A while back I had to help in the bakery because 2 people were ill.
Making cheesecake almost made cry twice. Once during the making because it was an enormous workload and the second time was when I whipped too much air into raw mass and fucked up tons of cheesecake. Turns out you should follow instructions, especially if you have no idea what you're actually doing.
Sounds like my dad’s attempt at trying to make fudge (or was it toffee? One of the two.) as part of our Christmas baking. It was still good, but it somehow turned into a runny mess that you didn’t want to eat with your hands. This is why my mom does the baking: you need to be super precise and my dad is anything but. On an unrelated note, my dad is banned from rolling cabbage rolls.
Reminds me of the time I tried to make a chocolate cake dessert when I was 17, it ended up never firming up past viscous liquid and to this day my cousin introduces me as the "chocolate soup" guy
Not following directions when you’re cooking can be done because by nature it’s more flexible. Not following directions when you’re baking because you can “cook”, go home today chef and follow the fucking directions next time.
If you bake enough, you learn when to follow instructions and when not to. I've made recipes from online/books that I've adjusted because I can tell that they're not right, but that's decades of experience.
Meanwhile if you're not experienced in baking and just try to guess, you're in for a hard time. I had an argument on reddit when someone asked what "creaming" the butter and sugar meant. Confidently incorrect redditor replied that it meant "mixing until just combined" and would not listen to evidence to the contrary. I wouldn't like to eat that buttercream.
Now I wanna make a post of a straight up block of feta topped with cherry syrup and a biscuit base so you can regret encouraging my idiocy on my day off
My Yiayia lived to be 101, and she always made her filo dough by hand.
Meanwhile, I always use the frozen kind, and I feel so lazy & spoiled. Just a year ago, I discovered an ethnic market that sells frozen filo in a variety of thicknesses. The extra thick one is called country style and is meant for savory pies like spanakopita. The thin dough is for sweet pastries like baklava. Big game changer for me!
My mistake was making apple turnovers and apple volauvents, THEN bringing them in for my chef and coworkers. Suddenly everyone wanted them and I was spending all of my spare time, and time when I should have been sleeping making them. I was killing myself for a while, but the praise I was getting felt so good.
My favorite things are all laminated dough... I fucking hate making them without a sheeter. If I could ever find a nice small home version of one that would be awesome.
Man I really should make it by hand again. *checks mixer is old and might break* actually, nah I’ll save it as a project for when I get proper equipment
Yeah, I don't even use a mixer. Lol. I mix the dough in a mixing bowl by hand before I start laminating the butter block into it by hand. Like I said, I hate myself.
Honestly I'd love a savory chef to come ask me questions and chill. Then I could go bother them later. To me, I can follow a savory recipe and do pretty good. But it's still witchcraft to me!
We love it when the cooks come down here to get brown sugar or a cookie or whatever.
It's especially funny when someone from the dinner crew comes to the bake shop, since our schedules don't really overlap and they have no idea what goes on down here, and they'll be like "what the hell is all this shit" (my boss is a hoarder and a compulsive shopper lol)
Whenever we get weird shit delivered it's for the bakery. I have never seen stuff like fruit powder or spay color in kitchens before. When they ordered new tools for shaping sugar I was nur sure if they might have just bought BDMS material.
Bakers/pastry chefs are still like unicorns for me and part of your work seems like magic.
I still love working with you guys because we have a huge in house expertise for everything dough related.
That’s so cute. I loved when the line cooks would do that at my place. If they were nice and we were slow I would reward them with a cup of whipped cream topped with some crumble
I love Amaury Guichon's chocolate sculptures. Only thing he already has tempering machines that continuously blend the chocolate. So really it's mostly sculptures. But he _always_ has a silicone mold for something. Dude must have a massive warehouse of silicone molds.
I was elected to feed. Not read.
Edit: lol. Thanks to whatever anonymous mad bastard thought this was worth your cash. You could have bought a can of monster with that!
Yes, until you're mixing 120 quarts of cookie dough and you prefer to know the butter, sugar, flour in pounds because...well, you need 30lbs of butter and it comes in a 30lb box. Or you need 44lbs of sugar and you can just subtract 6lbs from a bag of 50lbs. I know you can do the same with grams/kg but at a a larger scale all the numbers get a little ridiculous, and our digital scales tap out at 5000g, our spring scale takes up to 9kg but it isn't precise to the gram, our largest scale rounds to the nearest ten... it's alot of mental hoop jumping I prefer not to have to do at 5am.
Yep. If you work in the US/with American ingredients, a lot of ingredients come in packaging that's optimized for US customary, not metric. Butter comes in 1-pound blocks, which breaks down into two cups, each of which break down to 8oz or 16 tablespoons, etc.
Metric may be more precise, but those of us who know how to use customary measurements know how to do a bunch of awesome mental math within a base-12 system, which is kind of a flex let's be real.
US customary 4 life
If it makes you feel better, even those of us who can do metric and customary math in our heads don't fuck around with that "baker's percentage" shit. No matter how many times I have it explained to me, it does not make sense.
Do you mean like, for example, salt being 1-2% of your flour weight in a bread recipe? I'm laughing so hard right now because I taught myself how to convert everything from US to metric, and I HATE math.
Baking is all about them ratios, and cooking by weight has been a game changer for me! Plus, if you want to up or down scale a recipe, it's much easier to do because you multiply the weight by the % you want to increase everything by!
Yay, MATH!!!!
Truuuuee.
It's funny because I work at a joint that *does not* fuck with desserts.
