baking: does it come easily to you?

f*** no, baking is so difficult!

the workings of dough are ... mysterious to say the least

i love baking. i struggle with pastry, but I still like to keep trying. i find it kinda zen? maybe?

i am good at baking and at cooking. get yr shit together, people; it's science.
<3

i am, if i do say so, fairly skilled at general meal cooking
moderately skilled at baking, but only when some freehanding is involved -- i'm not a perfectionist, but i like to experiment.

which option do i choose?

moderately skilled = you can bake, girl

ok, i dunno -- i'm not into perfection (although my scone recipe -- which is stolen from the joy of cooking -- won someone (not me) a scone-baking work contest once!)
so i'll take it even if i don't really believe it -- most of my freehanding involves spice mixtures and additions (fruit, nuts, chocolate, toffee, SALTED CARAMEL CHIPS, sugar with ground up lavender flowers in it) not formulas like ratios of fat/flour etc. That shit perplexes me -- I use the same few recipes every time and just tweak with the above things.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/1175989-1146043-Marijuana-VOTE-logo.jpg.jpeg

baking works as long as you follow the recipe to the letter and aren't at some crazy altitude.
but i've known so many people who cannot follow a recipe. IT IS NOT HARD?? you read and you do. i don't know, talk to me when you're trying to make a gluten-free thing rise, because that is next level (literally! #archer)

i think any skill I have just comes from having good memories of baking as a kid with my mum and grandmother -- whenever the weather turns cold, the first thing I look forward to is a baking afternoon. and i love thanksgiving/christmas, coming up with things to bake and having a weird sense of purpose about it. idk.

yeah, i'm of the belief that it's not that hard too, but you would be surprised. one time i gave my scone recipe to a difft work friend and she thought that Cool Whip™ was "heavy whipping cream" and wondered why her baked goods were not as delicious as she expected them to be.

i have a friend who makes the most amazing Romanian desserts -- i'm not even remotely close to her level of skill, I'll put it that way. She is a natural.

xxxxpost i can follow a recipe but i hate following recipes! i always think i can do things better/more resourcefully than what's written down. which works for cooking, but i guess not for baking.

I definitely am dependent on recipes; I can't bake from scratch, or at least I don't like the idea of it. I like rules. Guidelines. I need a handrail.

bread is p much beyond my level of interest -- too complicated, not enough flavor payoff for the work involved, prefer to let someone else make that for me
i have made some breads, but they always wind up stale. every thanksgiving i make some p amazing butter rolls. but that's 1x a year.

and yeah cooking is def separate to baking -- I'll wing meals all the time. But I learned early on: with baking you pretty much have to follow the recipe to the letter, at least until you get a feel for it and can substitute to your own tastes etc.

yeah, cooking is far far more amenable to invention than baking is. i mean, add some cranberries to the dough or whatever, but don't fuck with the amount of baking powder or the flour quality.

i would love to make good bread. i tried the no-knead method twice -- the first time the dough barely rose, the second time it overfermented and smelled like bad beer.

yeah i never do that kind of experimentation -- i don't want to eat a bunch of shitty baked goods, might as well follow the recipe and add the flavors i want rather than try to cheat the system

also yeah i tried that no knead bread once and it was blah, not worth the effort as meager as it was. why bother.

i know a few p amazing bread bakers and it's v clear that i am not one of them

and i speak as a regular user of alternative gluten-free/low flours... let the experts do the trial and error, then just follow their recipe.

the first time i made irish soda bread, i was like "fuck you, my ancestors!"

because seriously, if you can make real bread, make it

I used to make bread a lot when I was a kid, but I don't do it at home now - my tiny kitchen is a big deterrent.

once when I was a kid i accidentally put bulgur instead of wheatgerm in the dough (mum used make a lot of tabbouleh back in the day) -- uugggh it was like gravel bread, I'm surprised we didn't break our teeth

i made bagels once when i was 12 or so
once
what a pain in the ass that was for a fucking BAGEL. i'm not disciplined enough to do that enough times to be good at it.

i guess i just don't like baking all that much. i am ok at it, i just don't really enjoy it.

we're supposed to learn bagels in class this semester. that's going to end in tears.

just remember that it's an exercise, not a judgement on your worth as a human! school is so cruel sometimes.

for some reason my program combined baking with the garde manger class -- so it's a bit of cognitive dissonance to be making pate brisee and then learning about aspics and chaud froid an hour later.

Cookies, scones, cakes are kids stuff and if you can't bake them that is OK! I will bake it.

The real task is pastry, frozen store-bought pastry is grody and a lot of recipes are like "add vinegar now" or "sift a pinch of salt" or "cut in with two knives" and there's that tragic moment when you're lifting your pastry from floury surface to quiche tray and it's all falling apart in your hands, or you prebake and the sides cave in, or your butter is too hot or too cold, or you're being pressured to crimp an edge or something

The nice thing about pastry in my experience is that every failed pastry bake will still produce a mass of crumbly flaky refuse that is nice to nibble on as you roll out a new one

Graham cracker crust is delicious but it tastes like cheating

Homemade bread is a con game imo, like "brew your own beer"

In my experience the only shitty things about baking are a) making sure you have all the correct tools, like a sifter or an angel food cake tray, and b) having to deal with oz vs. mL vs. Tbs vs. g vs. cups

gb - the only words in there that i know for sure are pate and aspic, neither of which I have ever eaten, much less made -- the rest i'm not 100% sure about = you are waaaaaay ahead of me
you are becoming an expert and learning the secret language -- i salute you!

i'm totally kiddie stuff when it comes to baking, there i said it!

pastry baking in summer = surest way to end up in the loony bin

soft butter has broken my heart many a time

pâte brisée is pie dough, it's not like goose liver pâté.

see? i didn't even know that! i'm pretty sure that the art of baking is something i would rather leave to the experts who take the time to do what they do well.

People at work seem remarkably impressed by my baking and the baking of a colleague. We're very much in the "i just followed the recipe to the letter, it's not that hard" camp. Bread and cakes are really easy. Cooking is harder.

I have the French Culinary Institute's 'The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Pastry Arts' at home, which looks like it would present more of a challenge, but i rarely want to bake for the office and can't be bothered to do much at home.

Homemade bread is a con game imo, like "brew your own beer"

I've kinda been like this with bread: it takes so long to make, and if yr fuckin with standard white, it always ends up being tasty direct out of the oven and then stale like .000334 seconds later >>:(

I've had some success on that front by using the ready bags of bread mix for the machines, but baking freehand. They add those preservatives and salts to it that give it a bit more oomf. BREAD NEEDS SALT.

Fruit bread? Now that I can get with. Ive made some damn tasty raisin toast loaves in my time.

I used to love baking butter bundt cakes and scones, but I lost my sweet tooth so I dont do it much now. Rrob is right tho: baking's a science, nothing like regular cooking. Only time I'll religiously follow the instructions.

Beholdeth: a raisin loaf I did a while back:

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Home-made bread does go stale fairly quickly without commercial preservatives but it makes the most amazing toast for days afterwards.

i guess i just don't like baking all that much. i am ok at it, i just don't really enjoy it.

^^^ That's me, except substitute 'good' for 'ok'.

I never baked much when I was little/younger because my mom turns Generalissimo during Christmas cookie baking and otherwise, she didn't have the time for making much more than rice krispie bars. I've turned out to be really good at things that work in a small kitchen, like brownies and cakes. Bread isn't something I'm keen to try at home - and it's one of the things I buy that has to be nice/organic/from a small shop. So nice, in fact, that it's a false economy to invest in the infrastructure of bread baking to reproduce the quality here at home. Also, you can get really good prepared pastry here because Europe, but I'm more a fan of making savoury pies when I can be bothered with pies at all.

If you use metric measures and follow a recipe correctly it's almost impossible to fuck it up. However, pound cake is great for freestyling once you know what you're doing. I make blueberry, chai flavour (dates, chai spices and a shotglass full of very black tea), and this one, with figs:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8105/8454629037_c3fb16f7e5.jpg

This has dried figs, fresh figs, fig purée, marinated figs and stewed figs in the batter, and a mix of melted butter and fig jam coating the top.

i'm a good cook but i stink at baking

this is me, he says immodestly. baking is just too *scientific* and unforgiving but I'm getting better w/computer stuff so maybe there's hope

having to deal with oz vs. mL vs. Tbs vs. g vs. cups

god I'd like to put a cap in the ass of whoever decided that 'cups' should be a measurement. just a needless annoyance. I am adequate at baking I guess but don't do a huge amt of it

thankfully things like "cups" here have been metricized so a "cup" is 250ml for eg.

can't cook, can't bake

^obviously my option

the "baking is a science, just follow the recipe" thing should make it slightly easier for me than the pure unadulterated panic and stress of cooking, but nothing i've ever tried has happened like the recipe says it should. there's always one stage at which everything just went wrong and fell apart and i couldn't work out why.

my bf makes bagels - i didn't know til seeing him do it that you POACH them! i don't even dare approach the oven when he is doing that.

just had a banana, cardamom and orange cake baked for me this week mmmmmm all mine

I think this "just follow the recipe thing" is a little misleading, there are so many different variables you can't control - heat source, equipment, quality of ingredients, and even slight differences in quantities can make big differences to the end result. My general experience as a shit cook with following (non baking) recipes is if nothing else the timings given can be unreliable by as much as 100%, and ok I've got enough common sense to see if something is in danger of burning or boiling dry or is nowhere near cooked, but that's enough to give me the fear and make it a less than straightforward and enjoyable experience.

Ok cook, ok baker, rarely bother with latter dough

ledge otm btw

book instruction rarely give enough detail imo (for baking) so seeing eg british bakeoff is useful

i have no common sense. i can't tell, visually, whether any food is cooked at all, let alone cooked perfectly. even if it's just a ready meal i pretty much have to burn it to make sure

i'm an artist not a scientist, baking is annoying

talking more about bread and stuff than cakes tho obv

i'm still sulking from my last loaf attempt and that was probably like a year ago :/

You're right, Ledge - it shouldn't go without saying that a reliable oven is both necessary and hard to gauge if you aren't habitually cooking. If I'm considering a new baking recipe I read at least ten of them to get an idea about what I should be doing/which cooks are overcomplicating with ingredients/timings and then apply the law of averages. Metric baking is great because all the other science is in mg/ml, so.

