I am a Baker, and having talked to numerous other Bakers and even a few Cooks, I’ve come to the conclusion there is a completely different mindset when it comes to cooking. For me it’s similar to shoving a page of calculus derivative problems at a grade school student who has just learned what an x and y graph looks like. It’s relatively easy to number the two bold lines intersecting at (0,0) and then plot a series of paired integers with dots. The difficulty arises when those single digit numbers inside the parenthesis are switched out for mathematical equations represented by letters and unintelligible symbols. Bring on the Tylenol.
Like any good argument there are two sides to every story. On the one side, Cooks are the first to offer they don’t need a recipe and tend to throw ingredients together by taste, claiming Bakers must adhere to a recipe like NASA computers plotting Space Shuttle reentry calculations, exact to the micrograms.
It’s my theory (in a Utopian world) that bakers should be able to cook and cooks should be able to bake. After all, we are only combining ingredients, adding heat and waiting an amount of time, and yet somehow there exists an unfathomably deep canyon between the two.
Bakers (and Cooks) use recipes as a set of directions, knowing like any well plotted roadmap that if you take I-90 from Seattle you will eventually wind up in Boston, every time. And it won’t rely on how fast you drive, how many rest stops or side jaunts you take, the result is always the same. Leave Seattle, end of the road is Boston. Any desired outcome requires some specific guidelines, but that doesn’t mean a Baker won’t play around a bit with ingredients. A pinch of spice here, a swap of ingredient there and we’ve now invented a new cookie.
So why doesn’t this cooking thing make sense? Take the latest episode in my quest to teach myself to cook. I found a recipe for parmesan chicken. I read through it a couple of times, make sure I have close to the ingredients on hand, because cooking claims you don’t have to be precise, correct?
Step one, pull the chicken breasts from the freezer and thaw 4 pieces. After the chicken is thawed I realize I hadn’t noticed that 4 pieces refers to 4 pieces after you cut the breasts in half. Okay, there is extra chicken and we set it aside figuring we’ll find a use for it shortly. Turn the oven on – check. Heat oil in pan on the stove top and drop in bread crumbs with garlic, salt and pepper then set aside in a bowl. Look back at recipe which calls for tomato puree, but I have tomato sauce and they’re close, right? Throw that into pan and bring to boil with some water and a few more spices and let it reduce. About 10 minutes later (read a chapter or two while waiting) the instructions say to drop the chicken into the sauce. Yep, it’s bubbling away nicely and about ready to put in the oven when I realize there is still a bowl of breadcrumbs off to the side of the stove. In a panic I reach for the magazine and read down the directions. I’ve not missed a step according to the printed word, but apparently I was expected to be a mind reader and should have breaded the chicken before dumping it into the sauce.
Yep, I’m looking at a pan of chicken and sauce, happily bubbling away on my stove. Being the baker and optimist I am, I took that bowl of bread crumbly goodness and dumped it into the sauce. Call me bold. I did stir the crumbly bits around in an attempt to fuse the ingredients before placing the entire mess into the oven. I allowed it to cook for the appropriate amount of time before extracting the pan and adding the parmesan cheese to the top and then let it sit a few more minutes inside to brown the cheese.
The final product? It was cooked, and one could probably describe it as more of a soupy muddled parmesan chicken dish. Awkward but tasty, and lesson learned.
Cooking requires more thought than baking as it’s a completely different set of rules.
Like any good argument there are two sides to every story. On the one side, Cooks are the first to offer they don’t need a recipe and tend to throw ingredients together by taste, claiming Bakers must adhere to a recipe like NASA computers plotting Space Shuttle reentry calculations, exact to the micrograms.
It’s my theory (in a Utopian world) that bakers should be able to cook and cooks should be able to bake. After all, we are only combining ingredients, adding heat and waiting an amount of time, and yet somehow there exists an unfathomably deep canyon between the two.
Bakers (and Cooks) use recipes as a set of directions, knowing like any well plotted roadmap that if you take I-90 from Seattle you will eventually wind up in Boston, every time. And it won’t rely on how fast you drive, how many rest stops or side jaunts you take, the result is always the same. Leave Seattle, end of the road is Boston. Any desired outcome requires some specific guidelines, but that doesn’t mean a Baker won’t play around a bit with ingredients. A pinch of spice here, a swap of ingredient there and we’ve now invented a new cookie.
So why doesn’t this cooking thing make sense? Take the latest episode in my quest to teach myself to cook. I found a recipe for parmesan chicken. I read through it a couple of times, make sure I have close to the ingredients on hand, because cooking claims you don’t have to be precise, correct?
Step one, pull the chicken breasts from the freezer and thaw 4 pieces. After the chicken is thawed I realize I hadn’t noticed that 4 pieces refers to 4 pieces after you cut the breasts in half. Okay, there is extra chicken and we set it aside figuring we’ll find a use for it shortly. Turn the oven on – check. Heat oil in pan on the stove top and drop in bread crumbs with garlic, salt and pepper then set aside in a bowl. Look back at recipe which calls for tomato puree, but I have tomato sauce and they’re close, right? Throw that into pan and bring to boil with some water and a few more spices and let it reduce. About 10 minutes later (read a chapter or two while waiting) the instructions say to drop the chicken into the sauce. Yep, it’s bubbling away nicely and about ready to put in the oven when I realize there is still a bowl of breadcrumbs off to the side of the stove. In a panic I reach for the magazine and read down the directions. I’ve not missed a step according to the printed word, but apparently I was expected to be a mind reader and should have breaded the chicken before dumping it into the sauce.
Yep, I’m looking at a pan of chicken and sauce, happily bubbling away on my stove. Being the baker and optimist I am, I took that bowl of bread crumbly goodness and dumped it into the sauce. Call me bold. I did stir the crumbly bits around in an attempt to fuse the ingredients before placing the entire mess into the oven. I allowed it to cook for the appropriate amount of time before extracting the pan and adding the parmesan cheese to the top and then let it sit a few more minutes inside to brown the cheese.
The final product? It was cooked, and one could probably describe it as more of a soupy muddled parmesan chicken dish. Awkward but tasty, and lesson learned.
Cooking requires more thought than baking as it’s a completely different set of rules.
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