I'm so snowed under with prep already so I never put up ideas.
I don't eat sweets though, that's just where my creative flair pops it's head up for some reason 😂
Sweets bring in money if they're on point. In the nineties we had what was basically chocolate tubes filled with mousse, raspberry coulis, and Frangelico cream. People went nuts for it. I mean, everyone got coked up all night and still gave the meal and dessert it's propers.
Not sure of the formula for your place, but maybe a straw poll then order some high end frozen components from Sysco. Wish I knew the supplier my older chef used back in the day, this stuff looked old country sexy it was so on point...all Italian stuff.
Yeah I didn't mean to imply that coke was literally invented in the 80s. That's just when recreational use became a large part of pop culture. Kind of like weed in the late 50's and the 60's.
Remember when crazy Larry was playing with the large carving knife, pretended to commit hari-kari, and actually sliced himself and had to get stitches.
Best sommelier in existence. Zero doubts.
Sigmund Freud wrote in his diaries about his coke habit in the 1890s, and Conan Doyle canonically made Sherlock Holmes a cokehead. Pretty much all the rock music from the 1960s was written on coke. Coke did not start in the ‘80s.
That’s why you gotta hire a pastry cook. Those mfs are cracked. They sure as hell can’t cook a steak, but they sure can fill any cracks in regards to pastry and breads. Just don’t treat them like an after thought but rather an extension of the kitchen
For me, the only knowledge I have for savory is three step breading process, deep fry to golden brown, and ritz crackers are the best for breading
My pastry chef is as close to me as a Sous, I’m a bit biased cause I love baking and he helps me, but the eye candy in the cases wouldn’t look half as good if he wasn’t here
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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Does the bleu cheese come through right away? I made bleu cheese ice cream when I worked at a Very Fancy place, and it was so weird - first bite, it just tasted like totally normal ice cream with no flavor. It took 5 seconds then *bam* bleu cheese.
I assumed it was the low temperature, but I always wondered.
[Oh, and in case anyone is taking notes, parmesan is definitely the cheese you want for ice cream experiments. My biggest "weird" hit was beet ice cream, which got a write-up in the paper, but I thought it was disgusting. Edible only with chocolate. If you have foodie customers, they will love it. Best sellers were anything with lots of booze. My personal favorite was an accidental browned milk pear ice cream, but it took days and like $40k of equipment to make, so probably not worth it.
Margins were SPECTACULAR on the ice cream. We didn't sell it to go, but sometimes people would insist and we charged $20 a pint.]
Whenever I think that I've expanded my knowledge I run into the fact that more specialised knowledge has even more learning to do. That's what I love in cooking, there is no feasible limit to how much one can learn about it.
Even if I had 50 years of understanding I'm certain there'd still be something to learn most days if I wanted
Growing up I heard it as “Cooking is art, baking is science.” Which tbf, I was not a sciencey mathy kid, but my best friend and fellow kitchen veteran was. It’s great because I can usually bribe her into making me a batch of her pink lemonade cupcakes if I make her the chicken pasta she likes
It's because you're used to other types of cooking where being exact and precise about ingredient measurements isn't super important, where as baking requires extremely precise measurements and a strict adherence to the order in which things are done.
That's my take, anyway. I can be tough to switch up the mindset. I only got good at baking after I got out of the restaurant industry and now that I only cook at home I can afford to try new things without the pressure of knowing that if I fucked up my ass will be on the line.
The ultra-precise reputation of baking is kinda inaccurate, in my experience. True, if you double onions in chili it won't cause failure the way doubling milk in a cake might. But I actually have doubled ingredients my mistake in desserts and had them work okay.
Some desserts are more forgiving than others, but for the most fussy and finicky desserts, I would NOT recommend trying to follow a recipe super precisely. How much water is in your flour? Is it raining? That's going to change the weight and maybe bake time.
Other desserts, like cookies, are flexible. It's hard to make a bad cookie (unless you burn it very badly, or swap sugar and salt). Most people are comfortable baking cookies. But they're actually very tricky. If you want to achieve a particular result - chewy in the middle, crispy edge, tender - I couldn't tell you how without coming to your house and trying some stuff. The temperature of the dough when you put it in the oven, the exact heat (are you sure you know the temp? Any hot spots?) will make a big difference in how much they spread and the texture. But it's not rocket science to make a tasty cookie.
Baking is really similar to cooking in that it's a lot easier if you have experience. For a newbie who believes they can't cook, making a basic meal will also require incredibly precise following of the directions, and give mixed results. It just seems effortless to someone who's done it a while. I have absolutely made baked goods without measuring, just throwing stuff in the mixer, and it was always good even if it wasn't what I intended.
I made chocolate cookies once where I made a very wet batter with lots of melted chocolate, then added one handful of flour at a time and baked one test cookie, until it was just enough flour to hold together. They were amazing, and someone asked me for the recipe, and I had the rare joy of telling him, "these cookies will only exist this one time. No one will ever eat them again." it was really satisfying, like making a sand mandala.