I'm pretty fond of saying that baking is really shopping plus science and art, so if you've got all three, you're golden. So glad your boyf is a good cook, Lex.

i don't even understand why anyone bakes bread. even the best bread isn't THAT nice or mindblowingly flavourful and bread is super-cheap. if you're gonna go to the trouble of baking something make a CAKE or a PIE or BAGELS or something somewhat exciting, surely.

All the above give ones house the scent of baked goods. That is irrepressible.

I am sort of interested in baking but only marginally more than say, brewing my own beer. Neither feels essential, surrounded as I am by an ever-growing army of yuppie shops and offies.

even the best bread isn't THAT nice or mindblowingly flavourful

would tend to disagree.

super-cheap, do me a lemon

The best homebaked bread isnt that much better than yr yuppie shop loaf costing three quid tho

i do like the idea of having a pet sourdough starter though, just malevolently getting hungry in the fridge

maybe take it for walks and stuff

i'm maybe a better baker than I am cook. When I was growing up everyone else in my family cooked, but no-one else in my family baked, so when a friend got me into baking it was like 'oh this can be my thing'. I don't really get the "follow the recipe to the letter" thing - so many baking recipes contain the mysterious quantity "one egg"! How can you be super focused on having exactly 175g of caster sugar when "one egg" could indicate a huge range of sizes and levels of freshness? (though this comes from fancy baking: if you've made macarons and had make sure you have 90g of egg whites that are untainted with yolk and also three days old, and still found there's flexibility, then... who cares about going over or under on amounts for a cake that people have been making for years of variable ingredients and variable ovens.)

Cooking and baking require a lot of talent to be really excellent at, but to be pretty good you only need a small amount of talent and the rest is learnt skills. The ways in which i'm only a pretty good cook and could improve are mostly to do with inexperience, unfamiliarity with processes, etc - i don't have the confidence of saying when a specific vegetable is done, how much more time something needs, whether a flavour needs more seasoning, etc. I'm used to the processes of baking, I have workarounds for the annoying stuff, I understand what the terminology means and when to stop or continue doing something: it's not that it comes easily, it's that it's become familiar.

having made bagels at home a couple of times tho i reckon i'd still buy them instead. so much faff.

The best homebaked bread isnt that much better than yr yuppie shop loaf costing three quid tho

i'd say usually it wouldn't be better at all?

untrue, there's nothing more delicious than feeling smug

This has dried figs, fresh figs, fig purée, marinated figs and stewed figs in the batter, and a mix of melted butter and fig jam coating the top.

Why do I have a sudden craving for apples

I disagree with the "baking is science" thing once you're talking about bread and pastry, where even a simple thing such as "wet your fingers to reconnect the pastry" requires a velvet touch. I like bread makers tho. I like the cubic loaves they produce, and I like making my own baguette with them.

And bread is my favourite starch
I could live the rest of my life eating little baguettes stuffed with blue cheese and pecans but after a single slice of pie I'm usually done with pie for a couple days

Voted "good cook, stink at baking," but stink isn't the right word. I'm okay at it, just not interested enough to get really good. I've made several different kinds of breads, thought "okay, that's something I can say I've done," then go back to working with proteins and vegetables and more interesting edibles. I found out good homemade biscuits are actually pretty easy, but frozen biscuits are just as good, really.

I chose can't cook, can't bake even though I can do the basics of both, just don't have much skill or interest in either.

I mean, the question is "does it come easily to you" -- and I guess if baking requires precision, patience, and the desire to eat a lot of baked goods, my answer is "no" not because of skill/ability, but because of (1) lack of desire and (2) the preference for being creative in other ways. if i spent all my time baking things that i didn't want to eat, that would be kinda weird.

i'm very much a "hey if all the ingredients taste good together and i don't use too much or burn any of them i am SET" kind of cook so baking is not for me. i try to do my share of the cooking at home but the wife handles all the baked desserts and stuff.

I'm a mediocre baker, I keep it to soda breads and cookies and things that are batters instead of doughs. I've never made bread all by myself with the kneading and the punching down, but I grew up on homemade bread and unless my memory fails me it is PHENOMENAL.

Salty cookies 4eva

Salty cookies and spicy apple pie, dear celestial beings above.

I have made one hell of a lot of pizza dough breadsticks though when I was unemployed and broke and hungry. Yeast and flour are cheep.

I'm good at baking, but most people I've met irl that are bad at it really just don't follow directions, or are like LL's work friend and think Cool Whip is heavy whipping cream or whatever. It really is all about following the directions word for word. The "baking is a science" thing is not an entirely true statement, but there is a lot of science that is fundamental to baking and it's very important to know the role of each ingredient and not just go "Well I'm on a low salt diet so I skipped the salt, but I can't figure out what I did wrong." Beyond that, there is a lot of technique involved, but if you start with some basic recipes it's pretty simple stuff.

I tried to get into the "bake by weight, not volume!" camp for a while but realized that it doesn't make that huge of a difference; I go by the scoop-and-level method and it works out just fine. As long as your flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, baking powder etc adhere to an approximate ratio you should be OK.

If I learned how to make really lemony poundcake I WOULD EAT SO MUCH POUNDCAKE so it's better that I don't know.

salty brownies for me -- i've made a wide array of cakes and stuff like that. this is fun flavorful baking imo.

the kind of baking i don't like is "it took half a day and made a huge mess for me to eat this piece of bread and then watch it get stale before my eyes because no two people can eat that much bread that fast and no one wants your gift of partially stale bread" baking, ie a waste of my time/energy.

desserts and savory pies are worth time and energy. y'all can have the rest.

are calzones/empanadas/pasties "baking"? that's the kind of baking i enjoy.

I'm a good cook for the most part, but several recent experiments with yeast breads were all flops. I don't mind buying store bread, but it was disappointing when the panettone didn't work--that stuff is NICE for breakfast.

I'm considering trying one of the no-knead bread recipies floating around the internet. Yet simultaneously I'm thinking MAYBE I should be cutting back on starches. Well, I contain multitudes (which is the problem that has me thinking maybe I should give up starches).

There was a while when I was being really good about making a lot of cookie dough and freezing it in tube shapes, rolled up in plastic wrap & foil, and then slicing off cookies like 8 at a time so I could have fresh ones every few days. That was pretty smart.

tbf i haven't really tried to bake enough to determine if i'm actually any good at it but it does not feel like it comes naturally to me

I have one really good no-knead bread recipe; I'll try to remember to post it when I get home. But I have tried a few others that were disappointing.

Homemade bread is for when you are having guests for dinner and want the house to smell wonderful! Otherwise, yeah, way too much bread.

I can only barely remember homemade doughtnuts and I have never really longed to deep-fry anything else in the food world, but I would eat homemade doughnuts until I felt sick.

There's some good, easy bread recipes in the tassajara bread book -- I think it was recommended to me from ilx in the first place. I like baking and it isn't something I have had many problems with. It's omelets that I'll never get right.

I'm very, very good at bread but pretty shit at anything else. We almost never buy bread anymore. I just made two loaves of a great honey oatmeal bread last night! (Having a KitchenAid mixer w/a dough hook is key here btw.)

YES. I was lucky enough to get the industrial grade motor KitcheAid mixer and it does a lot of the work for you. I don't think I'd really enjoy baking much if I didn't have it, because my arthritis makes it painful to do all of that mixing and kneading by hand.

I'm a good enough cook and love baking. Have given up on grains though so I only bake two or three times a year, usually scratch cakes and fruit crisps/cobblers. I was baking all our bread until a few years ago, and made some really nice loaves.

Misread this as 'barking'.

I am a good cook, because I have practiced it almost daily over many decades, and the process of cooking interests me. I hesitate to say I stink at baking, but I have never pursued it and can claim no more than a very basic proficiency. I'm pretty sure I could raise my baking a couple of notches, if I were to put in the required effort.

Misread this as "banking". I am an ok cook/ok baker, though I bake only occasionally and have never tried making bread.

i am a terrible banker, however

TS: baking vs. banking vs. barking vs. braking

barking comes really easily to me, that's an easy yes

really feeling the people itt talking about not liking to follow recipes. i made pistachio muffins yesterday, they were maybe the most successful thing i've ever baked, but my friend really had to rein me in, put measuring cups in my hands. who doesn't love the cavalier oil drizzle, the impulsive transfer of ingredients from their container to the bowl. i feel spoiled by cooking, too; when you cook you mainly cook with things you understand, whereas it's hard to attribute the same kinds of value to things like flour that you wouldn't eat independently. they are more like numbers than ingredients. i always thought it was like the difference between drawing & painting; drawing is so immediate, from your eye to the page, but painting involves a lot of counterintuitive moves, wanting red but knowing you need to paint brown first. baking is really confusing. i know there are comforting dimensions, cool techniques you get to get into like pestle & mortaring, kneading, &c, but i think some of the satisfaction i get from cooking is from feeling like all of the things i did worked out, & that's toned down when you have to obediently follow a recipe so it doesn't screw up.

see I get the opposite comfort from following a good baking recipe, for me it's like having a reassuring, confident voice to get you through the weird parts, so you don't second guess yourself. i'm kinda particular about who I bake with now - ie america's test kitchen can gtfo with their needlessly complicated baking shenanigans.

who doesn't love the cavalier oil drizzle, the impulsive transfer of ingredients from their container to the bowl.

hah, i don't

i love baking and i guess at this point it comes fairly easy/naturally to me, i used to pester my grandma and mom into helping them bake stuff when i was a kid. but yeah i like having a recipe to follow because i like checking stuff off of lists, what can i say. i'm a bit freer in cooking admittedly.

me flamboyantly catapulting hastily grasped fistfuls of ingredients into pans against the ambient noise backdrop of sizzling onions is one of my real Joys Of Cooking, i am really insistent on this sensation existing at the heart of any kitchen experience i go out of my way for

donna otm: lists! <3

on the contrary, schlump quite otm *plays bridge*

in our house, in general I'm the cook and my wife is the baker. it works out pretty well.

im a virgo btw

but yeah schlump also otm about freewheeling cooking, that is a fun thing too! I guess i like both worlds

i'm a virgo too! different moon signs, apparently.

lol so is my wife, the list thing is so true

what does it mean if i am an aries who likes lists

that you will be a most excellent baker :)

:D

Virgos are prone to believing in astrology iirc

iirc the more you believe in astrology the likelier you are to stay one

i'm awesome at cooking but i don't like to bake. i don't enjoy measuring and i can eat so many cookies that it's better for my health if i don't bake.

i am a sagittarius (but really an "ophiuchus" if nu-astrology is anything to go by) so i don't like following rules.

i am a vegetarius, i think it makes cooking less complicated

I don't bake. I love cooking, but I rarely eat bread, cakes &c., and baking is much more boring than cooking, like mail order vs browsing in a shop.

who doesn't love the cavalier oil drizzle, the impulsive transfer of ingredients from their container to the bowl

noooooo

chills down spine thinking about being made to do this. HOW MUCH IS A "DRIZZLE"? if you don't tell me exactly how much, how am i meant to know when to stop?

impulse has no place in cooking because everything will assuredly go disastrous if it does.

