The difference between cooking and baking is the difference between being an artist or a scientist. They are fundamentally different crafts, employing fundamentally different principles. Cooking is an art - your pots and pans are a blank canvas, on to which you add the ingredients you fancy, hoping for something beautiful and delicious, but sometimes ending up with something that tastes like one of Jackson Pollock's paintings might. And just the way an artist can turn the same paints that you and I use to finger paint into a masterpiece, a true cook/chef can turn a few simple ingredients into something magical.
Baking is a science, through and through. You must be precise with your measurements and precise with your temperature. You can tinker with a recipe, but it will change the chemistry and taste of the final product. But if you stay true to the exact measurements and temperature, you will turn out the same perfect cake or loaf of bread, time and time again.
Although I truly enjoy cooking, I am a scientist, not an artist. I honestly cannot come up with random recipes out of the blue. For example, I would never be original or creative enough to think to pair kimchi with tuna, or cheese with honey, except that I have tasted them together before and found them delicious. I can follow a recipe pretty well, and tinker with it to turn it into something that is my own, but the problem with cooking is that each time, the result is different. Four tomatoes is not always four tomatoes. Their sizes could be slightly different. The flavor and sweetness and water content varies. And so, the same recipe that turned out a perfect tomato soup or pasta sauce the last time you cooked could end up being too tart or acidic or watery. Cooking is imperfect - you will never create exactly what you created before, just like art.
But baking? Notwithstanding the use of fresh fruit, whose sweetness and water content can vary from time to time, you will basically get the same results every time if you are faithful to the recipe. You can add your changes to the recipe: add nuts or dried fruit or chocolate, change the flavor of icing on a cake, and so on, but the base of what you are baking - the cake, muffin, cookie or cake - you don't really mess with.
After I started my bakery (over 7 years ago - time flies!), I lost my love of baking. To me, it was a life lesson learned through real-life experience: if you turn your passion into your job, it will become a job. For a very long time, the thought of mixing butter with sugar and adding to a flour mixture - it just did not appeal to me at all. In fact, I detested the idea. But recently, I've been craving American baked goods: ginger molasses cookies, pumpkin bread, banana pudding. And in HK, they just don't exist - and if they do, they are a poor, poor version. So last night I decided it was time to get out the mixing bowls, spices and whisk. I started with something easy: pumpkin bread, which is an oil-based batter rather than a butter-based one. This means that you can make it all by hand, without an electric mixer, and that it's virtually impossible to mess up. I mixed my spices, salt and flour. Whisked the eggs into the sugar and pumpkin. Mixed together the wet and dry ingredients. Poured into loaf and muffin pans and stuck them into the oven. And about an hour later: the whole house smelled like American thanksgiving - pumpkin pie, cinnamon, cloves. My little convection oven bakes a bit unevenly, but for the most part, it was the pumpkin bread I baked at least a hundred times during my bakery days. Even El Hombre, after having a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin for breakfast this morning, exclaimed "that was delicious!" (and he is the toughest customer - every time I cook or bake something, he usually has a suggestion of how to make it better). I think I have my baking groove back. Well, let's not go that far. Baby steps. Next up: banana pudding (if I can find Nilla wafers in HK) and ginger molasses cookies (if I can find molasses).
Baking is a science, through and through. You must be precise with your measurements and precise with your temperature. You can tinker with a recipe, but it will change the chemistry and taste of the final product. But if you stay true to the exact measurements and temperature, you will turn out the same perfect cake or loaf of bread, time and time again.
Although I truly enjoy cooking, I am a scientist, not an artist. I honestly cannot come up with random recipes out of the blue. For example, I would never be original or creative enough to think to pair kimchi with tuna, or cheese with honey, except that I have tasted them together before and found them delicious. I can follow a recipe pretty well, and tinker with it to turn it into something that is my own, but the problem with cooking is that each time, the result is different. Four tomatoes is not always four tomatoes. Their sizes could be slightly different. The flavor and sweetness and water content varies. And so, the same recipe that turned out a perfect tomato soup or pasta sauce the last time you cooked could end up being too tart or acidic or watery. Cooking is imperfect - you will never create exactly what you created before, just like art.
But baking? Notwithstanding the use of fresh fruit, whose sweetness and water content can vary from time to time, you will basically get the same results every time if you are faithful to the recipe. You can add your changes to the recipe: add nuts or dried fruit or chocolate, change the flavor of icing on a cake, and so on, but the base of what you are baking - the cake, muffin, cookie or cake - you don't really mess with.
After I started my bakery (over 7 years ago - time flies!), I lost my love of baking. To me, it was a life lesson learned through real-life experience: if you turn your passion into your job, it will become a job. For a very long time, the thought of mixing butter with sugar and adding to a flour mixture - it just did not appeal to me at all. In fact, I detested the idea. But recently, I've been craving American baked goods: ginger molasses cookies, pumpkin bread, banana pudding. And in HK, they just don't exist - and if they do, they are a poor, poor version. So last night I decided it was time to get out the mixing bowls, spices and whisk. I started with something easy: pumpkin bread, which is an oil-based batter rather than a butter-based one. This means that you can make it all by hand, without an electric mixer, and that it's virtually impossible to mess up. I mixed my spices, salt and flour. Whisked the eggs into the sugar and pumpkin. Mixed together the wet and dry ingredients. Poured into loaf and muffin pans and stuck them into the oven. And about an hour later: the whole house smelled like American thanksgiving - pumpkin pie, cinnamon, cloves. My little convection oven bakes a bit unevenly, but for the most part, it was the pumpkin bread I baked at least a hundred times during my bakery days. Even El Hombre, after having a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin for breakfast this morning, exclaimed "that was delicious!" (and he is the toughest customer - every time I cook or bake something, he usually has a suggestion of how to make it better). I think I have my baking groove back. Well, let's not go that far. Baby steps. Next up: banana pudding (if I can find Nilla wafers in HK) and ginger molasses cookies (if I can find molasses).
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