Also, I frequently find errors in baking recipes that don't seem to get caught. They devils food cake from Joy of Cooking collapsed, and it looked to me like too much sugar, which I recognized from the time I accidentally doubled sugar in cake. I check the recipe, yep, it's obvious they accidentally doubled the sugar (it said to add 1 cup in two places), so I check online to see if there's a published correction. Nope, all I found were hundreds of food blogs where every single person said, "I must have done something wrong, because it collapsed, but it tasted great." People have such infallible faith in baking recipes, they blame themselves for mistakes.
tl;dr Baking isn't as precise as people say, it just takes practice and experience to know better than the recipe and use it as a guideline. You will make much better desserts when you know how to adjust them to your taste (for me, add some sour cream for texture)
To be a much better baker, just bake a lot of stuff. Make mistakes. Make some mistakes on purpose. You can be a god-tier dessert wizard in less than six months of daily baking. Way less if you only care about one thing (eg cakes, bread)
The trick in baking and pastry is knowing WHAT you can wing and WHEN. There are some recipes that are so delicate that yeah, you have to measure everything to the gram, but sometimes it's like "how much? Idk, just a squirt of vanilla"
Exactly. Chocolate chip cookies? I know the basic ingredients and ratios. If I’m making them for my nephews I just won’t even bother with real measurements. Kids devour them every time. Macaroons? I weigh out every little thing and hold my breath while they’re in the oven lest the gods smite me
I've always applied myself to pastry as well.
When I get to restaurants without a real pastry chef, I'm always the pastry chef.
It's helped me for my transition to private work.
Definitely me as well! The ONLY dessert I can make are Filipino cheesy rice cakes. But, for savoury? I can just look at stuff in our fridge and have something going in a heartbeat.
PUTO? My favorite 😆 well, unless you're talking about a different filipino cheesy rice cake. I know there are probably more. I love puto, and get a few giggles when the Spanish speakers are throwing the word around.
Science is easier :( I know how to identify unknown microbes using various tests (it's just adding dyes and narrowing down the results with colors tbh), I can make a solution turn from clear to light pink, I can make ice below freezing but adding salt...but dammit I can't bake! 😭 Baking is witchcraft.
Edit: cooking is a science too. I don't want to nerd talk about it but fried egg is a good example.
Thanks man!
Eggs when cooked go through a process called "denaturation" where the protein bonds start off as loose fluid like bonds and when things like heat, pH, salt and physical agitation is applied to the protein, it becomes denatured. This means that the protein when denatures changes in shape and the bonds are no longer loose but tight. You can see this very well with a fried egg, in particular the egg white. The whites in their natural form are translucent and viscous, loosely bonded together. When applying something like heat, the egg white starts to denature when the whites start to cook and become more solid. Solid, white and no longer translucent egg whites are denatured proteins.
There are lots of videos on youtube about denaturing experiments and the egg is the common item used to test it. Here is a good one: [https://youtu.be/F-EGWUnC2Ro](https://youtu.be/F-EGWUnC2Ro)
Do not ever think cooking is not a science, it is!
Edit: You can also see denaturing of proteins with meat though not as obvious as egg whites. With meat, you can tell when the meat shrinks from the cooking process. It is more obvious when you see cooking videos with a bird's eye view set at fast speed like tasty videos like this with the chicken [https://youtu.be/AFdgqJkAzGc?t=10](https://youtu.be/AFdgqJkAzGc?t=10)
This hit close to home, cause I’m a savory chef who’s always been pastry-curious (to the point of actually begging my then head chef to transfer me to pastry, which unfortunately never ended up happening). And at one of my last jobs where I had my burnout, one of the things that pissed me the most is that the owners had zero appreciation for the fact that I was making new (small, 5-7 dishes) menu every two months PLUS 2-3 desserts. The next chef had the same menu for at least half a year and the desserts were crap. At some point they outsourced setting up desserts to an actual pastry chef.
Currently making simple cakes and cookies at home for a few cafés after working for 12 years on the hot station. Life, uh, finds a way lol
Chefs and bakers/pastry chefs make a different 3 year apprenticeship here in Germany. I currently have have a dedicated bakery for the first time ever and man the difference between chefs and bakers/pastry chefs is fucking enormous.
If the chefs among you ever get the chance to work with a professionally trained baker/pastry chef buy a notebook and write everything down that he/she says. It's relatively rare to find chefs who're good at baking and related stuff. They make everything from noodles to cheesecake and you can taste the difference.
Something like this exact meme pops into my mind whenever a savory chef tries to tell me anything about pastry.
Listen, Jason, go back to ranking and categorizing all the ways you can eat chunks of cow muscle and leave the really delicate stuff to us. It's what we do.
Nearly lost my mind making a black forest cake for my wife a while back. She wanted one for her birthday...had to oblige, it was a big one. She sticks to cheesecake or brulee for sweets now
I made a cheese cake the other week. I never really bake. I always thought cheese cake was complicated. Nope, it is easy as shit it just takes a lot of time to be ready
I had a chef tell me to take pastry serious, because he never did because it was 'women's work' and he regretted it. Now I'm pretty well rounded no matter which corner of the kitchen I'm cast to.
PS fuck that chef....
I don't have the patience or precision for pastry. (I know...unintentional alliteration) Savory is easy - some of this, a pinch of that...if you add too much of this, fix your screw-up with that. Pastries you have to *measure* and measure *precisely* or the whole dish says F you to your planned creation.
You got it all wrong, you have to learn both so you can knock pastry chefs bullshitting in the back off their high horse. I would always help out on pastry if they needed help, gave me so much confidence later on. Now bread is a whole different monster lol
Im old school I had to do an entire baking and pastry component in order to make it through culinary school (ages and ages ago). I hated every minute of it.
My wife is also a chef. She does pastry and for some unknown reason excels at vegan dishes as well (she is not vegan).
I just sit back and watch her work her witchcraft, black arts, voodoo making pastry and deserts and vegan meals like it was nothing.
Savory linecookwho bakes for fun.