I enjoy both cooking and baking.

haha. i mean no offense to you or my sis but you sound exactly like my sister (i.e. must follow recipe to the "t" and offer no creativity or common sense.
was making the dough for some vegan sweet potato pecan breakfast rolls for her and niece the other week and when she saw how i was doing it she kinda started to flip. i asked her how they came out and she said "awesome". i'm not impulsive with baking but i've done it enough so i know what a tsp or tbslp of something looks like w/out always measuring. and it's a science but not rocket science. and just 'cuz something is in print somewhere as a recipe doesn't mean that it will always make sense.

oh, sorry, xpost to lex

lex's difficulties with cooking are well-documented on ilx and no further amount of posting is like to make him warm up to the concept

it's like coaxing dame barbara cartland into a pair of levi's

I must confess I get stressed out by a pinch of anything

i think i find cups more troublesome. some cups are twice the size of other cups.

Lol, tbf when I was a kid mum always talked in dashes and dabs and dollops, drove me barmy.

Pinches are fine. Trying figuring out if a dash and a bit and a shake are 3 diff measurements or the same thing

I like "a knob of butter" and would measure everything in knobs if possible

i have measured out my life in knobs

a murder of butter

a gaggle of eggs

lex, do you watch your bf when he cooks, does he talk about what he's doing or why?

re: drizzling, my food improved when I filled a spray bottle with olive oil. Spritzy spritz, kale chips

I think I like baking better than cooking

probably the hardest thing about baking is getting to know your oven

gonna invent a camera that you can install in your oven and it routes to your TV

then i'm gonna get 3 miniature astronaut figurines and put them in there and watch them melt

RIP Apollo 1

that's one small step for flan, one giant leap for meringue pie

irl lols

the treacle has landed?

lex, do you watch your bf when he cooks, does he talk about what he's doing or why?

i watch with much the same i-don't-even-know-how-you-do-that awe that i would watch a magician. it makes me feel even less like i'd be able to do it myself! occasionally he asks me to grate "some" of an ingredient and refuses to tell me EXACTLY how much just because he's amused by the ensuing panic. once he asked me to peel a potato and when i looked round he was in hysterical laughter and i still don't know what i was doing wrong :(

Well thats just mean, he should be showing you how to do it! Thats how you learn!

oh i think he knows i'm not that interested in learning

it being a completely lost cause etc

Our house mirrors Shakey Mo's in that I'm the cook and Em's the baker, by and large, but I probably still bake more often than she does, but that's largely down to the fact that I exercise more than her so have no guilt about eating cake.

My baking is limited to cakes, though, and big ones at that (i.e. not cupcakes or any other single-portion fiddly shit). I make loaf cakes quite often, mostly a banana one, and brownies too. My brownies are fucking incredible.

After I've made something to a recipe a couple of times I have to start improvising though - I now use a different sugar for my brownies, and mix in some ground pistachios at the end, and so on, and I add rum and dark chocolate chips and more ginger and cinnamon than specified into the banana cake. I guess that comes from improvising whilst cooking though; I feel a need to personalise stuff. But if you get a good recipe and you've got a decent oven and all the equipment and the right-sized baking trays etc, you should be fine as long as you follow the instructions.

This is how Em bakes - she doesn't like cooking, though unlike Lex she can peel potatoes and will thus help out with stuff at least - by following a recipe exactly. She likes the reassurance of being able to follow instructions closely, and she's made all sorts of breads and cakes that way. I wish she'd do more but she's quite impatient in many ways, and if she doesn't do something perfectly first time she can get frustrated with it and give up.

if em has that attitude i'm surprised you're shocked at other people disliking cooking, because that getting frustrated when something doesn't come out right is exactly why i refuse to even try cooking these days.

Em doesn't even refuse to try, though, in fact she's eager to help out more in the kitchen now we have much more space there.

Understanding cooking is, I imagine, a long slow process if you didn't grow up doing it. I think watching your bf cook my help with some of your anxiety around it, even if you never end up really caring about learning to do actual cooking. Xps to lex

eh, none of the ppl I grew up w/ did any degree of cooking as children/teenagers, I don't think it's uncommon. surely it's always a long slow process?

I think it has more to do with the right cookbooks.

I went from grinding pepper and splashing vinegar into cans of chickpeas and calling it an entree to impressing carnivorous inlaws with Delia Smith "pork" pot pies in about four months. Before that it was bad cookbooks making me make bad food. The cookbooks that taught me were Thai Vegetarian by Vatcharin Bhumichitr, Delia Smith Vegetarian, and Veganomicon.

My mom has never cooked a meal since I've been sentient and she was embarrassed and indignant about that fact, and would assure us she was a good cook, and she'd buy pies from local apple farms and tell us she made them (despite visible boxes in the recycling) and we'd not question her lies b/c either way there was delicious pie

imo it's a combination of growing up with it as just1n3 says, and innate skill

i dunno how much recipe books are to blame - it's the very basic stuff i can't do

Was cleaning out a closet full of old books over the weekend and gladly placed all of my Borders bargain rack cookbooks in the donate pile. I have a few cookbooks I trust but yeah, bad cookbooks can be a huge stumbling block. Recipe websites with rating systems = strong contender for best thing about the internet.

I've gotten confident enough at both to put myself in the "good" category, but lots left to figure out. On the baking front, I'm good with cookies, cakes, pies, but have done very little with bread. That's one of my goals for this year.

xp 1000000 yes. My thing these days is just to buy some veg on sale and then google "best savoy cabbage ever" and make some decisions. (The results for "best swiss chard ever" are highly recommended btw)

wrt baking, this was the recipe that made me go "ok I can bake pastry"

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/desserts/tart/deep-lemon-tart.html

Cake I made for son's 8th birthday last year. He wanted an Angry Orange cake, so I baked it and made the frosting, and my artistically gifted gf did the decorating.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/gypsyfrocksbedlam/angryorange_zps5bfd76cd.jpg

xp OK, I just googled "best swiss chard ever" and got something with kalamata olives and capers in it. This goes against all of my food instincts.

one of my favourite cakes ever was this nando's cake a friend of mine made once: http://twitpic.com/1ikpcp

(the chips were white chocolate)

whaaaaaaat

I'm much better at baking than cooking. There's so little wiggle room to baking that I find if you can't do it right you just can't do it; follow the instructions and you're 98% there. But cooking ... there's an improv aspect to it that I can't handle.

I used to cook like a baking recipe: exactly this much of this and that, in this order. Then I made friends with a professional cook/chef who was like WHAT are you doing? Put in your aromatics, then your veg, then your sauce base, then your liquids, etc, and I started to realize that it's just about a pattern and not the specifics.

My shortcoming in baking is that I'm not careful about texture that much. I like pie crust because I like flour and butter and the filling that's going to be all over it, but I won't turn up my nose at the exact flakiness of the crust unless it's absolutely leaden, etc. So as long as mine turns out within a broad range of acceptable, I'm not going back and fine-tuning.

If there's one thing I can bake that has a reputation as difficult, it is a decently tender pie crust from scratch. The main keys are minimal water added and minimal working of the dough.

Wau @ Nandos cake.

yeah, i'd say it's more a matter of familiarising yourself w/ patterns & developing intuition about what seems right. some ppl get hung up on the names of specific dishes & peculiar crap, but it's extremely pragmatic. i'm rarely surprised by mistakes when i'm cooking; either i see the disasters on the horizon or i am aware i have no idea what i'm doing & am blindly optimistic.

I actually don't think pie crust is difficult at all. Keep everything cold, including the pie tins, the butter, your hands, the kitchen...put everything back in the fridge or freezer when you're not working it. That's all! There's some evidence that if you do overwork the dough you can save it at the end with a food processor and a bit of added flour, but if you let the butter melt I don't think you can do much at all.

yeah, pie crust is pretty much just temperature and speed - i'm hothanded so i always start by giving the cubed butter/shortening ten minutes in the freezer.

that nandos cake is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

I know some who consider vodka the secret ingredient to pie crust, believe it or not:

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2007/11/cooks-illustrated-foolproof-pie-dough-recipe.html

From somewhere else:

Swapping ice cold vodka for water in pie crust recipes ensures a flakier crust. The liquid makes the dough more pliable to work with, and then evaporates while baking, giving you a lighter result than water.

yes cold cold cold... I worked as a professional pastry/dessert/baker person for many years. I used to keep the scone dry mix on the fridge overnight. I always pour my pie crust water off of ice. Using a little vodka also helps b/c it does not bind with the gluten structure the same way water does.

I mostly ate vegetarian for many years, so I am pretty skilled at Indian food in particular and can make most things but am very much a novice when it comes to cooking meat. Fortunately Laurie is a serious carnivore and meat cooking expert so she usually does the things like whole chickens or meatballs or whatever. She also knows a lot more about fish than I do.

lol xp

Yeeep, my pie crust recp, bequeathed by my mother, also calls for ice water.

I knew all the basics of cooking (by that, I mean I knew how to follow a recipe and understood most common terms) from a young age bc I had to do the majority of the family cooking from 11 onwards. But I hated it, and after leaving home I never really cooked anything - just plain roast veg, or steamed or boiled or sauteed etc. I only got into cooking when I met my totally-useless-in-the-kitchen vegan husband, and tbh I still mostly hate cooking/baking but have a deep fascination with veganizing stuff (even tho I'm not vegan), and that is the only thing that motivates me.

