Cooking is an art while baking is a science.
Cooking is jazz, baking is classical.
To continue with the art comparison: cooking is interpretative dance while baking is square dancing
Cooking? Follow your heart. Sure you can add more butter! A bit of garlic! Shit throw a bay leaf in no one knows wtf it does! Throw in some vodka no one will know, maybe a shot for the chef too, fuck it this is your kitchen!
Baking? You will follow the fucking instructions like checklist and double check it like submitting an SAT for college approval and the oven will be testing your answers, because unlike your SAT theres no multiple choice or “fill in the blank” only the harsh reality of a zero on your paper and that you didnt add enough butter and now your bread is so blackened and hardened the children are trying to take it from you to build a portal to the Nether.
I don’t make the rules I just have try again to make my stupid cookies.
I bought a high precision scale that does grams to three decimal places and can handle about a pound (because I don’t know that I won’t need that and if I’m getting something nice, might as well go all in), and switched all my baking to weight-based recipes for exactly this reason. It’s the only way I could get my bread maker to produce a halfway decent loaf without collapsing, but it makes a lot of other things more consistent as well.
Thankfully, I haven’t any offspring to use my failure to summon forth the end the world, but it did make decent croutons.
Honestly this fear is overblown. Unless you’re making pastries, baking is relatively straightforward and forgiving. Breads, cakes and flatbreads love you and want you to have fun. Experimenting with vegan substitutions, gluten free baking and scaling batch sizes helped me feel much less intimidated by recipes, you learn what role the ingredients are playing and how to adjust if you add too much, too little, or too not the right thing.
Baking is pretty forgiving, so many old baking recipes are written with add flour until it looks right as part of the recipe. If your baking sucks it’s most likely super old ingredients or you did something stupid like substitute strawberries for butter.
Wait, so I shouldn’t be greasing my pans with strawberries?
Brownies are forgiving. Sourdough bread will smack you in the face if you talk smart.
I think people forget that bread and pasteries used to be cooked in wood fired ovens with no temp control.
Cookies can be really finicky, though.
Yeah, there’s just more things to understand with baking. Yeast doing biology, acid/base chemistry, plus the whole “do everything at the start and hope you balanced things right because you can’t tweak as you go if it starts getting dry or the flavour balance is off”.
Or maybe I’ve just gotten lucky with my close enough measurements and substitutions so far.
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I love baking precisely because it is a science.
The creativity comes later in the proportions of things like how much icing/filling to make.
The only dough that knows my fears was the hamantaschen but every since I started only using King Arthur flour, they’ve never failed again.
Not sponsored
(But if they want to sponsor me, I’m open to this)
This is why I don’t do baking, the art form of cooking simply speaks to me more
Skill issue
Measuring issues. Baking is chemistry.
Yes… But also you do need feeling/experience/skill. For example, one of the bread recipes I’m still often making, I’ve been using completely unchanged since I started learning how to make bread. The ingredients (flour, water, yeast/sourdough, salt) and their amounts have not changed.
Yet the result today is far better and more consistent than back then.
That’s because time, room temperature, humidity,… are just as important. And before you say “that, too, is chemistry”: yes, it is, but these are not variables most people can accurately measure or influence in a scientific way.
Instead, you quickly develop an intuition for how these things relate and come together.
A skill, so to speak.
The first rule of baking is: accurately follow the recipe.
The first rule of cooking is: the better the ingredients, the fewer processing steps are necessary.
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