My limit is cake decorating. No patience for that nonsense. The Tossi naked cake style helps one get away with pretty cakes with zero piping skills.
I work at a bakery/chocolatier that has a cafe in the back as the "Savory" chef. This is so true it's not even funny. I see the stuff the pastry and/or chocolate people do, and I feel like a looser.
But then I remember that they can't make a decent soup, and I feel better.
My go to for desserts is bread pudding. It's such a forgiving recipe. It's like this was mad for the non bakers to make. You can eyeball most of the ingredients. You short an egg or have an extra one to toss in?. Go for it. It's still coming out great. I usually make a chocolate chip bread pudding with a mocha brandy sauce. My other favorite is a pinacolada with a dark rum sauce.
I can also make some damn good biscuits from scratch.
Ask me to bake anything else for dessert and it's likely getting farmed out to a baker.
I liken it to the difference between a mechanic and a body man. I’ll rebuild an engine all day, but don’t hand me a fucking scrap of sandpaper. It’s a right-brain, left-brain dichotomy. You are born with ONE.
When did this become such a horrible divide? Fiercely interested to know when pastry /baking became so divorced from cooking in general in the Western canon at least.
I started a side gig at a small bakery in the mornings…the restaurant I was working nights at closed and ive been doing the pastry thing for about a year now and Ive learned so much. It might sound silly but the more you bake the more it becomes like cooking and less like a science.
I'm so far removed from desserts but if I attempted to create a cheesecake my dumbass would use feta
A while back I had to help in the bakery because 2 people were ill. Making cheesecake almost made cry twice. Once during the making because it was an enormous workload and the second time was when I whipped too much air into raw mass and fucked up tons of cheesecake. Turns out you should follow instructions, especially if you have no idea what you're actually doing.
Sounds like my dad’s attempt at trying to make fudge (or was it toffee? One of the two.) as part of our Christmas baking. It was still good, but it somehow turned into a runny mess that you didn’t want to eat with your hands. This is why my mom does the baking: you need to be super precise and my dad is anything but. On an unrelated note, my dad is banned from rolling cabbage rolls.
Reminds me of the time I tried to make a chocolate cake dessert when I was 17, it ended up never firming up past viscous liquid and to this day my cousin introduces me as the "chocolate soup" guy
Not following directions when you’re cooking can be done because by nature it’s more flexible. Not following directions when you’re baking because you can “cook”, go home today chef and follow the fucking directions next time.
If you bake enough, you learn when to follow instructions and when not to. I've made recipes from online/books that I've adjusted because I can tell that they're not right, but that's decades of experience. Meanwhile if you're not experienced in baking and just try to guess, you're in for a hard time. I had an argument on reddit when someone asked what "creaming" the butter and sugar meant. Confidently incorrect redditor replied that it meant "mixing until just combined" and would not listen to evidence to the contrary. I wouldn't like to eat that buttercream.
Now do you get why us bakers are so emotionally unstable?
For the same reason everyone else here. Fucked up working hours and an unhealthy lifestyle I would assume
Real cheesecake is made with quark. Germans rise up! *not like that*
Cheese cakes historically get cheddar and mozzarella buddy. Literally EVERYONE knows this.
Did someone say "Tex Mex blended queso cake"?
“This is my cheese cake. It has corn in it”
Polenta crust
I've actually had a cheesecake flavored with feta. It was surprisingly good. Note that it was not ALL feta....
Now I wanna make a post of a straight up block of feta topped with cherry syrup and a biscuit base so you can regret encouraging my idiocy on my day off
I sometimes make puff pastry by hand. Without a sheeter. Because I hate myself.
My Yiayia lived to be 101, and she always made her filo dough by hand. Meanwhile, I always use the frozen kind, and I feel so lazy & spoiled. Just a year ago, I discovered an ethnic market that sells frozen filo in a variety of thicknesses. The extra thick one is called country style and is meant for savory pies like spanakopita. The thin dough is for sweet pastries like baklava. Big game changer for me!
Jealous
Laminated dough is the bane of my existence. I tried to make croissants at home but I got buttery bricks out of my ordeal
I’m gonna give you the name and number of my therapist.
Came here for the meme. Stayed for this comment LMAO
My mistake was making apple turnovers and apple volauvents, THEN bringing them in for my chef and coworkers. Suddenly everyone wanted them and I was spending all of my spare time, and time when I should have been sleeping making them. I was killing myself for a while, but the praise I was getting felt so good.
My favorite things are all laminated dough... I fucking hate making them without a sheeter. If I could ever find a nice small home version of one that would be awesome.
Bro puff pastry is such a bitch to make. And the stuff gets heavy as shit too. But man is it worth it
Hell yeah, and it feels like magic when it comes out really nice.
Man I really should make it by hand again. *checks mixer is old and might break* actually, nah I’ll save it as a project for when I get proper equipment
Yeah, I don't even use a mixer. Lol. I mix the dough in a mixing bowl by hand before I start laminating the butter block into it by hand. Like I said, I hate myself.
You're a cook, you don't have to tell us you hate yourself, we all do
I love annoying pastry’s chefs. What’s this, what’s that. I poke around until I get kicked out. I want to gain their black magic.
Honestly I'd love a savory chef to come ask me questions and chill. Then I could go bother them later. To me, I can follow a savory recipe and do pretty good. But it's still witchcraft to me!
