Why is cooking done by recipe and baking done by formula?!


Question: The answer comes in two parts:

1) Baking is a science.
Formulas are important because every ingredient is important ... and so is time, temperature, humidity, etc. Baking bread in Florida is very different from baking bread in Colorado. Also, if you're on a low sodium diet, you can't just leave the salt out of the dough as it won't work.

2) Cooking is an art.
Line cooking, whether hot or cold, isn't so exact. You can replace your ingredients, change their ratios, or just leave them out all together. Remember that low sodium diet? Leave the salt out ... maybe even replace it with lemon juice. Try doing that with a sourdough.


Answers: The answer comes in two parts:

1) Baking is a science.
Formulas are important because every ingredient is important ... and so is time, temperature, humidity, etc. Baking bread in Florida is very different from baking bread in Colorado. Also, if you're on a low sodium diet, you can't just leave the salt out of the dough as it won't work.

2) Cooking is an art.
Line cooking, whether hot or cold, isn't so exact. You can replace your ingredients, change their ratios, or just leave them out all together. Remember that low sodium diet? Leave the salt out ... maybe even replace it with lemon juice. Try doing that with a sourdough.

Because baking depends on ratios of ingredients that interact chemically with one another. This is not so much true with regular cooking.

There's many chemical reactions that take place while baking for items to come out correctly ... for example, bread must rise before baking, so your measurements of soda, yeast, water, etc. must be correct.

I don't know. I bake by recipe, and I cook by the seat of my pants!

Cooking and baking both rely on numerous chemical reactions, but in baking these reactions are responsible for doing much more. A recipe can be modified to taste with less of a chance of failure than when a formula is changed to taste. When the formula is thrown off, chemical reactions cannot take place in the way they are supposed to, resulting in baked goods that are substandard.





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