I think I totally lack cooking imagination

i am motivated by a desire to eat delicious/healthy food in a comfortable environment (home) and not pay out the wazoo for it in a restaurant and/or rely on someone else to prepare it and bring it to me. seriously, that is what makes me do all of the shopping/chopping/cooking. cheap + strongly dislike being served/requiring service.

my love of eating completely powers my love of baking. i like baking foods that I love to eat.

and it makes my house smells nice.

j you are an excelllent baker!!

I think I absorbed by osmosis without realising, a lot from Keith Floyd's old shows. Simple things like omlettes and sauces.

My dad taught me some things as a kid - pan juices gravy and how to do the roast, mainly. Mum hated cooking and served us meat and 3 overboiled veg all the time but all 3 of us kids are avid, good, creative cooks. Go figure.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yesterday in class we baked puff pastry from scratch. mine turned out fine, but i'm not anticipating making this again any time soon -- all that folding in butter and waiting around for things to set is kind of a pain.

Can I make a lemon-olive oil cake

1. in a ceramic pie dish, because I don't have either a springform or a straight-sided cake pan?
2. whipping up the eggs by hand because I don't have a mixer or a stick blender?

yes to both - to what degree do the eggs need to be whipped?

To soft peaks. Oh also I don't have cake flour--can I use regular unbleached?

I mean I'm going to anyway so I guess that's kind of a rhetorical question.

consistency might be tougher w/o cake flour. you can def whip up eggs to soft peaks using a hand whisk

Instead of the pie pan should I use a cast iron fryer with parchment in the bottom? I could do that if the browning required metal.

i don't know if the maillard reaction requires metal tbh

Thanks for being my own personal answerer! I'mma get on this now so I can eat delicious cake soon.

the cast iron might brown it too much, more than anything

plz ysi some cake to me when it's cooked

yeha and re the cake flour: it'll probably be a little denser with normal flour but it won't be the end of the world

basically dayo otm

Cast iron will work okay. I have cast iron cake and bread pans - the timing can be a bit different (cakes take a little longer because the metal is heavier so slower to heat vs. aluminum).

Oh well I put it in my ceramic pie pan anyway, with oiled parchment on the bottom. I love parchment.

Creamed 5 yolks with sugar for 3 mins and whipped 4 whites to soft peak, all by hand! Feeling kind of mighty atm.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Lemon-Olive-Oil-Cake-234274

Outside over-done, stupid 45 minutes my ass, my oven's a little hot but it's not THAT hot. But the inside is just right!

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LimitedLiabilityGirl/Cake_zps64c0b3b9.jpg

Hmm yes. I used the EVOO that we cook with (the only kind in the house) and it's not bad but I can...taste it.

yeah maybe get a bottle reserved specially for non-cooking and try it out again; a good tasting evoo might help

but it looks delicious and fluffy!

It IS fluffy and the crumb is nice and even and it's moist. There's just something off about the taste....

<3 Epicurious. I have a killer olive oil cake recipe that I will try to find and post this weekend. Sounds like the browning/overdone crust issues are with your baking time and maybe, as Jaq mentioned, the heating characteristics of the pan. I usually do a toothpick test about 2/3 of the way through the cooking time on new recipes, ovens can be so fickle.

This WAS about 2/3 of the way through! I think the time is just too long PLUS my oven is hot. If it was just the oven, the outside would be overdone but the middle would be showing signs of suffering from under-doneness, and it's not. The almonds are good, the lemon is...there's a bit of unwelcome fruitiness but I think it's coming from the OO and not the lemon juice or zest.

try regular OO or VOO? i dunno if i'd bake with EVOO tbh

Yeah exactly. Something with less flavor.

yeah I def notice that with certain 'trendy' food items there is a tendency to say, put it in everything! evoo, bacon, sriracha

waiting for the kewpie mayo revolution myself

mmm kewpie mayo cake

cake looks great btw. would eat

My appetite has been ravenous lately, and I'm kind of tired of the usual things I bake (banana bread, black bean brownies), so does anyone have suggestions? Bonus points for vegan, but it's not a requirement.

none of this is vegan but:

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/ginger-spice-cookies-recipe
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/new-england-anadama-bread-recipe
https://smittenkitchen.com/2013/01/intensely-chocolate-sables/

or, bake a pound cake

i like this apple berry pie (it is vegan)

https://www.isachandra.com/2013/09/appleberry-pie-with-olive-oil-crust/

i have become a cliché sourdough dad and i love it

LET ME SHOW YOU PICTURES OF MY SOURDOUGH

ok

plz

let's see em pal

whip it out

My partner has been making ridiculously good sourdough lately (and I'm always trying to show it off)

haha i swear to god i have been showing people these pictures as if i was showing them pictures of my children, or my vacation

ok get ready

no no, you don't really want to see. forget i said anything

you tease

so many possible jokes to make here but i am going to actually show you a picture of actual bread i baked this week

https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/341i2u3W3f321C0n2d1I/IMG_0252.jpg

Beauties. someone's got some proofing baskets!

those are gorj

unf

slice em open

i wanna see the insides

This turned into a bread-themed NIN lyrics thread pretty quickly.

haha1

those are amazing looking!

Those look fantastic!

I don't think my link worked, here are my (adopted) bread children:
https://instagram.com/sparkspasm_sp/

am hefty envious of the sourdough

dawg Jordan

the inside of mine doesn't look luxuriously open like that, i wish it did.

damn

i made cinnamon raisin bread a couple months ago that was good? i don't have the attention span to do what you guys do

If the choice had been offered, I would have ticked the box for: I am a fairly good cook and I'm OK at baking, although it is only of marginal interest to me.

that's about where i stand as well

i am a weirdly good natural baker but don’t often and it’s all weird because i can’t cook a thing and don’t care and can barely wash the dishes

I should've mentioned that I'm still a beginning baker, so special equipment, techniques, and ingredients are probably going to be out of reach for now.

Instead, I'm going to try this: https://minimalistbaker.com/the-worlds-easiest-cinnamon-rolls/

This will be the first time I've worked with dough that needs to rise, so still a new skill to learn!

Tracer, are you doing the Tartine thing?

I should reiterate that I don't know much about baking, I just watch her. There's been a lot of experimentation, and mostly what I've learned is that it always comes out bread!

I was just staying with a friend who was doing the Tartine thing. I liked the breads a lot (he's been trying to open a bakery somewhere). While he was away I was feeding all his sourdough starters.

I am very good with dough but suck at baking most things because I hate following recipes. I am a much prep chef/kitchen overseer.

One reason to have kids is that after you teach them the basics, then they spontaneously bake all kinds of delicious things on their own. My 12 year old can whip out an apple cake from memory. My oldest made éclairs last week. My boy makes pizza (including the dough) from scratch all the time.

That is awesome.
Funny timing to see those lovely loaves. Just a half hour ago was thinking to myself that a bagel making project is going to be in the near future. Have put off the idea for a year or more

OHhhh pics after it happens. I made bagels once/twice? in high school when my electric pasta machine had a bagel extruder.

i have not. "Tartine" means toast in French, usually with butter and jam, which i am a big fan of. but i gather this is a sourdough guru of some description?

I've been using this book - https://thedobook.co/products/do-sourdough-slow-bread-for-busy-lives

Yep, this Chad Robertson dude who has a bakery in SF and has published these tomes about sourdough baking. I've gotten the impression that it's kind of a movement and everyone has their variations on it. I'm not sure what the essential elements are that make it different from other sourdough styles, but I think a longer fermentation time is part of it? Idk, I shouldn't even be talking about this. :)

I'm sure you can find the recipe out there, and the baker I co-habitate with also had success with the variation here, which I gather is a lot less fussy about the fermentation time and dough folding: https://foodbodsourdough.com/

leee those cinnamon rolls sound good

I have definitely come across a LOT of extremely pedantic shit on the Internet in the last few weeks about "slap 'n' fold" vs "stretch 'n' fold" etc and some of it can feel douchebro mansplainy, like somebody's telling me the right way to fold a pocket square. Not saying the Tartine thing is that - I haven't read anything about that (though I expect I will at some point). But then there are other really, kinda, I want to say Santa Cruz types out there that are just super chill about encouraging people to try things and they're usually on crappy forums (lol?) just mixin it up breadstyle, I love it.

getting closer!

https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/2n0X112h2n3A2x200n3M/IMG_9217.jpg

that looks wonderful! do you spray mist in oven while baking to get that crust?

i didn't for that one. but i have with others and it does seem to create a browner, bubblier crust which is really nice. making in creuset/dutch oven, the lid of which you remove after 20 mins, is apparently a shortcut to a good crust and "oven spring" so i am going to try a big 1kg loaf like that today

https://imgur.com/gallery/nX6Eypp

Those are the cinnamon rolls from the link above, they’re not very sweet and are actually kind of bitter, I think because of the stevia I used in place of sugar.

i got a bread baking book for xmas from which i made the aforementioned cinnamon bread. i started a sourdough starter today. i'm excited about the ferments to come.

I did my first real vegan baking experiment yesterday with some brownies! I replaced the eggs with mashed bananas, but I think the extra moisture changed the baking time a lot, and I really had to add quite a lot longer and at a lower temperature because they were on the verge of burning. In the end they didn't rise at all but are super gooey.

the best chocolate chip cookies i ever had used aguafaba (i.e. the juice from a can of chickpeas) as an egg replacer

would like a harbl fermentation update

xxpost justin3 once gave me a great vegan brownie recipe that used black beans, it worked great. i’ll post it here if i can find it

ah ha! found it

https://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/2012/09/06/no-flour-black-bean-brownies/

my husband & are both non-vegans & we wolfed these, they are so good

oh man i'll have to try that

lol @ food bloggers. jeeeez katie skip the chit chat and gimme the damn recipe!!

oh damn, we don't have quick oats. I wanted to try those tonight.

I'm like, maybe I could use muesli?

yeah the chatty food blog style is so rmde
no-one cares!!!

lol that is a thing on the food blogs that I've seen too.

