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.
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.
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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