Why is baking harder than cooking?

I’m not even talking about creating recipes, merely executing them.

Think about it: when cooking, you manipulate a far more diverse cast of ingredients, by applying many more techniques (cutting, cooking, mixing…); yet with a bit of experience, you reliably end up close to the expected results.

Whereas baking, both when it works and when it fails, feels like the judgment of an unscrutable god — you did what you thought was the same thing, leading to two completely different outcomes.

And patissing (making cakes as opposed to bread) falls in the middle: more reliable than baking, but more unpredictable than cooking.

Why is that?

My pet theory is an analogy between these three food making disciplines, and three fundamental sciences: Cooking as Classical Physics, Patissing as Chemistry, Baking as Biology.

Cooking and Classical Physics

When cooking say a couscous or a beef wellington, most of what you’re doing falls within the real of classical physics: you’re cutting stuff, you’re applying heat to them, you’re mixing them.

This means that the consequences of your actions are relatively intuitive; for example, you will cook faster if the cuts are smaller and/or the temperature is higher.

There are a couple of tricks (thermal inertia which means your pasta/meat doesn’t stop cooking when you take it out of the pan, mixing fish with acid will cook it,…), but by far and large cooking behaves cleanly, linearly, such that being a bit off will lead to a slightly off result.

Thus the link with classical physics: it’s the part where you can easily intuit the behavior of the core components, and only need your eye and hand or basic tools to get the core data.

And in terms of feedback, you see almost instantly when you fucked up, and you can often course correct quickly (except when you try to reverse entropy: cannot uncook meat or uncut vegetables)

Patissing and Chemistry

When we move to patisserie, the bulk of the work moves from the physical to the chemical level. Instead of the variety of results coming from the variety of ingredients (different vegetable, different cuts of meat, different spices…), we are now using basically the same ingredients all the time (flour, water, sugar, eggs, butter, milk…), and instead varying the transformations that are applied to them.

Think about the stages of caramel or the many uses of eggs.

This introduces non-linearities: if you put a bit too much this or that or beat something a bit too long or too little, the result will be completely different (and generally failed).

I conjecture that a big part of learning patisserie amounts to learning what are the key degrees of freedom to monitor for each transformation, from whisking egg whites to making pie crusts.

Similarly, these non-linearities coming from chemistry force you to be much more precise about weight and timing. And they mess up the feedback process: you might still get quick feedback (seeing your egg white without stiff peaks), but what you should do to remedy it is far less clear (hence the prevalent superstitions in patisserie), and often the result is only obvious latter on, after you finished the cake/preparation.

Baking and Biology

Last but not least, baking reduces the number of ingredients even further: flour, salt, water, and yeast (plus some ways to vary the flavours like sugar, grains, oils…).

But the last ingredient is the killer: yeast, which are fungi that release the CO2 allowing bread to rise.

This one should be obvious: now you need to deal with a living being! You need to feed it the right stuff, consistently, house it at the right temperature, not kill it (through adding salt directly on it or using water out of temperature range or a host of other way), and after all that, you need to leverage it at the right time for it do to the one job you care about.

It’s even worse than that: a baking textbook I own informs me that the taste of the bread depends of the proportion of different types of bacteria in your yeast/starter. And what you feed the yeast/starter, how you do it, and when, all affect the taste and the texture.

Which is why to make reliable quality bread, you need ways to control the temperature, the hydration, the content of the flour, and even how long and uniform are the different forms of mixing!

And of course, the feedback loop gets much slower: not only is baking happening over time scales of hours and days, but you might have killed your starter or underfed it while making your levain the day before, or under/over mixed your dough; not only would you not clearly find out the reasons for your failure, but you would also only see the indirect consequences hours later.

Conclusion: Tasting The Regularities

Beyond explaining my mediocrity at baking, this analogy also help give a feel for the different kind of regularities present in physics, chemistry, and biology. It makes it painfully obvious why just transferring physics methods to biology will not work in general: if you try to bake as if you were cooking, you will make a lot of shitty loaves.