Weirdly enough, the recipe I was using as my base was also brownies with black beans!

oh gah, the overly dear diary food blogger is so annoying. I always scroll scroll scroll until I see ingredients. I have no clue what they are thinking or what mass feedback all of them got to that bs.

there must be a reason for it. more room to show advertising? they all do it. i have rage-quit so many recipes.

xp - flourless and/or vegan brownies are better than regular brownies, since it is almost impossible for them to be cakey

i stopped looking for recipes on blogs years ago because of the indulgent personal storytelling, probably contributed to the atrophying of my food prep repertoire but at least i didn't have to read any unfunny jokes

I've half-convinced myself that all those recipe blogs are generated by a single content-farm in Belarus or something.

i don't mind those chatty food blogs because i just scroll down over the text until i see the method and ingredients

A good friend of mine writes a baking blog - it has diary elements but she's a good writer, and keeps it brief. Her taste in cakes is impeccable:
http://alicebakesacake.blogspot.com

i'm starting to nail it. two weekends in a row of absolutely killer loaves of bread. this time i even totally freestyled it, didn't have the right flour, maybe 2/5 white bread flour and the rest a weird combo of whole wheat, rye plain (soft) white flour that you'd use to make pancakes and malted bread flour. KILLER. i get that goddamn spring all the headz talk about! the two things i changed that i think made the most difference: 1) refreshing my starter a day before making the levain. it's more active, stronger, able to keep going. 2) switching to just the bottom element in my oven after putting the dough in. just those few seconds of air escaping can be enough to make the elements kick on, and when the top one's on it crusts over the top of the loaves before they've had time to properly spring. or at least that's my working theory.

there should be a comma after the word 'rye' fyi

On the flip side: I'm not nailing it.

I tried my hand at this vegan/vegatarian chocolate tofu pie (I went with a TJ frozen crust that's probably got butter in it).

1. I overloaded my 3-cup food processor with the tofu -- which was firm, not silken as the recipe specifies.
2. I tried to make my own chocolate soy milk -- but didn't put enough sweetener in it (the results taste overpoweringly of sunflower seed butter).
3. I poured the filling into raw crust.
4. When I realized that the crust needed a bake, I put the whole thing (filling and all) in a toaster oven, so the filling ended up cracked, though I don't know if the it affected the taste. However, because of the filling, the crust didn't bake all the way through, especially in the middle of the pie.

well, it's hard to learn without mistakes. wondering to myself how sunflower seed butter gets into chocolate soy milk, but. . .
just wanted to say that alicebakesacake blog MatthewK posted up there looks SO nice. haven't yet made anything from it but am eyeing that pear pistachio chocolate cake. even though pears are out of season i don't think i can wait until august/september to make that

even trying to make your own chocolate soy milk seems daunting.

I'm just a couple of weeks away from being reunited with my new kitchen featuring NEW OVEN and I am going to learn to bake, I really am, now that I'll have an obedient baking appliance.

Need to see if my KitchenAid still works. I have not turned it on for about seven years.

it'll still work.

Guys I made crumpets a couple of weeks ago and while it took a little longer than I thought (for some reason I thought you could just baking soda that shit - but no, yeast is involved) - they were BOMBBBBBB

Whoops! The pie recipe calls for almond butter (I keep sunflower seed butter), which overwhelmed the filling.

And I wasn't trying to make *soy milk* from scratch -- just wanted to make it chocolatey, so I dumped some cacao and what sweeteners I had into it.

cacao!! i hadn't looked at that recipe until now. looks nice! but yeah, i would def. follow at least the silken tofu recommendation. i just remembered i made a vegan banana cream pie for the niece last year. it came out really good. that's the only pie i can recall ever making. i used frozen vegan pie shell from a supermarket for that. in case you're vegan, i don't think tj's is https://www.traderjoes.com/dietary-lists/vegan

Matcha loaf!

https://imgur.com/gallery/M2ls46x

OK can I complain about one thing? How did coconut oil (and its saturated fat) become so popular? I keep seeing it pop up in recipes, especially vegetarian/vegan recipes.

How was it? We made matcha sugar cookies two weeks ago and they definitely needed more matcha and less butter.

I noticed coconut oil everywhere when atkins was very popular.

I was decent at baking until I went gluten-free and now I can't be arsed to figure out all the psylium husk and xanthum gum and whatever you're supposed to add so I just stopped. I think about starting again but I would need some kind of different life for that, I think, in which I had a lot more time to spend in a quiet, sun-dappled kitchen.

It's not bad! I followed this recipe, and substituted stevia for the sugar -- so the end result wasn't too sweet (yay). The matcha taste is a little on the subtle side, and I would've preferred the loaf to be moister (I just remembered that I may have used too little vegan butter), but it's a pretty solid starter recipe.

baking loses its shine when you spend half the prep time trying to figure out wtf a flax egg is, and the rest being angry at the world when you find out

i made that matcha loaf tonight. It is really good (plus it only took like ten minutes to make) and I put in 3 times the amount of matcha.

You really like your matcha! How strong is the taste? I was planning on trying again tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS6YJJfBYag

xpost It was still pretty subtle. But I was using a matcha that is supposed to be served iced, I didn't want to use anything nicer. I got it in the bottom of one of the Isetans. I should look into getting some specifically for baking.

While eating it, we discussed adding ginger or lemon zest next time but I think it might overpower the matcha. But maybe will make the loaf just a completely ginger, lemon, tumeric thing instead. The ingredients were so easy and simple to whip together.

I am just realizing now that the matcha loaf may have kept us up last night.

Maybe.

I've read a lot of articles and forum conversations on the internet about baking bread now. there's the fresh loaf, which has a kind of gentle person-to-person bonhomie that used to characterize much more of the internet and now exists pretty exclusively on narrow-interest websites. not to be confused with the perfect loaf, which i'll come back to. i've watched a lot of youtube videos. i mean a lot. how to pre-shape. why these big caves appear just under the crust. how much to care about the proportions of your semolina / bread flour dusting mix. if that's how you're doing it, instead of cornmeal. or brown rice flour. some of the people i feel like i know. there's a guy on youtube who runs his own baking school in provence. he's got a whole series of instructional videos where he faces the camera, alone, beaming his signal into a harsh world, a mournful oryx supplicating to humanity. what has happened in his life? he probably used to be a research librarian. he took a hard left. now he's running summer classes with certification for future professional boulangers. and doing youtube videos. there's one video where a couple of other bakers appear and demonstrate their batard-shaping technique and it's practically mind-altering because it breaks the format (e.g. this guy, alone, just killing the game, the first couple of minutes translated into english, the rest not for some reason).

other videos are practically ASMR. amateur enthusiasts taking it to some realm of pure aesthetic. watch this video and tell me it doesn't have more in common with paint-mixing twitter accounts than laurel's kitchen.

and there's the perfect loaf. this guy. all his recipes have absurd ingredient measures, like 732g water and 39g rye. i would be amazed if he didn't have scrum-master certification. i'm pretty sure he's an acolyte of 'tartine bread', a book by superstar san francisco bread dude chad robertson. there seems to be a tendency with this style of breadmaking to head relentlessly for some vanishing point of high-protein, extra-strong, impossibly fluffy bread, with a lot of emphasis on how much 'bloom' you can get i.e. that thing where the loaf looks like it's exploding up through the crust and how nicely you can control the way it looks. which is fine, but there can be a kind of 'how do i shot windows xp install' vibe to it. and the perfect loaf guy (though he's far from alone in this) lays out these kind of reassuringly prescriptive recipes that tell you exactly what to do, step by step. but there are too many steps. kitchen temperatures, what flour you bought, and other factors make a nonsense of this kind of certainty. to be fair to him though, he's incredibly posi and encouraging in the comments and replies a lot, and tends to admit a lot more flexibility than his articles would suggest.

i've gotten into whole wheat (i.e. wholemeal) sourdough. it tastes amazing. it's the opposite of the aesthetic that's become associated with tartine bread. it doesn't rise as high in the oven. it's denser and has low strength, on account of all the bran in there interfering with the platonic ideal of long, straight unbroken gluten strands. but goddamn it's amazing to eat. so anyway, i'm reading up, chasing youtube rabbit holes, and lo and behold mr perfect loaf has a whole thing about whole wheat! i read it and it's not very enlightening. then i see he has another page about whole wheat sourdough and i happen across a hint of this guy's life. i love this stuff. when an internet-tipper illustrates their tip with an anecdote that reveals more about them than they realise. read the second graf of this article and try not to crack under the existential ennui.

i'm going to post the graf in question because maybe even the perfect loaf shall pass one day.

“Why don’t we ever have good ol’ sandwich bread?”, I heard my wife recently whisper to herself in the kitchen. This wasn’t the first time I’ve listened to such a statement, and scattered comments like these got me thinking back about that sliced bread I had as a kid. Nostalgia turned to motivation as I felt urged to develop a pan loaf with many of the same characteristics but 100% sourdough, and with somewhere around 98% fewer ingredients — you know, just flour, water, salt, and yeast.

TO HERSELF IN THE KITCHEN

The type of bread that I like is not anything like the type the bien cuit/tartine people love. I am very much a 'pas trop cuit' person. Your perfect loaf guy link did not come through. I am wondering who it is.

I have a bread person/friend that sublets my apartment and when I am there I sometimes feed the sourdough and hear all about the thriving population of ambient yeast now residing in a corner of my kitchen. Sigh.

https://www.theperfectloaf.com/whole-wheat-sourdough-sandwich-bread/

hmmm, bread people are a whole other thing. I have a circle of friends around r!ck east0n who is popular in the tristate area and who I am always amazed when I see him written up in big publications. But I kind of dig how previous ocd activities like record collecting have turned into bread or cheese making or wine people. It's the same type of obsessive focus.

indeed it is!!
i have no interest in cooking this way but other people obviously do! i hear there are pizza people as well as bread people.

Pizza people have it worse bc getting more heat than a residential oven is more critical to getting the results they want

bread baking is complicated! the Tartine Bread cookbook has like 35 pages of instruction (including pages of pictures) for making basic country bread. It's hard for me to believe in retrospect that my mother and father were so into the process. I guess you need a family of people to bake for to make it worth it

pizza person seems like next-level bread person

narrator: it is not actually complicated

however that didn't stop me from taking a day-long sourdough class at e5 bakery like the metropolitan dad i am

absurd ingredient measures, like 732g water and 39g rye.

My response to that is. When did they last calibrate their scales and do a gauge R&R study?

<3

The most Ed response possible <3

My bf got Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast for his birthday and the giver SWORE that her bread came out perfect on the 1st try using the most basic recipe in the book. So let's hope he finds a way to get the good rise & texture he wants and stops baking overly dense doorstops and throwing them away.

