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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32186 is a reply to message #32184 ] |
Mon, 02 August 2010 22:20   |
 kolokolchiki
Messages: 47
Registered: November 2008
Location: Michigan, USA |
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One of the reasons I’ve never got round to posting my How to Make Yeast Bread (which I’ve been promising off and on now for almost three years) is because so much of it is based on feel—on experience. Every frelling bag of frelling flour is a little different, and what makes cooking fun and interesting and dangerous is learning to respond to your ingredients and when to ignore the recipe. There’s a reason why so many of us old, experienced, not to say self-willed and cantankerous, cooks say of ourselves ‘I can’t follow a recipe’. This is pretty hard to quantify.
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Have you ever looked at Tassajara Cooking by Edward Espe Brown? There are very few amounts listed anywhere. It is mostly suggestion and guidance rather than recipe, but it's honest about what it is, and I love this cookbook. The Tassajara Bread Book gives measurements in the recipes, but in the front matter, Brown goes to great lengths to point out how variable they may be. I think I enjoy Brown's cookbooks precisely because they empower me to experiment by giving me a baseline from which to begin.
Tassajara Cooking ISBN:0877730474
Tassajara Bread Book ISBN: 0877733430
[Updated on: Mon, 02 August 2010 22:21]
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32192 is a reply to message #32184 ] |
Mon, 02 August 2010 23:13 |
EMoon
Messages: 662
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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So true about bread. Having tried to teach friends to make bread (they asked me; I didn't push) who turned out to have no hand for bread, I think it's all feel and maybe even innate.
My mother made incredibly good from-scratch pastry. My pastry either falls apart or resembles suede (in the unbaked form) or mortar (in the baked form.) She made great from-scratch cakes; I can barely make a cake from a mix. But bread...she made OK bread but not great. My bread...was good enough for my mother-in-law to rave over. And it was good from the first time I plucked up courage enough to try it. It's as if the ingredients tell my fingers what to do with it; I've made bread in different climates, on different continents (as a guest-present) with totally different flours...and very rarely does it go wrong. I don't think it's skill--I think I was born with 'bread hands.' When I read directions in books, it seems I'm doing it all wrong...but the bread comes out right. (But it's clear that I will never in my life make biscuits as good as my mother's. Or pie crust.)
As for other recipes...yes...it's all smell and feel. How much wine in the soup? "Enough." How much of anything? Depends on how much of other things are available...and what was substituted when an ingredient was missing. A recipe is a suggestion. I heard a TV cooking show host comments recently that the big difference between home and professional cooks is that professional cooks have to be absolutely consistent--if it's "Great Chef X's Beef Stew" the customers expect the same beef stew every time. But at home...it can be never the same twice, but always good.
E
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32195 is a reply to message #32184 ] |
Tue, 03 August 2010 00:31 |
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danceswithpahis
Messages: 380
Registered: October 2008 |
Senior Member |
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This has always been one of the areas that I've wanted to have more time to experiment, since I do enjoy baking things (when I have the mental and emotional energy). My one caveat is that it has to be tricky, complicated, or at the very least, time-consuming. My first time making caramel rolls (a process involving multiple hours of work, they were the first bread-like food I'd ever made [I had to look up bread-making instructions online], and my cooking ability at the time was largely based on my ability to successfully boil water, but hey, the caramel rolls sounded like fun) they came out light and tasty and as if I'd been making them for years. My various experiments with French pastries (most of which involve various recipes combined into one, so that making all of the separate pieces involve multiple specialized cooking tools [most of which I don't have] and various ingredient lists with things not available in the country I was cooking in at the time), while not always attractive-looking, have pretty much always turned out tasting good. This, despite not knowing how to cook at all (at the beginning), and starting off my baking career in a foreign country with a stove that had two temperatures -- 1 and 1/2 (one could fiddle around with them and have, say, 5/8 or 9/10 or so, but there was no correlation with actual temperatures). But give me a recipe like, oh, muffins, and I can't do it. The recipe is too simple, and it falls to pieces in my hands. Even if I have friends who take the same simple muffin recipes and create masterpieces. Cookies are another example; try to get me to make a basic cookie, and you will be sorely disappointed. Chocolate chip cookies? Doesn't work; they taste awful. How could I possibly manage something successful with a recipe that only takes 10 minutes to make? This is why I don't bake very often.
"Oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!"
-- Lilo ("Lilo and Stitch")
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32200 is a reply to message #32184 ] |
Tue, 03 August 2010 04:00 |
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HUNGRY!!!!!!
And then Jodi ate the world. The end.
Smooshes!
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32211 is a reply to message #32207 ] |
Tue, 03 August 2010 09:36 |
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anne_d
Messages: 206
Registered: October 2008
Location: Orange County, California |
Senior Member |
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| Robin wrote on Tue, 03 August 2010 05:25 |
Snork. 'Yummy mummies' is a phrase over here for . . . um .. . middle to upper-middle class stay at home mums who are trying to be Nigella Lawson/domestic goddesses. It's not a very friendly term.
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Oh, you mean the ones who let their spoiled-brat offspring run wild in the market while they talk on their cellphones? I get the picture.
Many attempt to be Nigella, but few succeed...
"The creative urge can come out in any form: in embroidery, in... cooking, in painting, drawing and sculpture, in composing music, as well as in writing books and stories... the artist's inner satisfaction was probably much the same." ~ Agatha Christie
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32213 is a reply to message #32184 ] |
Tue, 03 August 2010 10:59 |
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equus_peduus
Messages: 437
Registered: September 2009
Location: France |
Senior Member |
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Am I the only one here whose mother actually taught her how to bake things rather than forcing one to learn out of a book and experimentation because said mother didn't bake much/at all?
