the funniest dynamc between my boyfriend and i is the chef/baker divide runs so deep. experimentally my boyfriend is a genius with figuring out what flavor profiles will not just taste good together but also will be enjoyed by the specific audience he is cooking for. a recipe is not a guidebook so much as a suggestion and he will frankenstein ideas together to get exactly what he wants to happen. he also didnt know that sugar will not work properly if you dont mix it with the wet ingredients in banana bread and when i asked ‘why didnt you do it in the order of the recipe’ he said ‘i didnt really think it mattered’. autistically i exploded his head in my mind
when your pumpkin loaf or banana loaf is not delightfully moist and soft and sweet like the pillow of a cherub and instead is like a dense fruitcake brick of misery we will see who is pretentious then. beast
“Pretentious”???
Baking is chemitry, if you don’t do things in the right order, it can mess up the whole recipe.
Yep, this.
And technically, regular cooking is ALSO chemistry. It’s harder to fuck up, but the order in which you add things can absolutely change the taste and/or consistency. Consider that the reason Indian food tastes Like That and no other cuisine on earth even seems to be related to it is because Indians developed a method of blooming and opening the spices before anything else was added
. If you cook an Indian curry by dumping everything in the pan all at the same time you might get something delicious, but it’s going to be noticeably not an Indian curry.
In most cooking, your order of operations mostly revolve around heat control. You toast your spices and fry your aromatics now, because once there’s much moisture in there, you put a hard cap on how hot your material can get. We put the potatoes in before the peas, so they finish at the same time.
Pretty much all of these things can be seen or smelled as they’re happening. Most other things can be altered in real time. Anything that is more chemical in nature is probably like a marinade or brine, in which case it really doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it’s all in there.
Baking is far more at the mercy of mostly invisible factors like flour hydration and gluten development. There won’t always be enough free moisture to dissolve sugar, so you need to do that early. Directions like “let rest for an hour in the fridge” sound like bullshit until you realize that chemical chains are relaxing and water it seeping into microscopic starch packets, and subtle changes in the texture will have a huge impact of how well your leaveners can fluff that shit up and turn your wet brick into a fluffy loaf.