I could launch a YouTube channel using six sigma black belt statistics to critique YouTube bakers but I think it would be both unpopular and trolling. I’ll stick to my half arsed sake reviews in Japanese in insta.

Also not exactly critiquing from the high ground of scientific perfection in baking here.

flour the paddle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZnS77l79PY

to speed up my levain build i've taken to starting up a movie with a particularly intensive video codec on my mac mini and putting the bowl on top

however the legendary e5 bakery in london takes the opposite approach. they retard their levain build in the fridge for 24 hrs!

what movies does your levain like best

Pizza people have it worse bc getting more heat than a residential oven is more critical to getting the results they want

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Sunday, September 15, 2019 10:56 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

i know a pizza person and he had all these techniques to max out the oven in his old apartment. one time i was over there and he set off the smoke alarms and got a decent-sized high rise evacuated.

then he moved and bought this propane-powered outdoor oven with a rotating surface and a flame jet thing to char the crust.

basically pizza people are out of their minds.

Made apple cobbler last weekend, so easy, so good

I made this Instant Pot cheesecake this weekend (still need to top it with ganache) but as Paul Hollywood say, I got the taste bang on but the texture is curdled. I'm looking online for reasons why that happened -- did I overbeat the batter/eggs? I suspect that my wet ingredients may not have been room temperature (left them on the counter for maybe an hour?).

I would never machine beat cheesecake ingredients as the recipe advises. Gentle folding is always the way to go.

i use a mixer on the regular, havent had any isses. plus my puny dinosaur arms could never hack handmixing lol

maybe your cream cheese and/or eggs were too cold? cheesecake ingredients should be room temp - especially cold eggs can make the mixture seize & curdle

We made yogurt biscuits (ie American biscuits) the other day and they turned out well. I also have a recipe for yogurt pancakes, and I'm excited about being able to make these things on a weekend without having to leave the house to buy milk (which we never have around, unlike yogurt).

I forgot to mention that this was my second time attempting the recipe, and the texture was much smoother the first time (and I'm pretty sure I used an electric hand mixer then as well). Sounds like ingredient temperature is the leading culprit -- though the thought of leaving dairy products (esp. yogurt, which I subbed for the sour cream) out on the counter for 2 hours sounds dodgy.

Cultured dairy has already been left out

The live acidophilus cultures introduced into previously pasteurized milk should pre-empt the niche that any 'wild' bacteria might try to muscle into. Then you're going to bake them, too.

leaving dairy out on the counter for many hours and then eating it only makes you stronger. I've left cheese out for days (on purpose) and it's fine.

Did you use the same berry jam both times? At first I was thinking some acidic thing was making it curdle.

I've left pizza out overnight and then had it for breakfast the next afternoon many times and I'm fit as a fiddle

Is quiche Lorraine considered baking? It was gooooood

i took a macaron class once and I remember them saying a lot of people in the US have difficulty getting it right because they refuse to use aged egg whites and it's pretty important when making macarons.

i have left cream cheese out on the counter for an entire day & lived to tell the tale

you can get eggs up to room temp by putting them in a bowl of warm water for 10 min

how tf do you age egg whites

People get so paranoid about food existing outside of the fridge for any length of time, unless it's moldy, it's fine imo.

there seem to be different methods online, but basically just leave them out for a couple of days.

xpost yeah cheese is a lot better when you can leave it out for awhile until it gets "sad". refrigerate, repeat, refrigerate, repeat. Eat.

Did you use the same berry jam both times? At first I was thinking some acidic thing was making it curdle.

Actually I'm not. I used a rasp jam the first time, this time I'm using a cherry jam.

unless it's moldy, it's fine imo

For most of our evolution humans were required to distinguish between 'safe' food and 'bad' food, using only our sense of smell, taste and visual clues. Turns out, we're like most animals in being pretty good at it. I would say that visually perceptible surface mold is just one clue and often not the best one. But when you use all the clues provided by your senses and trust your innate responses to them, you'll be spot on 99% of the time.

After a night chilling in the fridge the texture has gotten smoother! Yay. Still, next time I’ll definitely make a point to let the ingredients warm to room temp.

unless it's moldy, it's fine imo

if it's moldy, cut the mold off; it's probably fine underneath

words to live by

my neighbor gave me some sourdough starter and i baked my first loaf this weekend. it turned out pretty decent for a first try, with a refrigerated starter and the most basic recipe possible basically (pics here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4sdOHRlbN6/). i don't want to get crazy about it, like measuring out very specific amounts of ingredients as mentioned above, but i'm looking forward to experimenting.

for now i want to get the flavor more sour and the inside less dense. then move on to different ingredients/flavors.

wanna share your recipe?

That looks really good! I'm always a little amazed at how no matter how inexact the measurements are or what goes wrong during the process, it always turns out bread.

my recipe for this loaf was just some notes my neighbor emailed me. it's pretty basic. the only thing that seems weird to me is she doesn't have you measure out the amount of starter you put into the dough. you just use whatever's left after you take out 1/2 cup of the starter to feed and retain.

i'm considering keeping the starter unrefrigerated and feeding it daily, because it seems like the starter would work better that way. but i'm not going to be baking daily so it seems like i'd just end up throwing a lot of starter away.

For awhile S was coming up with recipes to make with the discard, like 'wacky cake' (sort of a spongy quick bread) or sourdough crackers (which were really good and easy to make).

do that throw-away-half-and-refresh routine the night before baking to "rev up" your starter. otherwise you can keep in fridge.

your bread looks great!

Me and my girls have very different experiences here - she outshines me in every other aspect of cooking, but she is very "yeah, about that much will do", so baking has come harder to her than me (though she's inevitably overtaking me there) - I'm aware this perspective has appeared several times throughout the thread.

i bought "flour salt water yeast" so i'm one of those guys now i guess

god bless

yeast wtf

do you even lift bro

i've noticed all these artisan bread bros love super-dark, thick crusts. which has its place and is maybe "authentic" but not something i personally want to eat all the time.

I never like those super crusty, dark breads. I kept trying to make myself like Bien Cuit in nyc and it always was dry and burnt and tore up my mouth. I don't get it. Maybe if I needed to keep it in my hobo bag for a week while traveling the rails it would be worthwhile.

even their croissants sucked and were burnt. Some people love it I guess.

For artisan bread lovers, many of the 'standard' markers of excellence in bread are just markers of how difficult they are to achieve, so when they're present you know the baker has slavishly followed the exacting procedures required to get those results. How enjoyable that style of bread is, is beside the point. Any damn fool (like me) can make a delicious muffin, but it takes a perfectionist to juggle all the variables that make for the "perfect" qualities of crust and crumb in artisan breads.

Me, I'll go on baking muffins or quick breads and leave the fussy yeast breads to the perfectionists. There's good bakery bread at a reasonable price within a mile of my house.

I baked my first batch of cookies, which also required some in motivation on my part! https://www.biggerbolderbaking.com/3-ingredient-shortbread-cookies/

The butter and flour were not mixing together (room temperature requirement strikes again?), so I added a couple eggs. I also cut them too thick and so the flavor was too samey, so I melted some chocolate over them.

Whenever I want dough (sweet or savoury) to be super-short I freeze and then grate the butter.

I'm making these tomorrow: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/bas-best-chocolate-chip-cookies

Looks awesome, email me a couple!

seems pretty similar to the cook's illustrated best chocolate chip cookies, which also use browned butter and are amazing

i aborted my first attempt at bread from "flour water salt yeast" last week because it seemed like it wasn't going right and the timing with thanksgiving was stressing me out. i'm trying again this week and it still seems like it isn't going right but i'm going to push through to the end and see what happens this time. the levain that results from his approach is way drier than i'm used to, like almost the texture of bread dough on its own.

i had some discard levain this morning so i cooked globs of it in a nonstick pan and ended up with something approaching english muffins

They turned out pretty well! The hardest part was getting them on the pan, long story short I made them too big and had to bake them longer (

Oops, I'll just post the thing
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5yQScjn32d

yum!

What do people use the leftover egg for when recipes call to separate the yolk and the whites? I don't like the idea of not using one or the other.

Oh, whites freeze!

so do yolks. ice cube trays

this week's bread: https://www.instagram.com/p/B5yJZ_qFz-1/

That looks fabulous!

Ooooh C has a loaf of the overnight white loaf in the oven right now. Do you like the levain? I don't think he's tried it yet but the reg overnight and poolish recipes have been gorgeous.

thanks! i was surprised it turned out, the dough seemed so dry in every step and didn't rise as much as it was supposed to, but it's a good brownish bread. it's a time-consuming and wasteful recipe (so much discarded levain) so i'm probably going to go back to the more basic sourdough recipe i've used in the past for most weeks going forward. i want to start playing around with some additional flavor elements like seeds etc. in the future too.

try mixing in a bowlful of porridge into your dough, before the stretching and folding. whatever kind you like.

like cooked porridge? or uncooked oats

cooked porridge!

What do people use the leftover egg for when recipes call to separate the yolk and the whites? I don't like the idea of not using one or the other.

I felt bad wasting these, I should have just cooked them up and ate them.

re: unused levain you can save it in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks and use in pancakes among other things

my technique is to warm up a little milk, mix the levain into it, then mox that into the pancake batter. noticeably stronger, tastier pancakes ime

mIx but i do like the word mox actually

what is "porridge" made from?

oats! it is oatmeal. we had this discussion recently in another thread, can't remember which

the kindle edition of the tartine book is free on kindle, probably expires eventually i just closed the pop-up explaining it too fast. i am reading it.

i meant free on amazon prime but you know what i mean

and i just bought flour water salt yeast. i have the bread baker's apprentice, which is quite good. i need to get a bigger dutch oven; mine is 3.5 qt. though i could easily scale everything down slightly by weight.

anyway 2019 was a big baking year for me, but not much bread. i made the cinnamon raisin bread from bread baker's apprentice and some pitas and that was about it. i made about 10 pies. i became a pie crust expert.

how do i shot pie crust harbl

do you have a kitchenaid stand mixer

i... do not. i have a food processor though. and a rolling pin. and a good attitude.

i use this recipe but stand mix it (xpost--food processor works just as well!) https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/all-butter-pie-crust-recipe
they also have one that uses a combination of butter and shortening but i think it's better for a savory pie--imo shortening lends a fried food kind of taste to the dough
the hardest part for me to learn was rolling it. i do better when the dough has a tiny bit more water than is recommended, so i'm not actually an expert in that respect. but the dry spots do take up the water as it rests in the fridge. most important is:

• start with as round a disk as possible and pinch down all the cracks you can find
• roll from the center to the edges--all the way to the edges
• give it a quarter turn after you pass the rolling pin over the whole thing, repeat
• don't let it get warm (this is why pies are such a more difficult challenge in the summer!)
• roll it onto the rolling pin to transfer to the dish, then roll off

It don't come easy!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tebBj42fC3k

i have made pastry dough in the food processor before & it works pretty well!

