baking v cooking

My friend The Red Menace recently blogged about the perceived dichotomy between baking and cooking. While I’m more comfortable baking, I’m a pretty kickass cook as well.

I cook less these days because my boyfriend is the undisputed best cook in the house, and he doesn’t bake. But he was blown away last weekend when I whipped up dinner for him, by modifying a Smitten Kitchen recipe: Whole Foods didn’t have ground chicken or pancetta, so I used turkey and prosciutto in her amazing meatballs. I served them with her caramelized shallots, an enormous green salad, and some spicy roasted sweet potatoes I improvised from thin air. For salad dressing, I splashed olive oil, red wine vinegar, and balsalmic vinegar over the greens, squirted them with a lemon, ground some pepper over it, and tossed. I couldn’t even give you the proportions, but we both were really impressed by the dressing—which was totally a page taken from my boyfriend’s book. The difference between him and me is that he wouldn’t have needed a recipe to caramelize the shallots or season the meatballs.

Last night, in complementing the Twin Peaks-inspired cherry pie I brought as my potlatch contribution to my art opening, my friend Jamie raised the cooking v baking issue indirectly, claiming that baking is chemistry, and experimentation leads to inevitable disaster. He cited a failed attempt to change the texture of a cake by adding more flour that failed and resulted in something inedible.

But for me, baking is incredibly experimental, with room for great flexibility. For example: that sour cherry slab pie. I got the recipe from my usual source, smittenkitchen.com. Deb adapted it from a Martha Stewart recipe. I used her version as suggestion.

Recipes are always guidelines.

First deviation: I don’t own a pastry blender. So I used a potato masher. Because the width between the slots are about twice as wide, I wasn’t able to get down to “pea-sized” bits of floury butter; more like marbles. I had to use a steak knife to hack at the globs, and to chop them out from between the metal tines. Even then, there were fairly large chunks of unincorporated butter in the dough when I rolled it out. Additionally, it took a quarter-cup less of ice water to make my dough the proper texture, so I didn’t use nearly as much liquid as the recipe called for. And it was still the best pie crust I’d ever made from scratch.

I wasn’t able to find the sour cherries Deb used, so I substituted frozen sweet cherries. I just bought two bags, and didn’t bother measuring to find out if that was exactly six cups. Martha’s original recipe called for one and a half cups of sugar in the filling, which Deb reduced to three-quarters to preserve her cherries’ sour bite. Thawed, my sweet cherries were so overwhelmingly sweet that I just sprinkled them with a dusting of sugar, definitely less than two tablespoons. And that ended up being perfect.

On Deb’s recommendation, I used a mixture of lemon juice and water in the icing rather than milk as Martha mandated. But I went with an egg wash over the crust instead of Deb’s suggestion of heavy cream (partly because I don’t have a pastry brush). I lined my tray with parchment paper as she suggested, but additionally buttered and floured it, and also scored the bottom crust with a fork like my mom does. Because rolling out the first crust was not as successful as the second, my top ended up being bigger than the cherry-filled bottom, so I had to lift the base and tuck the top crust underneath the bottom one, rather than bringing the bottom crust up to wrap around the top. It worked just fine.

I putter in the kitchen, with years of instinct honed in my mom’s kitchen. And I find experimenting with baking recipes far more rewarding—and yes, more challenging—than experimental cooking. A few months ago, my boyfriend, the chef, wanted to whip up a chocolate cake without using any recipe. And, with my help, we made a killer one. But he didn’t know to add a leavener, so I had to explain that it would come out bricklike without baking soda or powder. He needed to rely on me for proportions: ratios of sugar to cocoa, how much butter, eggs to flour, etc. I hadn’t known that my brain had absorbed these standards, but I somehow knew exactly what to put in, and how much, and in what sequence.

My mom has that ability to invent recipes as well: her perfect sugar cookie recipe was derived from so many hundreds of sources over decades that it’s truly an original, from wholecloth. But there is no recipe too sacred to alter: I’ve used the gist of her potato pancake recipe to whip up incredible brownsugar-blackpepper-sweetpotato latkes! My best chocolate-chip cookie recipe is just tweaking the proportion of brown to white sugar from a cookbook recipe. She’s where I got this from.

And somehow The Red Menace’s blog entry about her cooking inspiration—her mother—has inspired me to share my own. As I commented on her site, when people ask me where I learned this, I simply tell them that “I grew up in my mother’s kitchen.” I think I brought something of myself to it though, because my sister doesn’t enjoy kitchening as much as me. But when we were little, we mixed dough by hand and poured ingredients into bowls. We frosted cupcakes and cookies. Messily. When we were old enough to handle blades, we peeled potatoes and apples. When mom made her famous cheesecake, we were silent as mice. When we were stovetop tall, we kept the gravy from burning to the bottom of the roasting pan with a long wooden spoon, scraping meat drippings and smooshing bouillon cubes. We made games of fishing bay leaves from spaghetti sauce, and spread it over lasagnas. We were inspired in that kitchen, where food was an expression of love.