.)

Cooking and baking require a lot of talent to be really excellent at, but to be pretty good you only need a small amount of talent and the rest is learnt skills. The ways in which i'm only a pretty good cook and could improve are mostly to do with inexperience, unfamiliarity with processes, etc - i don't have the confidence of saying when a specific vegetable is done, how much more time something needs, whether a flavour needs more seasoning, etc. I'm used to the processes of baking, I have workarounds for the annoying stuff, I understand what the terminology means and when to stop or continue doing something: it's not that it comes easily, it's that it's become familiar.

having made bagels at home a couple of times tho i reckon i'd still buy them instead. so much faff.

The best homebaked bread isnt that much better than yr yuppie shop loaf costing three quid tho

i'd say usually it wouldn't be better at all?

untrue, there's nothing more delicious than feeling smug

I did add sage on accident.

“i didn’t have butter so I substituted some leftover crackers”

LOL come on now, I added those crackers deliberately.

you know i love it

Youn, yeast dough will rise at room temp, just slowly. I've done 48 hour cool rises with no problems and have always left biga (which is basically very wet dough) out over multiple nights as well. You mostly don't want it to dry out or for the yeasts to use up all the available sugars (when they will all die off).

Thanks! I took up making a few quick breads a while back but won't feel like I've begun to bake until I bake with yeast, can knead dough (to the transparent window pane test), and know how to roll a pie crust. I'm not so big on frosting, piping, etc.

It's great that breads change color with their ingredients. I love how walnuts can turn bread purple.

Well this was a fun rabbit-hole to fall down!

https://www.reddit.com/r/foodhacks/comments/b2yvun/interesting_fact_sunflower_seed_butter_turns/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbiEngKpVgQ

Both of those look like a spot-on cross-section of my 'doodles, and actually I just remembered that I scraped out some leftover sunflower seed butter with a new jar of PB, though I'm struggling to remember how much, anywhere from 25-75% of what I used.

I could've sworn that I've baked with sunflower seed butter before (because I usually buy that from TJ instead of PB) but now I'm doubting my memories! #lolold

i think i saw suggestions to reduce baking soda amts if using sunflower seed to counter whatever reaction but when baking goes beyond recipes into sciencey math equations i dip out, i like the science of the end result but if i need a calculator i’m baking something else

If it doesn't kill me and it doesn't taste bad, I can deal with the unexpected green.

And I guess I'm still falling down that rabbit-hole, the labcoats have looked into this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33401798/

one time i made a pumpkin pie with soy milk and it turned out gray?!?!?! like a dang zombie pumpkin pie!

I've been making pumpkin pie with soy milk for over a decade - works great as long as you use unsweetened soy milk. HMU if you want to see the recipe.

baking hive, i need advice!

i am relatively newly diagnosed w type 2 diabetes & am now at the point where i am managing pretty well

but loving baking as i did, i very much want to re-enter that arena again, even if it’s just for a christmas bake of some kind

i thought keto baking might be the go with erythritol as my sweetener & did a test-run lemon loaf bake last weekend w almond flour & granulated erythritol but it gave me suuuuch painful GI distress to such a degree that it’s clear that it is def Not For Me™️

does anyone have any recs for sweetener alternatives? or type 2 baking success?

Swerve is out since that is the same family of sugar alcohol, same w Allulose
monkfruit is out since that is mostly erythritol …
and most other replacement sweeteners aren’t very baking friendly so idk where that leaves me.

it seems like the way into this is prob ~low~ carb baking rather than ~no~ carb and just working w other sugars and almond flour … but so many of these websites are deeply unsatisfying in terms of actual baking and are so focused on the end result ~looking~ similar to “real food” that the process is a bummer & the end result taste kinda crap too

anyway … thoughts? suggestions?

