The key point is this: The big difference between baking and cooking is that baking involves much more chemistry than cooking, which means that altering the recipe without understanding what you’re doing is much more likely to result in failure. (Bad substitutions/ratios in cooking means the result might taste/look a bit strange, but overall it’ll likely be fairly close to the original. Bad substitutions/ratios in baking means you probably get a brick / dust / other unidentifiable garbage.)
Thus, if people approach baking like cooking, they probably fail. Repeatedly. Hence the ritual thinking.
Yes, I would say baking is the most complicated form of cooking to understand because it is chemically the most complex.
I think the general point of the OP is you cannot easily violate the ritual (ad lib with the recipe in baking). I suspect most people don’t grasp the difference between baking and other cooking (which is also rather chemical reaction driven). I would suggest the different is widths of the error bands. Baking has really narrow bands, other cooking has relatively wide ones.
I think the post gets to a much deeper question. Just when should someone be a ritual follower and when is that not so important. I think part of that answer related to the error band concept. It also related to knowledge of the gears.
The idea of complex interactions + small error bands leading to ritualisation neatly explains why medicine is so ritualised despite its practitioners being among the most educated professionals.
There are a few places where chemistry does impact cooking, mostly with fat/water emulsions:
The takeaway here is that if you don’t have enough fat coating the noodles when you mix in the cheese, instead of just having less-fatty sauce, your cheese will clump up into giant blobs of parmesan instead of becoming a cheese sauce that covers the pasta.
I also recently substituted 2% milk instead of whole in a pasta sauce; instead of mixing together and becoming a beautiful light pink sauce, the milk curdled in the acidity of the tomatoes without the right amount of fat.
The key point is this: The big difference between baking and cooking is that baking involves much more chemistry than cooking, which means that altering the recipe without understanding what you’re doing is much more likely to result in failure. (Bad substitutions/ratios in cooking means the result might taste/look a bit strange, but overall it’ll likely be fairly close to the original. Bad substitutions/ratios in baking means you probably get a brick / dust / other unidentifiable garbage.)
Thus, if people approach baking like cooking, they probably fail. Repeatedly. Hence the ritual thinking.
Yes, I would say baking is the most complicated form of cooking to understand because it is chemically the most complex.
I think the general point of the OP is you cannot easily violate the ritual (ad lib with the recipe in baking). I suspect most people don’t grasp the difference between baking and other cooking (which is also rather chemical reaction driven). I would suggest the different is widths of the error bands. Baking has really narrow bands, other cooking has relatively wide ones.
I think the post gets to a much deeper question. Just when should someone be a ritual follower and when is that not so important. I think part of that answer related to the error band concept. It also related to knowledge of the gears.
The idea of complex interactions + small error bands leading to ritualisation neatly explains why medicine is so ritualised despite its practitioners being among the most educated professionals.
There are a few places where chemistry does impact cooking, mostly with fat/water emulsions:
The takeaway here is that if you don’t have enough fat coating the noodles when you mix in the cheese, instead of just having less-fatty sauce, your cheese will clump up into giant blobs of parmesan instead of becoming a cheese sauce that covers the pasta.
I also recently substituted 2% milk instead of whole in a pasta sauce; instead of mixing together and becoming a beautiful light pink sauce, the milk curdled in the acidity of the tomatoes without the right amount of fat.
This was new information to me, thanks.