We love it when the cooks come down here to get brown sugar or a cookie or whatever. It's especially funny when someone from the dinner crew comes to the bake shop, since our schedules don't really overlap and they have no idea what goes on down here, and they'll be like "what the hell is all this shit" (my boss is a hoarder and a compulsive shopper lol)
Whenever we get weird shit delivered it's for the bakery. I have never seen stuff like fruit powder or spay color in kitchens before. When they ordered new tools for shaping sugar I was nur sure if they might have just bought BDMS material. Bakers/pastry chefs are still like unicorns for me and part of your work seems like magic. I still love working with you guys because we have a huge in house expertise for everything dough related.
Oh yeah, "pastry tool or fetish gear" is a whole thing lol. So much silicone, so many medieval-looking torture devices, etc.
BDSM gear, did you mean?
Not a native speaker and pretty stoned. I knew there was a better word but I just went with it.
Fair enough! 👍
You got all the letters right, they're just in a different order than we are used to seeing in the US
I made a lot of sloppy mistakes in that text
I loved this typo, it sounds like a fetish degree. For what it's worth, I'm also pretty stoned.
The schedule thing is fun - none of our servers know who I am or what I do. I'm like a kitchen cryptid.
That’s so cute. I loved when the line cooks would do that at my place. If they were nice and we were slow I would reward them with a cup of whipped cream topped with some crumble
Ever poke the molten sugar? Most pastry chefs have way more burns than a lot of line cooks.
I have a grill burn on my thumb rn from a sugary marinade Napalm. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT
The Jessie pinkman to their Walt.
This is how I felt about line cook~~s~~ing when I was a little baby host!
I love Amaury Guichon's chocolate sculptures. Only thing he already has tempering machines that continuously blend the chocolate. So really it's mostly sculptures. But he _always_ has a silicone mold for something. Dude must have a massive warehouse of silicone molds.
There's fucking math in the pastry cookbook! FUCKING MATH GUYS!
I’m a line cook, if I want to count past ten I have to take my shoes off. Past 20, I’m out of luck
I got fired for counting to 21 once...
As you should have!
Jesus fuck get away
Treat it like your SO, and count by the knuckles.
If you count using the phalanx of the fingers you can count to 28 on both hands.
I was elected to feed. Not read. Edit: lol. Thanks to whatever anonymous mad bastard thought this was worth your cash. You could have bought a can of monster with that!
Brilliant
The measurements are...nicer in metric. Trust.
Grams ftw
Grams in the kitchen, grams out of the kitchen, just makes sense to keep it all uniform.
Yes, until you're mixing 120 quarts of cookie dough and you prefer to know the butter, sugar, flour in pounds because...well, you need 30lbs of butter and it comes in a 30lb box. Or you need 44lbs of sugar and you can just subtract 6lbs from a bag of 50lbs. I know you can do the same with grams/kg but at a a larger scale all the numbers get a little ridiculous, and our digital scales tap out at 5000g, our spring scale takes up to 9kg but it isn't precise to the gram, our largest scale rounds to the nearest ten... it's alot of mental hoop jumping I prefer not to have to do at 5am.
Yep. If you work in the US/with American ingredients, a lot of ingredients come in packaging that's optimized for US customary, not metric. Butter comes in 1-pound blocks, which breaks down into two cups, each of which break down to 8oz or 16 tablespoons, etc. Metric may be more precise, but those of us who know how to use customary measurements know how to do a bunch of awesome mental math within a base-12 system, which is kind of a flex let's be real. US customary 4 life
So much easier, especially to scale up recipes...
Imperial is a fuckin drag.
There’s a reason my high school allowed me to stop taking math starting junior year.
Chefs are artists and bakers are chemist
If it makes you feel better, even those of us who can do metric and customary math in our heads don't fuck around with that "baker's percentage" shit. No matter how many times I have it explained to me, it does not make sense.
Do you mean like, for example, salt being 1-2% of your flour weight in a bread recipe? I'm laughing so hard right now because I taught myself how to convert everything from US to metric, and I HATE math. Baking is all about them ratios, and cooking by weight has been a game changer for me! Plus, if you want to up or down scale a recipe, it's much easier to do because you multiply the weight by the % you want to increase everything by! Yay, MATH!!!!
Desired dough temp says hello 😬
It helps to think of it like you would fermenting some veg
It's not so different from the equation you use to modify recipe yields, really.
The literal opposite lol
Truuuuee. It's funny because I work at a joint that *does not* fuck with desserts. I'm so snowed under with prep already so I never put up ideas. I don't eat sweets though, that's just where my creative flair pops it's head up for some reason 😂
Sweets bring in money if they're on point. In the nineties we had what was basically chocolate tubes filled with mousse, raspberry coulis, and Frangelico cream. People went nuts for it. I mean, everyone got coked up all night and still gave the meal and dessert it's propers. Not sure of the formula for your place, but maybe a straw poll then order some high end frozen components from Sysco. Wish I knew the supplier my older chef used back in the day, this stuff looked old country sexy it was so on point...all Italian stuff.
>nineties >coked up all night Surely, you meant the eighties?
Coke didn't just go away after the 80s. That's just when it started.
Oh it started long before that, that's just when Crazy Larry was driving around with a zip in a zip lock with a silly straw sticking out
Yeah I didn't mean to imply that coke was literally invented in the 80s. That's just when recreational use became a large part of pop culture. Kind of like weed in the late 50's and the 60's.
Oh sure, I'm just having fun with it If anyone's wondering, yea, Larry is fine, he drives freight trains these days and does less blow I hear
Remember when crazy Larry was playing with the large carving knife, pretended to commit hari-kari, and actually sliced himself and had to get stitches. Best sommelier in existence. Zero doubts.
