I have come to the conclusion that i love cooking but hate baking? Why? Because baking is too much like quantum physics. The act of observing changes the result of the experiment. I am not crazy, hear me out.
Think about it: When you open your oven to inspect the status of whatever it is you are baking, perhaps cutting into it to see if the inside is done, you are letting a lot of the heat out and the whole timing of the recipe is thrown off! How are you supposed to know how many extra minutes this adds to the baking time?!
It must have taken so much trial and error and so many wasted ingredients for the people who came up with the recipes for baking before they got it right…
Just a random thought that popped into my head today while i was preparing dinner.
Absolutely, baking a cake is so much trial and error, but once you find the sweet spot, it works
Tried lots of temperatures, different times, different recipes. Burned, underbaked, overbaked, until it became perfect
I guess it’s just something you have to enjoy. I just couldn’t justify wasting that much food on failed experiments.
With cooking you can make mistakes and still recover from it. Just don’t burn anything and don’t oversalt it - apart from that almost everything else can be rescued and made edible. But when baking, you make one mistake and you might just have to start from scratch.
Everything has to be so precise, even the quantities. If i put double the flour in a cake it’s going to be ruined. If i accidentally put twice the onions in my stew, my soup or my stir fry, who cares?
Cooking feels improvisational and fun. Baking feels rigid and strict.