Cooking vs. Baking

I started my online class today. Given that I had a whole day unexpectedly free I felt the compulsion to balance it with freedom as well as giving-freedom-later work. Good thing too, cause my first assignment was due at 11:55PM tonight. They aren't messing around.

Still it wasn't a hard assignment, it was a typical "Hello, my name is Kate. I am a third semester student in SLIS and I teach..." blah blah blah. With the exception of having to fuse the whole thing in with a description of how we ourselves are managers I could have copied it from any one of my other online classes; and thus I began. I typed, figuring 200 word wouldn't be hard to stay under. Three hundred words later (ooops, I guess I'm verbose) I had some editing to do, and a lack of desire to make my piece as flat as all the other entries I'd read so far.

I was successful. One shortcut I didn't take though was lumping together "cooking" and "baking." It is often tempting. Most people would. I won't. They aren't the same. About the only thing they have in common is that they are activities that usually take place in a kitchen and they usually produce products that are consumed orally or thrown down the garbage disposal.

I'm going to steal a couple definitions from Alton Brown:
1) food + heat = cooking
2) food x mixing + heat = baking

You cook stir fry. You bake cupcakes. You cook a lasagna. You bake a cheesecake.

Cooking is a relatively forgiving process. As long as you don't get too crazy with the flavors, add too much heat or not enough you will generally wind up with something edible. You can substitute like crazy. You can use chicken instead of pork, you can use pears instead of apples. People might look at you strange, but then you can just say you got the recipe from Rachel Ray and they will contentedly eat your concoction.

Baking however is not a forgiving process. While cooking is an art and can truly be done with "a dash of this and a dop of that" baking is NOT. Baking is a science. Ignoring a small detail, like leveling mounding cup of flour or packing/not packing the brown sugar can change everything. You might blow up the lab. The ingredients are indeed cheap, but you got to know what you are doing. You can over mix and you can under mix and either can yield holes in the cupcakes or rubbery cookies. Yes it matters if there are large eggs at room temperature. It matters that the butter is creamed and not melted and it matters that you use shortening, margarine, or oil... even if they are all from corn.

Sometimes I feel like a chef. I like the creativity, the art and the tolerance. Things go together, they work out and I can improvise much more. Sometimes I feel like a baker, I like the directions and the rigidity of it. You can't play with it unless you know what you are doing; but when you do know what you are doing the product is much more... sweet. Sometimes I like the big picture. I like thinking about making pesto and noodles but I'm not going to concern myself with all the little details. Sometimes I like the art. Sometimes I like the science, I like being told exactly what to do here and there without questioning or improvising, emerging with Sarah's 4-H cookies. But what I really want to do is make the sweet stuff my own.