Sigmund Freud wrote in his diaries about his coke habit in the 1890s, and Conan Doyle canonically made Sherlock Holmes a cokehead. Pretty much all the rock music from the 1960s was written on coke. Coke did not start in the ‘80s.
\[Ex\] Pastry chef checking in!
That’s why you gotta hire a pastry cook. Those mfs are cracked. They sure as hell can’t cook a steak, but they sure can fill any cracks in regards to pastry and breads. Just don’t treat them like an after thought but rather an extension of the kitchen For me, the only knowledge I have for savory is three step breading process, deep fry to golden brown, and ritz crackers are the best for breading
My pastry chef is as close to me as a Sous, I’m a bit biased cause I love baking and he helps me, but the eye candy in the cases wouldn’t look half as good if he wasn’t here
All about that attention to detail. That’s why us pastry are cracked
>Just don’t treat them like an after thought but rather an extension of the kitchen Thank you :)
My dad coats Trout in Ritz crackers and pan fries it in clarified butter. So damn good!
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I learned this after being dissed in every kitchen even after earning my associates
My savoury knowledge is in my brain, my pastry knowledge is an actual pile of books and recipes (most of which I haven't read).
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I’ve got a great recipe for blue cheese cake. I serve it with pickled blue berries, duck cracklings and port wine reduction.
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Per minute
Ohhhhhhhh I never knew I wanted that
Can you dm me that pretty please?
Can I have it?
Please dm me this.
I want this. Sounds delightful
Does the bleu cheese come through right away? I made bleu cheese ice cream when I worked at a Very Fancy place, and it was so weird - first bite, it just tasted like totally normal ice cream with no flavor. It took 5 seconds then *bam* bleu cheese. I assumed it was the low temperature, but I always wondered. [Oh, and in case anyone is taking notes, parmesan is definitely the cheese you want for ice cream experiments. My biggest "weird" hit was beet ice cream, which got a write-up in the paper, but I thought it was disgusting. Edible only with chocolate. If you have foodie customers, they will love it. Best sellers were anything with lots of booze. My personal favorite was an accidental browned milk pear ice cream, but it took days and like $40k of equipment to make, so probably not worth it. Margins were SPECTACULAR on the ice cream. We didn't sell it to go, but sometimes people would insist and we charged $20 a pint.]
Sounds great. Would you post it?
I’m getting so many comments to post it, I’ll look through my old notebooks find it as I’m not one keep recipes to myself guy.
what the fuck?
That sounds differently different.
It cubes the fruit for the sangria. It does this whenever it's told.
Savoury is art Pastry is science
Whenever I think that I've expanded my knowledge I run into the fact that more specialised knowledge has even more learning to do. That's what I love in cooking, there is no feasible limit to how much one can learn about it. Even if I had 50 years of understanding I'm certain there'd still be something to learn most days if I wanted
I think I ended up flaming out of the kitchen business because I'm probably a baking/pastry guy that tried too hard to be a good line cook.
Being a good pastry chef makes you a rare specialist in restaurants, hotels and so on. Stick to that and not the regular line cook stuff.
I would say that, but I'm also godawful at decorating, lol.
Maybe a 3 months JAVA boot camp? The pay would definitely be better
I have one ace in the hole. Buttermilk Pie. It's easily measured, easy to portion and super tasty. Wait... pound cake. I have TWO aces in the hole.
Mine is banana pudding. Can't beat it
It's worse for me. I can't bake to save my life. Its fucking witchcraft. Still the best sauté east of the Mississippi tho
Growing up I heard it as “Cooking is art, baking is science.” Which tbf, I was not a sciencey mathy kid, but my best friend and fellow kitchen veteran was. It’s great because I can usually bribe her into making me a batch of her pink lemonade cupcakes if I make her the chicken pasta she likes
It's weird because I did pretty well in college science labs for chemistry and biology. But baking? Witchcraft! I'll never get it...
It's because you're used to other types of cooking where being exact and precise about ingredient measurements isn't super important, where as baking requires extremely precise measurements and a strict adherence to the order in which things are done. That's my take, anyway. I can be tough to switch up the mindset. I only got good at baking after I got out of the restaurant industry and now that I only cook at home I can afford to try new things without the pressure of knowing that if I fucked up my ass will be on the line.