Though while my mother makes a very much excellent strawberry shortcake (actually she makes (or used to make) a lot of very excellent baked goods), she seems to think that I'm better at most baking than she is. She makes *me* do the cakes, pies, cookies, muffins, bread (well, the latter mostly gets bread-machined now-a-days). Or maybe she just wants the end product without doing the work  Not that I mind - other than my chocolate experiments, I mostly don't bake for myself any more, and I *like* baking. But I've always followed recipes for baking. Cooking, I make it up, but baking I follow recipes. But I do agree - you have to know when to keep going with kneading, or when to stop mixing the muffin batter, or how much pastry-handling you can get away with - and it's something that is a combination of learning-by-doing and *feeling* in the mix. I had a roommate a few years ago who made molasses-oatmeal bread - but she NEVER kneaded it enough, so while it always tasted really good, it also always fell apart, and she could never figure out why.
| danceswithpahis wrote on Mon, 02 August 2010 21:31 |
This has always been one of the areas that I've wanted to have more time to experiment, since I do enjoy baking things (when I have the mental and emotional energy). My one caveat is that it has to be tricky, complicated, or at the very least, time-consuming.
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I find this interesting. I do enjoy somewhat complicated recipes from time to time - but I generally find that while they come out pretty darn good, they're just not *quite* worth the effort involved. I'd much rather throw together a 7-minute batch of cookies (+8 minute baking time). OTOH, doing all the convoluted fiddly steps can be a lot of fun in and of itself, if you're not trying to get something else done at the same time because you didn't think that it was going to take as long as it did. Have you ever made croissants? Not that difficult, really, but very time consuming (every 10 minutes - take the dough out of the fridge, roll it out, layer it with butter, fold it and roll it a couple times, and stick it back in the fridge... repeat too many times...). I like most breads because you can ignore them for a couple hours while they rise, then come back and do the next step.
Am I the only one, for some reason, that despite the number of times I've read that book, thought they were MILK bars? This explanation makes much more sense.
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Trust me: ‘thank you’ is never inadequate to a storyteller about her stories.
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All right then - Thank you, Robin. Two of my three most favorite I-just-want-one-book-to-read-right-now books are yours. 
(And since EMoon is also around here... Thank you too - one of my two favorite I-want-a-whole-series-to-read-again series i
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32216 is a reply to message #32215 ] |
Tue, 03 August 2010 15:32 |
amp15
Messages: 96
Registered: February 2009
Location: Denmark |
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It's a real recipe, that I unfortunately lost in a computer crash some years ago.
Anette, the Great Dane
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32223 is a reply to message #32221 ] |
Tue, 03 August 2010 20:23 |
Catlady
Messages: 230
Registered: December 2008
Location: Aurora, Colorado |
Senior Member |
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I've always felt they sounded like a perfect sort of snack food. Enough like real food to fill you up, sweet enough to be interesting... and since they're in Damar, not filled with twenty-six syllable ingredients to give them their sweet-enough-to-be-interesting taste.
And I've always pictured Killer Zebras as pinwheel cookies, though probably much more artistic than the ones I make, which do NOT resemble pinwheels. (Or zebras.)
[Updated on: Tue, 03 August 2010 20:24]
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32279 is a reply to message #32275 ] |
Thu, 05 August 2010 02:46 |
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| mayasings wrote on Tue, 03 August 2010 11:37 |
you are so not the only one who read them as MILK bars, lol!
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In his last decade my father suffered from ataxia, which, besides messing up his balance, made his speech difficult to understand, and may have affected his cognition, though that wasn't clear. He was sitting at the dining table at my house one evening, looking out the window, and he said, "It says 'milk'."
"What?" we said.
He kept insisting that he saw the word milk somewhere out the window. As there was just a green yard, without even any litter of any papers, we were mystified. Eventually, I put my head right down beside his, and looked where he was pointing. Indeed, I saw "milk." Across the yard was a row of nandinas. They have many leaves, narrow pointed things about 1 cm x 5 cm, that grow in a somewhat scattered, non-dense way. From his particular position, 9 leaves overlapped in a formation that formed an M, an L, and a K. There was not actually an I, but the perception was indeed that it said 'milk'.
Tom had gotten rather frustrated as we couldn't tell what he was talking about, and he was unable to explain himself more clearly. Once we all saw it, he was vindicated.
The bushes continued to say "milk" for a week or so, till uneven growth moved the leaflets and destroyed the formation.
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| Re: Sunshine Ask Robins [message #32284 is a reply to message #32213 ] |
Thu, 05 August 2010 11:19 |
Annagail
Messages: 68
Registered: August 2009
Location: PA |
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Am I the only one here whose mother actually taught her how to bake things rather than forcing one to learn out of a book and experimentation because said mother didn't bake much/at all?
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Nope. My mom taught me baking, too- although I think I make better piecrust than she does at this point. I've been trying to figure out if one could "artisanise" my favourite bread recipes- the family recipe is a molasses rye that is HEAVENLY but I rather wonder what it would be like if it was let to sour a little, or made with some kind of starter. I also love my honey-oatmeal bread, but think it would be better with more of a crust and also made with a starter. I'm a little hesitant to fiddle with them that much, though, because they WORK now and I want them to work again.
I love good biscuits (also Southern-US variety). I think buttermilk biscuits should get made this weekend at my house.
I make one kind of cookie because they're so good that I can't see wanting another kind. (Ok, I see the attraction of peanut butter cookies, but still!) They're basically chocolate chip with oatmeal and nuts and spices and they're chewy. HEAVEN.
~Annagail, who wants lunch NOW
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