What cooking skills are so difficult that they border on sorcery?
What cooking skills are so difficult that they border on sorcery?
What's your 'Heston' experience?
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Baking. Measuring isn't fun. I'd rather wing it.
It's absurdly easier with a scale. I don't know why the US standardizes to volume.
Especially for things like butter. Who measures butter in a cup, America?! Unless you just have vats of liquid butter sitting around, in which case I guess scooping up a cup is pretty easy... But even then, weighing it out is better, I think.
fwiw 1 stick of butter = half a cup
We do sticks so it's not that much of an issue.
But flour? The difference between sifted and packed is huge, it makes a huge structural difference, and people have genuinely written recipes measured pretty far across the range on density.
I came across an American recipe using cups of butter a week or two back, so obviously not everyone got the memo! Sticks isn't so bad, but I do wish it was all just done by weight. Whenever I encounter recipes using sticks, I still have to convert it because butter is sold in different quantities here.
I agree about flour, it absolutely needs to be done by weight!
I'm saying it's sold in sticks. The recipe is always cups or tablespoons, but 2 sticks is a cup and tablespoons are marked on the wrapper to just cut off.
Right, but in my non-US country, the recipe is in grams or ounces (ie, by weight) and butter is sold in different-sized sticks to in the US. So, whenever I come across US recipes, I have to do some kind of conversion that involves me looking up how much butter is in a cup, how big a US stick of butter is, or how much a tablespoon of butter weighs!
But how big is a knob of butter!?!?
Cooking is art. Baking is science (chemistry).
What? Baking is super easy. Follow the instructions. That's all there is to it.
Recipe calls for 250g of sugar? Put in 250g. Not 260 (close enough). Follow the instructions. Works every time.
But that’s hard
I’m used to winging it while cooking
Precision is not in my food preparation repertoire
You can wing it with baking, at least for some types of stuff. Oatmeal raisin cookies don't really take precision, as an example.