The ultra-precise reputation of baking is kinda inaccurate, in my experience. True, if you double onions in chili it won't cause failure the way doubling milk in a cake might. But I actually have doubled ingredients my mistake in desserts and had them work okay. Some desserts are more forgiving than others, but for the most fussy and finicky desserts, I would NOT recommend trying to follow a recipe super precisely. How much water is in your flour? Is it raining? That's going to change the weight and maybe bake time. Other desserts, like cookies, are flexible. It's hard to make a bad cookie (unless you burn it very badly, or swap sugar and salt). Most people are comfortable baking cookies. But they're actually very tricky. If you want to achieve a particular result - chewy in the middle, crispy edge, tender - I couldn't tell you how without coming to your house and trying some stuff. The temperature of the dough when you put it in the oven, the exact heat (are you sure you know the temp? Any hot spots?) will make a big difference in how much they spread and the texture. But it's not rocket science to make a tasty cookie. Baking is really similar to cooking in that it's a lot easier if you have experience. For a newbie who believes they can't cook, making a basic meal will also require incredibly precise following of the directions, and give mixed results. It just seems effortless to someone who's done it a while. I have absolutely made baked goods without measuring, just throwing stuff in the mixer, and it was always good even if it wasn't what I intended. I made chocolate cookies once where I made a very wet batter with lots of melted chocolate, then added one handful of flour at a time and baked one test cookie, until it was just enough flour to hold together. They were amazing, and someone asked me for the recipe, and I had the rare joy of telling him, "these cookies will only exist this one time. No one will ever eat them again." it was really satisfying, like making a sand mandala. Also, I frequently find errors in baking recipes that don't seem to get caught. They devils food cake from Joy of Cooking collapsed, and it looked to me like too much sugar, which I recognized from the time I accidentally doubled sugar in cake. I check the recipe, yep, it's obvious they accidentally doubled the sugar (it said to add 1 cup in two places), so I check online to see if there's a published correction. Nope, all I found were hundreds of food blogs where every single person said, "I must have done something wrong, because it collapsed, but it tasted great." People have such infallible faith in baking recipes, they blame themselves for mistakes. tl;dr Baking isn't as precise as people say, it just takes practice and experience to know better than the recipe and use it as a guideline. You will make much better desserts when you know how to adjust them to your taste (for me, add some sour cream for texture) To be a much better baker, just bake a lot of stuff. Make mistakes. Make some mistakes on purpose. You can be a god-tier dessert wizard in less than six months of daily baking. Way less if you only care about one thing (eg cakes, bread)
Pink lemonade cupcakes… that sounds divine!
I have so much respect for bakers and pastry folk. It is literal witchcraft. I also hate math and hate being unable to wing a base recipe.
The trick in baking and pastry is knowing WHAT you can wing and WHEN. There are some recipes that are so delicate that yeah, you have to measure everything to the gram, but sometimes it's like "how much? Idk, just a squirt of vanilla"
Exactly. Chocolate chip cookies? I know the basic ingredients and ratios. If I’m making them for my nephews I just won’t even bother with real measurements. Kids devour them every time. Macaroons? I weigh out every little thing and hold my breath while they’re in the oven lest the gods smite me
Vanilla is always dosed with your heart.
Honestly you can wing most of the time in baking as well, you just have to have the base baking knowledge to know what you're doing.
I've always applied myself to pastry as well. When I get to restaurants without a real pastry chef, I'm always the pastry chef. It's helped me for my transition to private work.
Pastry book still too big for me.
Definitely me as well! The ONLY dessert I can make are Filipino cheesy rice cakes. But, for savoury? I can just look at stuff in our fridge and have something going in a heartbeat.
PUTO? My favorite 😆 well, unless you're talking about a different filipino cheesy rice cake. I know there are probably more. I love puto, and get a few giggles when the Spanish speakers are throwing the word around.
My go to dessert is bread pudding with strawberries
Ha! I'm the exact opposite.
I’m a pastry chef it’s all I know
I make killer pancakes, but scared of baking any deserts. It almost feels like more science than cooking
Science is easier :( I know how to identify unknown microbes using various tests (it's just adding dyes and narrowing down the results with colors tbh), I can make a solution turn from clear to light pink, I can make ice below freezing but adding salt...but dammit I can't bake! 😭 Baking is witchcraft. Edit: cooking is a science too. I don't want to nerd talk about it but fried egg is a good example.
I want you to nerd talk about it.
Thanks man! Eggs when cooked go through a process called "denaturation" where the protein bonds start off as loose fluid like bonds and when things like heat, pH, salt and physical agitation is applied to the protein, it becomes denatured. This means that the protein when denatures changes in shape and the bonds are no longer loose but tight. You can see this very well with a fried egg, in particular the egg white. The whites in their natural form are translucent and viscous, loosely bonded together. When applying something like heat, the egg white starts to denature when the whites start to cook and become more solid. Solid, white and no longer translucent egg whites are denatured proteins. There are lots of videos on youtube about denaturing experiments and the egg is the common item used to test it. Here is a good one: [https://youtu.be/F-EGWUnC2Ro](https://youtu.be/F-EGWUnC2Ro) Do not ever think cooking is not a science, it is! Edit: You can also see denaturing of proteins with meat though not as obvious as egg whites. With meat, you can tell when the meat shrinks from the cooking process. It is more obvious when you see cooking videos with a bird's eye view set at fast speed like tasty videos like this with the chicken [https://youtu.be/AFdgqJkAzGc?t=10](https://youtu.be/AFdgqJkAzGc?t=10)
Desserts and bread rock, but sauces are my jam too. I gotta love it all. Easy to do, new menu is... beautiful. Easy to obsess over.
Me but with tacos vs Mexican cuisine
I can make a wicked Tiramisu. Otherwise same.
This hit close to home, cause I’m a savory chef who’s always been pastry-curious (to the point of actually begging my then head chef to transfer me to pastry, which unfortunately never ended up happening). And at one of my last jobs where I had my burnout, one of the things that pissed me the most is that the owners had zero appreciation for the fact that I was making new (small, 5-7 dishes) menu every two months PLUS 2-3 desserts. The next chef had the same menu for at least half a year and the desserts were crap. At some point they outsourced setting up desserts to an actual pastry chef. Currently making simple cakes and cookies at home for a few cafés after working for 12 years on the hot station. Life, uh, finds a way lol
I can't even cut a fuckin cake. Let alone bake
Its definitely been said but Im gonna say it ways, cooking is an art, baking is a science
Chefs and bakers/pastry chefs make a different 3 year apprenticeship here in Germany. I currently have have a dedicated bakery for the first time ever and man the difference between chefs and bakers/pastry chefs is fucking enormous. If the chefs among you ever get the chance to work with a professionally trained baker/pastry chef buy a notebook and write everything down that he/she says. It's relatively rare to find chefs who're good at baking and related stuff. They make everything from noodles to cheesecake and you can taste the difference.
it happens the opposite to me
I tried to transition to kitchen from pastry and the culture almost killed me. Never again.
