Back at the start of the pandemic, I bought some baking cookbooks and a 50-lb bag of flour and figured I’d learn to be a better baker. It seems I wasn’t alone in this thought.
I mean, it makes sense: the temporality of baking is different than cooking. If you mix something and put it in the oven, you can do other things like meetings and teaching and paperwork while it’s finishing. Baking also feels like a home thing for a lot of folks.
I’ve never liked baking: I experience it as something profoundly different than cooking. Cooking you can adjust and fiddle and improvise on the fly, you can make a thing you know well differently the next time just to see what it’s like. You can goof and fix the goof. You can approximate and substitute. Tonight, for example, I’m making a rabbit that I bought from Primal Meats. I keep going back and forth in my head about what I’m going to do exactly, but basically it’s going to be a cacciatore, maybe with buttermilk biscuits. Or maybe not! Doesn’t matter, I have a lot of stuff to work with.
Baking is precision. It’s math, it’s lab measurements. It’s knowing the exact conjugation and agreement of a verb in another language. Most of the time you’re right on or you just wasted a lot of time and ingredients.
As a pandemic baker, I got fairly good with bread made with my own sourdough starter. I got good enough that I started wanting to just half-ass it and guesstimating when I was making the dough and then my bread stopped being good. Then I got annoyed with the regularity it required: feed the starter, use the starter, oh damn the starter died because you forgot. Sourdough starter starts to feel like the goldfish your kid wins with a ping pong ball at the fair. You can keep it alive a long time but it takes effort and attention.
Still, I did like baking bread. I’ll probably make another starter and get back into it soon. There’s a small room for error and impulse with bread. Everything else, though, you got to do it just so, with the possible exception of things like bread pudding or fruit fool.
There’s a handful of cookie recipes I know well and get right with some consistency. I can make a fair pie crust (same basic technique as biscuit dough, which I’m fairly practiced with). I maybe have made a cake once in my life? So I picked up Bravetart just on the strength of reviews, thinking it would give me a bunch of new recipes to try.
The thing is, I didn’t look very carefully at the fine print, as it were. I just saw, “oh baking and desserts and people love the book and awards and Lopez-Alt blurbed it, let’s go”. What I didn’t realize was that a lot of the recipes are versions of mass-produced American desserts and other baked goods. That’s what the subtitle “Iconic American Desserts” mean. I thought that was going to be more like apple pie and so on.
There’s a recipe for home-made Oreos. For home-made Wonder Bread. As I read through, I just was not excited to try most of what was in there. I eventually did the Pop-Tart recipe (though I already had something like it elsewhere: it’s basically just pie crusts with jam inside and a sugar frosting on top). It was fine.
Today I decided to screw up my courage and give it a fair shot again. This is probably a book that actually has to survive, though: I’m not terribly disposed toward it, and at this point if I were going to bake cookies or other desserts, I’d probably favor using the NYT Cooking app, which is closer to my own vision of “oh yeah that looks good”.
So what’s the test? I’m going to try making the recipe for Twinkies. Thankfully it omits the preservatives or zombie blood or whatever it is that lets them be the processed food most likely to survive well after the apocalypse.
OMG. I want to taste home made Twinkies. Total guilty pleasure of my young adulthood but not allowed to pass my lips for the past twenty years or so.