baking: does it come easily to you?

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

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.

Why do I have a sudden craving for apples

I disagree with the "baking is science" thing once you're talking about bread and pastry, where even a simple thing such as "wet your fingers to reconnect the pastry" requires a velvet touch. I like bread makers tho. I like the cubic loaves they produce, and I like making my own baguette with them.

And bread is my favourite starch
I could live the rest of my life eating little baguettes stuffed with blue cheese and pecans but after a single slice of pie I'm usually done with pie for a couple days

Voted "good cook, stink at baking," but stink isn't the right word. I'm okay at it, just not interested enough to get really good. I've made several different kinds of breads, thought "okay, that's something I can say I've done," then go back to working with proteins and vegetables and more interesting edibles. I found out good homemade biscuits are actually pretty easy, but frozen biscuits are just as good, really.

I chose can't cook, can't bake even though I can do the basics of both, just don't have much skill or interest in either.

I mean, the question is "does it come easily to you" -- and I guess if baking requires precision, patience, and the desire to eat a lot of baked goods, my answer is "no" not because of skill/ability, but because of (1) lack of desire and (2) the preference for being creative in other ways. if i spent all my time baking things that i didn't want to eat, that would be kinda weird.

i'm very much a "hey if all the ingredients taste good together and i don't use too much or burn any of them i am SET" kind of cook so baking is not for me. i try to do my share of the cooking at home but the wife handles all the baked desserts and stuff.

I'm a mediocre baker, I keep it to soda breads and cookies and things that are batters instead of doughs. I've never made bread all by myself with the kneading and the punching down, but I grew up on homemade bread and unless my memory fails me it is PHENOMENAL.

Salty cookies 4eva

Salty cookies and spicy apple pie, dear celestial beings above.

I have made one hell of a lot of pizza dough breadsticks though when I was unemployed and broke and hungry. Yeast and flour are cheep.

I'm good at baking, but most people I've met irl that are bad at it really just don't follow directions, or are like LL's work friend and think Cool Whip is heavy whipping cream or whatever. It really is all about following the directions word for word. The "baking is a science" thing is not an entirely true statement, but there is a lot of science that is fundamental to baking and it's very important to know the role of each ingredient and not just go "Well I'm on a low salt diet so I skipped the salt, but I can't figure out what I did wrong." Beyond that, there is a lot of technique involved, but if you start with some basic recipes it's pretty simple stuff.

I tried to get into the "bake by weight, not volume!" camp for a while but realized that it doesn't make that huge of a difference; I go by the scoop-and-level method and it works out just fine. As long as your flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, baking powder etc adhere to an approximate ratio you should be OK.

If I learned how to make really lemony poundcake I WOULD EAT SO MUCH POUNDCAKE so it's better that I don't know.

salty brownies for me -- i've made a wide array of cakes and stuff like that. this is fun flavorful baking imo.

the kind of baking i don't like is "it took half a day and made a huge mess for me to eat this piece of bread and then watch it get stale before my eyes because no two people can eat that much bread that fast and no one wants your gift of partially stale bread" baking, ie a waste of my time/energy.

desserts and savory pies are worth time and energy. y'all can have the rest.

are calzones/empanadas/pasties "baking"? that's the kind of baking i enjoy.

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.