Baking is Not a Ritual

The key point is this: The big difference between baking and cooking is that baking involves much more chemistry than cooking, which means that altering the recipe without understanding what you're doing is much more likely to result in failure. (Bad substitutions/ratios in cooking means the result might taste/look a bit strange, but overall it'll likely be fairly close to the original. Bad substitutions/ratios in baking means you probably get a brick / dust / other unidentifiable garbage.)

Thus, if people approach baking like cooking, they probably fail. Repeatedly. Hence the ritual thinking.

Thank you for this! Two things that helped me immensely with developing my models of baking were (1) watching a lot of Bake Off, and (2) having to contend with dietary restrictions (I was vegan when I started baking in earnest, and am now gluten-free but not vegan, for complicated reasons). 

For (1): In addition to being both calming and delightful as a thing to watch, I find Bake Off really helpful because the bakers all have really good models of how and why baking works, and they often share them verbally. This, for example, is how I learned that kneading functions to 'develop' the gluten in a dough, and therefore cut it out of any recipe where I wasn't using gluten (although, naive substitution there is basically always doomed anyway), but that's only one among many examples. 

The other really cool thing is that you get to see the bakers make lots of mistakes, for both simple and complex steps. Observing failure modes is great for this kind of model-building, and it's all the better that you don't have to make the mistakes yourself!

For (2): Starting my baking career without eggs helped me get an intuitive feel for what they're used for (and also put me in complete awe of eggs, especially once I started using them). Similarly, cutting out gluten and seeing what happened to my tried and true recipes as a result made me understand what flour does better. Maybe I should have a concept of 'emulsifier', but I've gotten along pretty well with 'binding agent' vs 'raising agent'. (Correct me if I'm wrong but) eggs function as both. 

I never really went for weird ingredients like flax eggs or agar agar, which gave me a great chance to understand more common ingredients better! The trusty binding agents I have on hand if something isn't coming together are xanthan gum (dry) and applesauce (wet), although, I mean, usually you just want to add more of whatever is in the recipe (e.g. flour for dry, eggs for wet). For raising agents, vegan recipes will generally using both baking powder and [baking soda + acid]. Lemon juice and apple cider vinegar work equally well as the acid, although as an edge case you probably wouldn't want to, like, substitute apple cider vinegar for lemon juice in a recipe for lemon muffins.

There are also smaller things like, using almond milk instead of regular milk led me to realize that milk in recipes is almost always(?) more about fullness of flavor than about the fat, so you could really just use water and the recipe would still come out, though it would probably be less rich. Similarly, fats are somewhat interchangeable in many situations (e.g. melted butter vs olive oil in cupcakes probably doesn't make a huge difference) but definitely not all - for doughs in particular, you really want to pay attention to the behavior of the fat at the temperature you're working with, as you mentioned. Normal butter and vegan butter have slightly different melting points, which can affect doughs that you want to be flaky, and vegetable shortening has a higher melting point than either, which makes it good for doughs if you can't be arsed with all that freezing butter stuff. Unfortunately, butter tastes better than everything else.

Finally, since this is just a brain dump at this point, gluten-free all-purpose flour is heavier than normal flour, which makes it slightly harder to make rise. This isn't generally a problem for almost all recipes, but somehow turns into a complete disaster when you're using yeast. I try not to let failure stop me from trying things, but I am completely done with trying to make gluten-free yeasted breads. Even with all the knowledge I'm claiming to have here, I cannot fathom the depths of the disasters that occur in this realm.

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Okay well, that was a lot. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. And remember kids: if a recipe calls for self-rising flour, they're lying to you; just add baking powder and salt to your normal-ass flour and you'll be fine.

I like it. FWIW, I find this is exactly the same line that must be crossed to become an expert at many things. Some examples that come to mind, there are probably more I just don't have enough experience with to be able to be sure they are examples:

• programming
• mathematics
• writing

Things that seem like anti-examples, i.e. things that are not in this category with baking:

• rock climbing (although there is a lot of skill involved, you don't have to understand the gears to succeed, you can learn to intuitively make efficient motions that move you up without understanding too much about why or how that happens)
• meditating (although lots of people get into the gears, plenty of people successfully meditate either without a deep understanding of what they're doing or possibly actively mistaken theories that work anyway)

Again, I'm sure there are more, and I think for all of these there's plenty of room to argue on the margins.

If I had to guess at what the divider is it's something like how robust the ontological abstractions around the topic are at levels that matters for the task. The more robust, the less like baking, the more fragile and leaky, the more like baking.