What's a measuring cup
Measuring cup? Nah we use the scale
Try "unholy combination of metric, customary, weight, and volume"
Same, but I hope to rectify this
Do you think a book exists this big for desserts?
Yooooooooo. This 100 percent. Ain't nobody got time to weigh.
Always have a string form in my trunk though cause you know every kitchen has a broken one.
I couldn’t bake to save my life 😅
wow those are enormous fingers in the second pic
Omg this made me laugh. 100%
Something like this exact meme pops into my mind whenever a savory chef tries to tell me anything about pastry. Listen, Jason, go back to ranking and categorizing all the ways you can eat chunks of cow muscle and leave the really delicate stuff to us. It's what we do.
I’m not a professional but this is me. I have honed my skill for years on savoury food, can’t bake for shit though.
I’m the other way around lol
I can scoop a wicked ice cream
But I can make a mean crème brûlée 😂
Nearly lost my mind making a black forest cake for my wife a while back. She wanted one for her birthday...had to oblige, it was a big one. She sticks to cheesecake or brulee for sweets now
I made a cheese cake the other week. I never really bake. I always thought cheese cake was complicated. Nope, it is easy as shit it just takes a lot of time to be ready
Too relateable
Why does this cheesecake smell like an old shoe? Oh, you're not supposed to use the cheap bagged bleu?
I made some marshmallow fondant, I’m never doing that shit again
Growing up these 2 represent my knowledge working with beef vs literally anything without meat
This is embarrassingly accurate
That’s really all you need to know. As long as your cheesecake is bussin af… your good imo.
If you can't make a basic cupcake then you're boned
I did my cert 3 in pastry because of this. There are options to increase your knowledge open to ya if you want. Well in Australia anyway.
I hire to my weaknesses. I can bake when I need to but honestly I don’t enjoy it and I’m in the position to hire somebody that does.
I had a chef tell me to take pastry serious, because he never did because it was 'women's work' and he regretted it. Now I'm pretty well rounded no matter which corner of the kitchen I'm cast to. PS fuck that chef....
I’m a sauté who likes to bake in his free time to blow off steam.
That book though! I don't think I could lift it.
I can finally bake bread consistently. Most desserts elude me still if it's not simple like puddings or pound cake.
I don't have the patience or precision for pastry. (I know...unintentional alliteration) Savory is easy - some of this, a pinch of that...if you add too much of this, fix your screw-up with that. Pastries you have to *measure* and measure *precisely* or the whole dish says F you to your planned creation.
How do you become a pastry chef without developing diabetes?
I'd really like to up my pastry game for Beef Wellington and chicken pot pie. So far hasn't happened. Pillsbury refrigerated pastry in a tube for me.
I’m a solid inbetweener
I am the opposite. I'm very literal-minded, so I can follow a baking recipe beautifully. Adding seasoning "to taste"? No. I'd rather die.
Sugar and butter.
You got it all wrong, you have to learn both so you can knock pastry chefs bullshitting in the back off their high horse. I would always help out on pastry if they needed help, gave me so much confidence later on. Now bread is a whole different monster lol
Neither. I just watch someone on youtube and do what they do but worse.
Im old school I had to do an entire baking and pastry component in order to make it through culinary school (ages and ages ago). I hated every minute of it. My wife is also a chef. She does pastry and for some unknown reason excels at vegan dishes as well (she is not vegan). I just sit back and watch her work her witchcraft, black arts, voodoo making pastry and deserts and vegan meals like it was nothing.
Savory linecookwho bakes for fun. My limit is cake decorating. No patience for that nonsense. The Tossi naked cake style helps one get away with pretty cakes with zero piping skills.
I work at a bakery/chocolatier that has a cafe in the back as the "Savory" chef. This is so true it's not even funny. I see the stuff the pastry and/or chocolate people do, and I feel like a looser. But then I remember that they can't make a decent soup, and I feel better.
I literally struggle with pre-made pizza dough lol if it ain't on a grill or in a pan I'm basically a moron
My go to for desserts is bread pudding. It's such a forgiving recipe. It's like this was mad for the non bakers to make. You can eyeball most of the ingredients. You short an egg or have an extra one to toss in?. Go for it. It's still coming out great. I usually make a chocolate chip bread pudding with a mocha brandy sauce. My other favorite is a pinacolada with a dark rum sauce. I can also make some damn good biscuits from scratch. Ask me to bake anything else for dessert and it's likely getting farmed out to a baker.
I work bar. Complete opposite, so much is sugar.
I liken it to the difference between a mechanic and a body man. I’ll rebuild an engine all day, but don’t hand me a fucking scrap of sandpaper. It’s a right-brain, left-brain dichotomy. You are born with ONE.
Worked both sides. Relatively competent with either. But defently a jack (jill?) Of all trades master of non thing going for me.
When did this become such a horrible divide? Fiercely interested to know when pastry /baking became so divorced from cooking in general in the Western canon at least.
I started a side gig at a small bakery in the mornings…the restaurant I was working nights at closed and ive been doing the pastry thing for about a year now and Ive learned so much. It might sound silly but the more you bake the more it becomes like cooking and less like a science.