I am posting this from inside the King Arthur Flour store. There are lots of neat baking sheets here.

I don’t use a mixer to make pie crust and have used a wine bottle to roll out the dough — you can afford to keep it simple, you can’t go wrong bc it’s pie crust!!

yeah i don't use a mixer - because i don't have one - and i also don't have a rolling pin (olive oil bottle or used wine bottle) and making pie crust is easy as pie

keep the fat cold is one thing i tend to try and do. when i was vegan i would use veg shortening or olive oil (would put olive oil in the freezer in a tupperware until it solidified before combining it, now i tend to use butter (though i have a fondness for the olive oil crust and still make that sometimes)

cold butter, ice water, re-chill dough if gets too unwieldy etc ... keep it cool, kids

yeah i didn't mean to imply one was needed! i just find it a lot easier on my brain. i get overwhelmed.

trying to make this https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/classic-100-whole-wheat-bread-recipe and not doing great
i kneaded by hand. i don't love to knead. it started getting sticky and i got impatient. i should have let it sit for a bit but i added more flour. that is always my downfall. it did rise but didn't get as high as the recipe wanted after over 2 hours so i put it in the oven. it'll be ok. i will try again after i eat this one and i promise to let it stay sticky.

I have a bread machine and the very first loaf of whole wheat I made was perfect. It rose like a champ and had a great texture. Every single loaf since then has been a relative failure. Just not rising enough. I don't get it.

the ol' bread machine bait and switch!

if it’s too sticky and sticking everywhere you can add a little water to your hands and/or the work surface. you can also try mixing/kneading in a big bowl instead of on the counter.

the ol' bread machine bait and switch!

yeah, they saw me coming

a lot of people overknead. you usually don’t need much. a few minutes maybe. and you don’t want to be too violent. if you’re really grinding it into itself try kind of slowly stretching and pulling.

eyyy

i suppose it could have also been an overknead and not an underknead. and i probably knead too hard. the recipe said oil the surface, but it took up all the oil twice

i wouldn’t use oil tbh, just a little water.

eyyyy

our small kitchen is also our small living room, my shortcrust game is killed dead by the heat

baked challah today

Challahhhhhh pic.twitter.com/1qCBjrJmED

— Evan (@silby) March 7, 2020

pic.twitter.com/MVH1w1WUi9

— Evan (@silby) March 7, 2020

looks fantastic. now i want some french toast asap

that looks beautiful.

i am very impressed!

☺️

I tried the Bon Appetit chocolate chip cookie recipe and it seemed to take forever to hold its shape when I was poking it, and when they were finally done they ended up bone dry. I probably added 6+ movies too the baking time. I want a softer cookie for sure, so any ideas on how to tell when they're done?

Cookies that are done don’t seem at all done until you’ve baked cookies a bunch of times and can tell the difference between done and not done cookies.

i haven't done that particular recipe but i looked at it. i have the following questions.
1. how are you measuring the flour?
2. have you tried resting the dough overnight?
3. is your oven temperature accurate?
4. yeah try taking them out earlier than you think the center should look very light and underbaked. it'll continue to bake itself after you take it out.

resting dough in the fridge, i mean

Ah, my post is a little misleading, the dough itself held its shape well when I mixed it, I was poking it on cookie sheet after baking to see how done it was. Next time I think I'll try scooping one up with a metal spatula to see how it holds its shape out of the oven.

i'm not sure i understand what you mean, but you shouldn't judge by touching or moving them when they're hot. they're all going to be very melty upon removing from the oven and will have better shape when cooled. a cookie that is that firm coming out of the oven is gonna be overdone. they will take about 5 min to cool enough to move from the sheet to cooling rack. (i am a savage and sometimes just let them cool on the sheet entirely.)

I generally just do a toothpick test when in doubt. I agree with harold's rec to just let them sit for at least a few minutes after taking them out of the oven. And yeah, confirming the accuracy of thermostat is key

harold lol v good autocorrect

Ha!

what challah recipe did you use? I have never made it before but think I am going to do it tomorrow.

My Oma’s, mostly, wherever she got it from however long ago. I was careful about activating my yeast since we had active dry not instant and she’d specified margarine but that’s pretty passé. It’s enriched but not bordering on brioche like challah can be.

I’ll type it at some point

hmmm. ok most of the recipes online seem pretty similar and I am sure I will improvise since I can't help myself. I am excited to make this tomorrow. I am going to braid it like subway party loaf bread.

Nice looking challah! I need to revisit the hotbread kitchen raisin challah recipe now that my general dough skills have improved

Jesus I suck so much at everything involving dough... How do people do it? It's so sticky and messy your hands become useless after a minute and you never know if you have the right texture, and oh no I need to add more liquid, and oh God now there's too much I need to add more flour it fucking never ends. I'm trying to make naans for tonight and it's a fucking nightmare and my kitchen is a battlefield and fuck American measurements and fuck all the confusing kinds of flours and yeasts. Ugh.

if things are too sticky all the time for you you need to be more prudent with adding liquid to flour. maybe you live in a humid climate so won't need as much as recipe calls for, or something. and if you have to mix by hand, leave one hand out of it so you can reach for other things? "all the confusing flours and yeasts", wot?

Well every country seems to be using different names for types of yeast/flour as well as different types of yeast/flour altogether and you can't always be sure to find an equivalent. I'm French and using an American recipe which states 'all-purpose flour' and nothing more but here our flours are named T55, T65, T80, T100 etc. depending on how much it is refined (except it's actually not that easy and some brands do whatever the fuck they want). Yeast is just as confusing.

“All purpose” is like cake flour, I think it’s T-45

I am pretty good at mixing dough by hand. I take listed measurements as a suggestion. I think the key is to keep moving your hand ( I have never used a mixer) as you slowly pour in the liquid and you just kind of get used to what it should feel like when you need to stop adding liquid and then adjust as you go along. I only add about a tablespoon at a time to adjust liquids afterwards.

this is an interesting guide to baking ingredients in france. says AP flour will be T-65. for naan you would want to be closer to bread flour.
some of the flour links are dead but this one worked https://www.chowhound.com/food-news/53455/you-say-farine-i-say-flour/

hmm i think t65 is definitely more bread flour. it's stupidly difficult to get a good read on this via the internet. isn't this exactly the sort of thing the internet is supposed to be good at?? i did find this on a forum:

AMERICAN: Cake & Pastry
 APPROXIMATE FRENCH EQUIVALENT: Type 45
AMERICAN: All-Purpose & Bread
 APPROXIMATE FRENCH EQUIVALENT: Type 55
AMERICAN: High Gluten 
APPROXIMATE FRENCH EQUIVALENT: Type 65
AMERICAN: Light Whole Wheat 
 APPROXIMATE FRENCH EQUIVALENT: Type 80
AMERICAN: Whole Wheat 
 APPROXIMATE FRENCH EQUIVALENT: Type 110
AMERICAN: Dark Whole Wheat
 APPROXIMATE FRENCH EQUIVALENT: Type 150

which seems to pretty much correspond with this page:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/51263/what-are-flour-types-t45-t55-t65-t150-type-0-or-type-00-magic-enzy-flour-rye-flour-t1150

You shouldn't need to be a NASA engineer to make some fucking bread, right? I used T65 with 11% proteins.

Anyway the naans were okay but they didn't bubble when I cooked them, they just stayed flat. I had a better recipe but I lost it.

Making naan in a domestic oven is going to be not quite right regardless, not hot enough.

i've only made naan on a cast iron skillet. It worked well.

Yeah that's what I'm using too

I think I used yeast and also baking powder just to make sure it had bubbles.

yeah i've done it with difficulty getting small bubbles, and the bread just doesn't come out as soft as restaurant naan. it's more pita-like. the recipe i used did have ingredients you'd expect to soften it, can't remember what though. butter, milk, yogurt? i used a skillet.

i let the skillet heat up for ~7-10 minutes I remember. and the dough texture should be very very soft/proofed when you roll it out.

i've had three weeks in a row of failed sourdough - good crust, good taste, but huge air bubbles inside to the point where it's almost hollow. my first theory was that i wasn't getting a good cut in the top of the dough when i put in the oven so the steam was building up inside and inflating the loaf. but then i was thinking back to what i've been doing different recently and i've been doing an overnight fridge proof so now i suspect that's the issue? maybe over or underproofing? next week i'll try shifting my schedule back to allow for a daytime proof outside of the fridge.

Some people covet that oven spring! Like, it seems to be seen as a plus for fancy instagram sourdoughs, even though it's terrible for sandwiches/eating.

Idk what to do about it, but I think Sarah usually does an overnight fridge proof too.

We made banana bread for the first time last week, used this random blog recipe (rather than the BA one, since we don't have a mixer) and it came out great: https://www.katiebirdbakes.com/the-easiest-banana-bread/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9hVpzzHSRJ/

Added walnuts and a chopped up chocolate bar that had cayenne in it, the heat really came through.

This one is even easier IMO and is very moist!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSQyJuMN0d4

NA make sure your starter has enough zing. do you refresh it before making your levain/sponge/whatever?

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9a42fRJ0H6/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

lol jackasses.

I always thought there was something a little fascist about the tartine vibe. ‘the one true bread’ kinda thing. now i see i was right!

I made the cookies again and this time did not over-bake and they were moist and delicious! Related question: are those silicone cookie sheet liners worth buying?

i have them but didn't have a good experience with cookies. they are maybe too slippery. this is possibly individual to me, but i bake 6 cookies per sheet. in my oven, the one positioned in the middle back always cooks slightly less than the others. with the silicone mats, that one became misshapen and began to slide so the cookie developed a keyhole shape! i have used them to roast vegetables just fine, though. i prefer parchment for most applications.