I have been baking for a long time, but it took a surprisingly long while to get to this practical "not a ritual" stage. My problem was that I approached it as an academic subject: an expert tells you what you need to know when you ask, and then you try it. But the people around me knew how to bake in a practical, non-theoretical sense. So while my mother would immediately tell me how to fix a too runny batter and the importance of quickly working a pie dough, she could not explain why that worked in terms that I could understand. Much frustration ensued on both sides.

A while ago I came across Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" and Jeff Potter's "Cooking for Geeks". These books explained what was going on in a format that made sense to me - starch gelation, protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and so on - *and* linked it to the language of the kitchen. Suddenly I had freedom to experiment and observe but with the help of a framework of explicit chemistry and physics that helped me organise the observations. There has been a marked improvement in my results (although mother now finds me unbearably weird in the kitchen). It is also fun to share these insights: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1263895622433869827.html

The lesson of my experience is that sometimes it is important to seek out people who can explain and bootstrap your knowledge by speaking your "language", even if they are not the conveniently close and friendly people around you. When you get non-working explanations they usually do not explain much, and hence just become ritual rules. Figuring out *why* explanations do not work for you is the first step, but then one needs to look around for sources of the right kind of explanations (which in my case took far longer). Of course, if you are not as theoretical explanation-dependent as I am but more of the practical, empirical bent, you can sidestep this issue to a large extent.

A'ight. Engaging with the post a bit more than my previous comment (note: haven't yet read the whole thing, just the first half). 

I have some kind of aversive reaction to the claim:

The right way to approach baking is to realize it is not a ritual. Instead, try to understand the principles of how baking works, to understand why an ingredient is in the recipe, and why a particular step is needed

I certainly agree that you'll gain a lot of benefits if you approach baking this way. But, like, sometimes I just don't have the time/energy/investment to fully understand a process, and just want a blackbox procedure that mostly works. And, sometimes I try to fudge that procedure and then want to complain about it a bit.

(I think your overall point stands, and in other circumstances I might have been the person arguing that "yeah you really should understand the underlying process here.")

Man, I came here much more excited about the prospect for someone making the case "Baking is not a symbolic act that transforms you via meaning you ascribe to it", which, well, sounded (usually) true, but hinted at some kind of very interesting worldview disagreement somewhere.

(This is mostly a joke. Post seems pretty straightforward)

The only thing I want to add is that despite pretenses to sameness it's useful to remember that not all ovens are equal and having a conscious awareness of oven quirks can help a lot to diagnose what went wrong.

Excellent post! I'd love to see more content like this on LW.

In general this is also how I think about baking. One thing I struggle with, though, is understanding the role of ingredients. For example, I've been trying to figure out how to make vegan Choux pastry. When I replaced the eggs with aquafaba, I can get a great foam and it pipes out great. But the eggs also seem to have some kind of structural role, and my dough collapses to a flat sheet on the baking tray. How would you go about figuring out what role eggs play in the recipe?

Are there cookbooks that look at the world this way?

Great post. 

I've seen recipes written in the precise ritualistic format many times, but rarely seen discussions on the chemistry patterns/etc — how do people typically learn the finer points?

I imagine there's some cookbooks / tutorials that go into the deeper mechanics — is it that, or learning from a knowledgeable baker that understands the mechanics, or...?

This is really cool! I've been reading a lot of cookbooks on dessert/watching elementary baking videos for fun lately, and knowing why every ingredient does what it does is extremely interesting as well as useful.

I wonder, if more baking books emphasised all potential spanners in the works early on (climatic factors, different oven temperatures, etc), whether your approach to baking would be more widely adopted? Would a reframed focus on difference, rather than sameness, encourage independent understanding on the part of the cookbook owner?

It would be neat to have a bread baking recipe book (or website) in which each recipe was accompanied by nicely-designed and organized descriptions of the science behind each ingredient and step. Almost always, the filler in recipe books is autobiographical, or describes the dish itself; scientific descriptions are rare.

To me this doesn't seem too far off from the mentality/approach one should take when cooking or when making metaphorical bathtub drugs. Though it's probably in between the two regarding complexity.

The on thing that annoys me about baking as opposed to cooking is that for most of the process you can't taste things and adjust based on that, whereas with cooking there's usually more feedback you can get via constant tasting , which goes a long way especially when your only making the dish for yourself or yourself + people which have culinary preferences well known to you.

On the other hand, isn't it very easy for baking to fall into a taste/health trade-off where the better your pastries the more likely you are to regret eating them 10 years from now ?