Thank you for this! Two things that helped me immensely with developing my models of baking were (1) watching a lot of Bake Off, and (2) having to contend with dietary restrictions (I was vegan when I started baking in earnest, and am now gluten-free but not vegan, for complicated reasons).
For (1): In addition to being both calming and delightful as a thing to watch, I find Bake Off really helpful because the bakers all have really good models of how and why baking works, and they often share them verbally. This, for example, is how I learned that kneading functions to ‘develop’ the gluten in a dough, and therefore cut it out of any recipe where I wasn’t using gluten (although, naive substitution there is basically always doomed anyway), but that’s only one among many examples.
The other really cool thing is that you get to see the bakers make lots of mistakes, for both simple and complex steps. Observing failure modes is great for this kind of model-building, and it’s all the better that you don’t have to make the mistakes yourself!
For (2): Starting my baking career without eggs helped me get an intuitive feel for what they’re used for (and also put me in complete awe of eggs, especially once I started using them). Similarly, cutting out gluten and seeing what happened to my tried and true recipes as a result made me understand what flour does better. Maybe I should have a concept of ‘emulsifier’, but I’ve gotten along pretty well with ‘binding agent’ vs ‘raising agent’. (Correct me if I’m wrong but) eggs function as both.
I never really went for weird ingredients like flax eggs or agar agar, which gave me a great chance to understand more common ingredients better! The trusty binding agents I have on hand if something isn’t coming together are xanthan gum (dry) and applesauce (wet), although, I mean, usually you just want to add more of whatever is in the recipe (e.g. flour for dry, eggs for wet). For raising agents, vegan recipes will generally using both baking powder and [baking soda + acid]. Lemon juice and apple cider vinegar work equally well as the acid, although as an edge case you probably wouldn’t want to, like, substitute apple cider vinegar for lemon juice in a recipe for lemon muffins.
There are also smaller things like, using almond milk instead of regular milk led me to realize that milk in recipes is almost always(?) more about fullness of flavor than about the fat, so you could really just use water and the recipe would still come out, though it would probably be less rich. Similarly, fats are somewhat interchangeable in many situations (e.g. melted butter vs olive oil in cupcakes probably doesn’t make a huge difference) but definitely not all—for doughs in particular, you really want to pay attention to the behavior of the fat at the temperature you’re working with, as you mentioned. Normal butter and vegan butter have slightly different melting points, which can affect doughs that you want to be flaky, and vegetable shortening has a higher melting point than either, which makes it good for doughs if you can’t be arsed with all that freezing butter stuff. Unfortunately, butter tastes better than everything else.
Finally, since this is just a brain dump at this point, gluten-free all-purpose flour is heavier than normal flour, which makes it slightly harder to make rise. This isn’t generally a problem for almost all recipes, but somehow turns into a complete disaster when you’re using yeast. I try not to let failure stop me from trying things, but I am completely done with trying to make gluten-free yeasted breads. Even with all the knowledge I’m claiming to have here, I cannot fathom the depths of the disasters that occur in this realm.
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Okay well, that was a lot. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. And remember kids: if a recipe calls for self-rising flour, they’re lying to you; just add baking powder and salt to your normal-ass flour and you’ll be fine.
Thank you for this! Two things that helped me immensely with developing my models of baking were (1) watching a lot of Bake Off, and (2) having to contend with dietary restrictions (I was vegan when I started baking in earnest, and am now gluten-free but not vegan, for complicated reasons).
For (1): In addition to being both calming and delightful as a thing to watch, I find Bake Off really helpful because the bakers all have really good models of how and why baking works, and they often share them verbally. This, for example, is how I learned that kneading functions to ‘develop’ the gluten in a dough, and therefore cut it out of any recipe where I wasn’t using gluten (although, naive substitution there is basically always doomed anyway), but that’s only one among many examples.
The other really cool thing is that you get to see the bakers make lots of mistakes, for both simple and complex steps. Observing failure modes is great for this kind of model-building, and it’s all the better that you don’t have to make the mistakes yourself!
For (2): Starting my baking career without eggs helped me get an intuitive feel for what they’re used for (and also put me in complete awe of eggs, especially once I started using them). Similarly, cutting out gluten and seeing what happened to my tried and true recipes as a result made me understand what flour does better. Maybe I should have a concept of ‘emulsifier’, but I’ve gotten along pretty well with ‘binding agent’ vs ‘raising agent’. (Correct me if I’m wrong but) eggs function as both.
I never really went for weird ingredients like flax eggs or agar agar, which gave me a great chance to understand more common ingredients better! The trusty binding agents I have on hand if something isn’t coming together are xanthan gum (dry) and applesauce (wet), although, I mean, usually you just want to add more of whatever is in the recipe (e.g. flour for dry, eggs for wet). For raising agents, vegan recipes will generally using both baking powder and [baking soda + acid]. Lemon juice and apple cider vinegar work equally well as the acid, although as an edge case you probably wouldn’t want to, like, substitute apple cider vinegar for lemon juice in a recipe for lemon muffins.
There are also smaller things like, using almond milk instead of regular milk led me to realize that milk in recipes is almost always(?) more about fullness of flavor than about the fat, so you could really just use water and the recipe would still come out, though it would probably be less rich. Similarly, fats are somewhat interchangeable in many situations (e.g. melted butter vs olive oil in cupcakes probably doesn’t make a huge difference) but definitely not all—for doughs in particular, you really want to pay attention to the behavior of the fat at the temperature you’re working with, as you mentioned. Normal butter and vegan butter have slightly different melting points, which can affect doughs that you want to be flaky, and vegetable shortening has a higher melting point than either, which makes it good for doughs if you can’t be arsed with all that freezing butter stuff. Unfortunately, butter tastes better than everything else.
Finally, since this is just a brain dump at this point, gluten-free all-purpose flour is heavier than normal flour, which makes it slightly harder to make rise. This isn’t generally a problem for almost all recipes, but somehow turns into a complete disaster when you’re using yeast. I try not to let failure stop me from trying things, but I am completely done with trying to make gluten-free yeasted breads. Even with all the knowledge I’m claiming to have here, I cannot fathom the depths of the disasters that occur in this realm.
-
Okay well, that was a lot. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. And remember kids: if a recipe calls for self-rising flour, they’re lying to you; just add baking powder and salt to your normal-ass flour and you’ll be fine.