Oh sorry to hear that! I didn't realize that Swerve is erythritrol, I use it regularly without incident but clearly different strokes etc. Would using overripe bananas be possible? Obviously that's sugar but also comes with a fair bit of vitamins and minerals, though you'd have to juggle proportions of the rest of your ingredients accordingly.

yeah swerve is like a combo of erythritol and other stuff

bananas may def be an option although i may need a few more tools since they do kinda limit you in terms of flavor

You can get pure monkfruit powder and liquid drops and I can attest it is a pain to deal with and you use such a tiny amount that it throws recipes off. I basically stopped baking when Mr. Jaq got the type 2 diagnosis so I wouldn't be contributing to his downfall. So now I bake favorites only very infrequently.

I do use Just Better fiber (corn based soluble fiber) in my coffee for the prebiotic factor but the bag says you can sub it for up to half the sugar in baking. So maybe it might be of use?

Hmm also maybe see how you respond to tapioca syrup or Vitafiber syrup (made from either corn or peas) - both much lower carb and glycemic index sweeteners with no sugar alcohols. You could bake with them if you reduce the liquid in the recipe you use.

thanks for the advice jaq! i will investigate those

it definitely seems like very infrequent “special occasion only” baking is going to be my new normal :(

One more: look up the various keto egg loaf recipes. You basically blend eggs and softened cream cheese into a batter. I've baked it in a loaf pan, sliced, toasted, and eaten with ChocZero maple syrup for keto french toast and baked it in a cast iron skillet with sausages dropped in and some mustard powder added to the batter for keto toad. Might hit some of the baking target.

oh interesting! thx

Is bread flour appropriate for quick bread (in this case a cheddar Jalapeno bread)?

sure, it'll work

Cream of Tartar, yuck.

I’m thinking of making my own sourdough starter but after some initial searching all the recipes I’ve seen say to start with whole wheat and feed with all purpose. Can I feed with whole wheat too? It’s all that I have.

Yes, it'll be fine!

Awesome, thanks!

have been preparing meals for my pops and his wife lately, she is gluten intolerant (sometimes she is tolerant I guess? she drinks beer so I dunno who knows) but I discovered Brazilian Sequilhos which has been a big hit, corn starch + condensed milk + butter

and then whatever else, have incorporated lemon/almond extract, and actual lemon/almond, tastes like a fancy sugar cookie, peanut butter/chocolate turns it into a more traditional cookie but anyway super simple and easy and delicious cookie base even if you don't care where the starch came from

Recipe pls!

worth experimenting with ratios but basically

1/2 cup room temp butter (~1 stick)
1/2 cup condensed milk (~half adorable lil can of the stuff)
~1 cup corn starch

350 for 10-15mins, 15-20 cookies

have been eyeballing the corn starch, erring on the conservative side yields a spread out/crispy caramelized edges thing while bumping it up makes a tighter dough, shortbread/Pfeffernusse territory

lately I split the dough in half, dash of lemon/almond extract/sliced almonds with a lemon juice/confectioners sugar icing on one pan and then vanilla extract/spoonful peanut butter/crushed peanut/chocolate on the other

So I figured I haven't done anything weird in a while, and so I decided to try to make chocolate chip cookies with prunes.

i would eat those! (i love prunes)

how did they turn out?

Texture was off and they weren't quite sweet enough, but not bad considering it's a first attempt! They weren't very airy so I'll probably reduce the number of prunes or bump up the baking soda. I was inspired by a base/crust I made once with prunes and walnuts, which I remember being pretty chewy.

Did you purée the prunes or just dump them in whole/chopped?

Pureed. Chopped would've been like big raisin chunks.

Which I think I would like actually!

prunes cut into small oieces would help the cookies to rise more, puree would make them too moist imo

Moisture of chopped pieces giving off steam and creating air pockets?

roll em in flour

Moisture of chopped pieces giving off steam and creating air pockets?

I tried making these at my wife's request (she saw the recipe online): https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018450-pistachio-rose-and-strawberry-buns

Did not get the dough to come out right, it didn't rise as much as it should. Still tasted OK, and the filling is very good. Two things, though — to some degree it just tastes like a fancy peanut-butter-jelly sandwich; and there is evidently no way to puree pistachios for "pistachio cream" and not have the resulting mix look kinda like poop lol.