I considered buying those but parchment paper is cheap and compostable and more versatile than silicone liners (you can cut it to fit a cake pan etc) and you don't have to wash it.

In the last 30 hours I’ve baked a banana cake, a tray of chocolate brownies, and a loaf of sourdough bread.

I wouldn’t say it’s easy but I do enjoy it.

I did it again

The one on the right is gone already pic.twitter.com/HFoPHCoSjA

— Evan (@silby) March 14, 2020

Protip: to avoid the rambling food blog preambles, I've started bookmarking the printable versions of recipes.

A relative who is a bread expert is teaching me by email and zoom how to bake bread. we zoomed today and now my dough is resting in the refrigerator. I am really excited to bake my first loaves tomorrow

:D

Join the rank amateur bread thread!
long-time reader first-time bread-maker

I only just founded out it's CARDAMOM, not CARDAMON.

hello and welcome

baked my second loaf of bread today

I wanted to be scientific, so I thought I would bake another loaf exactly as I did before with the King Arthur bread flour, but with 25g more water.

It was definitely harder to work with during the first part of the two hours of stretching and folding, it stuck to the countertop and to my hands. I discovered that the bench scraper I have made it much easier to work with. By the 5th time after 2 hours when I stretched it and rolled it out it seemed fine

I baked exactly the same as before. It's still cooling but it looks fantastic

I'm going to try the Antimo Caputo Semola Di Grano Duro Rimacinata Semolina Flour that my cousin has recommended to me the next time, mixed with a little bit of regular bread flour. It's drier so it requires more water

Highly recommend DIY cultured butter with your fresh bread. But get some food service gloves because pressing the buttermilk out of the final butter is gross without them.

Now that I've been baking brownies, cookies, and muffins regularly, I'm looking for a slightly more intermediate baking project. The most difficult recipes I've done so far have been cinnamon rolls (which have been the extent of my working with active yeast) and Instant Pot cheesecakes; would cakes be the next step up?

Try pound cake and see how you get on.

yeah pound cake would be a good step up

Dorie Greenspan has some good ones like this one https://doriegreenspan.com/recipe/a-cake-you-can-take-with-you-anywhere/

Also carrot cake - Mary Berry’s is pretty much a no-fail and includes banana for moistness
https://blog.lakeland.co.uk/recipe/mary-berrys-carrot-cake/
(sub muscovado sugar for light brown, nbd)

I like the spices of that Greenspan cake! An added bonus being that I have all the equipment already (no need for a stand mixer, and it even uses a loaf pan instead of a cake tin). I'm not a huge fan of lemon sponge, but most of what I've been baking has been chocolate whatever so it'd be a nice change of pace.

The carrot cake looks good! I'll of course have to convert from metric, and I'd still need the cake tins. I'm guessing "full fat soft cheese" is Britishes for cream cheese?

made this recently and it absolutely rules, esp with some raspberry jam. easy to make as well, no stand mixer required.

https://www.food.com/recipe/almond-pound-cake-67538

xpost Lee - get a cheap digital scale that does both oz & grams and you will never have to convert again

and yes, full fat soft cheeze = cream cheeze

oh and cake tins you may be able to convert to something you have using this

https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/cake-pan-sizes/

i bake almost every weekend now during #Quar for purely reasons of sanity and economics

after years of trawling the internet for decent/average/ok recipes I realized this year that Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home To Yours” book is one of the key goto places where i can always find something that tastes so good & is usually straightfoward to make (not always not-complicated but she lays things out well if they are fiddly)

her book and Mary Berry’s baking bible are my no-fails

and it is v confidence building too, like once you have made a bunch of tasty things it makes you feel good!

that is on my list of books to get, i love her recipes. she made a cookie on a video she did for some publication (it's on the cheese board, i forget) and i put it on my calendar to make for xmas.

i kept making average-ass internet brownies (including fkng gross vegetable oil brownies from kitchn.com that were the worrrrst) and then Dorie was all, girl let me help u, and holy shit I never looked back

she’s the best

if you have 6 hours to spare make her cabbage rolls but follow her recommendation and use savoy cabbage

Someone here should open a bakery called Gang of Flour.

There’s one in West London called Outsider Tart.

Gang of Flour is an awesome name!

I don’t suppose that I should spend too much on cake tins, right?

i don't make cake very often but i got 2 usa pan round cake pans and i love them, great nonstick surface and the metal is thick-ish. i don't think it's worth it to get those cheap thin ones bc the surface wears off and you have to get new ones eventually.

yeah otm
i am into NordicWare but the USA Pans brand are also v good

oh and if you ever decide to buy a bundt pan, dont cheap out, get a good quality heavy one

target has a pretty good supply of basic sizes
restaurant supply places are good too

Valuable advice all around, even if I don't respond directly to you specifically! I will avoid going the cheapo route; as it happens, my neighborhood has more than a few restaurant supply stores, so I'll definitely make a trip when I get my CAKEY INGREDIENTS.

NordicWare was founded and is still based in my home town. The Bundt cake was developed by a local non-Zionist Jewish women’s group; they added the T to distinguish it from/not evoke the fascist German-American Bund.

For Dorie Greenspan's lemon spice cake, the recipe doesn't specify how much zest. Does that mean basically all of the lemon's peel?

anyone have a good skillet cornbread recipe?

yes

lol

2 cups cornmeal
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

2 cups buttermilk/kefir/yogurt/what have you
2 eggs

---

1 turn the oven on full blast
2 put in your skillet

3 beat the eggs
4 combine eggs with the buttermilk
5 combine the dry ingredients
6 now mix all together

7 take your skillet out and put on a burner to keep it hot
8 add plenty of bacon fat or 3 tbsps of another oil to the hot skillet, and make sure it gets nice and hot in the skillet

9 pour your batter into the hot skillet
10 put skillet in the oven
11 reduce heat to 400F
12 bake for about 20 minutes

eat immediately if poss!

I had this very *earthy* American cooking youtube of how to annihilate a beef brisket in a pressure cooker with skillet cooked cornbread, potatoes, beef-gravy and carrots on my youtube history and it has been deleted from history for some reason. I only did my own version of the beef brisket part of the vid which was probably appalling on a healthy eating level, but also good at the same time. I generally do the same thing but do it to the Yorkshire pudding cooking regs where it is somewhat fluffier!

that recipe looks good Tracer Hand

love to see a zero sugar cornbread recipe

For Dorie Greenspan's lemon spice cake, the recipe doesn't specify how much zest. Does that mean basically all of the lemon's peel?

― Kaliningrad Oberst (Leee), Wednesday, September 30, 2020 7:41 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago)

is it too late? the answer is "sure"

uh, not the entire peel, forgive me if you knew that. just the yellow part!

Actually that's useful to know! And I haven't gotten the ingredients yet. Basically, the whole lemon has to look a bit naked?

yes you just scrape the yellow then move on to get more yellow, you want as little white as possible. if it doesn't say an amount i would say it's "to taste," if you use some reasonable amount you won't ruin it. probably one lemon or half a lemon.

Thanks, tracer!

yw!

the key is to get coarse cornmeal, stoneground if you can. in the uk i get indian head which is fine. bob’s red mill is great but hard to get over here.

I somehow have only just heard of Alison Roman but I do believe that my cake aspirations will have to wait for this first: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/salted-butter-and-chocolate-chunk-shortbread

i'm just gonna say you're lucky

i'm addicted to making porridge bread.

https://i.imgur.com/WTkQJtY.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/250gT8I.jpg

was gonna ask you about this! i made my third loaf today. i'm ready to move into more different grains and seeds because that's the kind of bread i like. do you just add cooked oatmeal to it and amend the water and flour ratios accordingly? i'm learning this is more forgiving than i thought.

yep just good old cooked oats! i use 50g oats and 200g water per loaf. cook it for about 10 minutes and then let it cool. add it once you're ready to mix everything together for the bulk fermentation. i add about 20g of linseeds (or 40g for two loaves) to the porridge while it cooks. they swell a little and add some glutinous properties to the porridge to help it bind with the dough. and they add some nice crunch and flavour to the bread too. it will add a bit of hydration so you might want to knock your other water down just a little.

it is sooo soft inside and i feel like it lasts so much longer.

that looks amazing

I made Dorrie Greenspan's Lemon Spice cake, and it did not turn out well. Not much rise, tough outer crust, too dense for a sponge, and not much lemon taste. I realized that I used too little stevia (I can never seem to calculate it correctly), but I don't imagine that it led to the density or dryness.

did you use all stevia? no sugar at all?

Correct, just stevia and no sugar, which hasn't been an issue in most of my other bakes when I use the correct amount. (I get the feeling the baking gods are about to smite me.)

i have never baked with a sugar substitute but i thought that it *would* affect rise and texture to substitute. sugar does things with moisture that stevia may not. probably doesn't affect the lemon taste issue.

Yeah sugar is v important for texture. Let's not blame this on Dorie is all I'm saying.

I always assume that a failed bake is my fault!

I do want to try the lemon spice cake again eventually, probably by doubling the spices and lemon juice AND zest, and making sure to calculate the correct stevia amount this time, and measuring the butter by weight instead of using the tablespoon markers on the wrapper. I might make sure to use real heavy cream for this future attempt, since I used almond milk + olive oil the first time.

But for this weekend, I'm going to try that carrot cake. Reviewing the recipe, it looks idiot proof, which I will put to the test.

my puregro cornmeal coarse polenta has arrived, got some buttermilk arriving later. I'm going to do some cornbread this weekend as per Tracer's recipe, not using bacon grease on my skillet though that's one step too far for me!

awesome! please let me know how it turns out. that's my family's recipe. my dad always liked it because it was very simple - 2 of most things.

something i've discovered when making with polenta - the polenta really soaks up the liquid quickly, so do the mixing of wet & dry ingredients no more than a couple of minutes before dumping into your skillet, otherwise you'll end up with a kind of sandy bowl of polenta hunks.

ah thanks for that tip I'll remember that

I'm going to be serving my cornbread with roast potatoes, sausages and onion gravy and steamed greens. Not sure if that is a bit doing it wrong but I'm treating it like it's like a yorkshire pudding finger type food on a separate plate that you can dip and enjoy basically - which seems right!

Idiot proof indeed!