I have been baking for a long time, but it took a surprisingly long while to get to this practical “not a ritual” stage. My problem was that I approached it as an academic subject: an expert tells you what you need to know when you ask, and then you try it. But the people around me knew how to bake in a practical, non-theoretical sense. So while my mother would immediately tell me how to fix a too runny batter and the importance of quickly working a pie dough, she could not explain why that worked in terms that I could understand. Much frustration ensued on both sides.
A while ago I came across Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking” and Jeff Potter’s “Cooking for Geeks”. These books explained what was going on in a format that made sense to me—starch gelation, protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and so on - *and* linked it to the language of the kitchen. Suddenly I had freedom to experiment and observe but with the help of a framework of explicit chemistry and physics that helped me organise the observations. There has been a marked improvement in my results (although mother now finds me unbearably weird in the kitchen). It is also fun to share these insights: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1263895622433869827.html
The lesson of my experience is that sometimes it is important to seek out people who can explain and bootstrap your knowledge by speaking your “language”, even if they are not the conveniently close and friendly people around you. When you get non-working explanations they usually do not explain much, and hence just become ritual rules. Figuring out *why* explanations do not work for you is the first step, but then one needs to look around for sources of the right kind of explanations (which in my case took far longer). Of course, if you are not as theoretical explanation-dependent as I am but more of the practical, empirical bent, you can sidestep this issue to a large extent.
I have been baking for a long time, but it took a surprisingly long while to get to this practical “not a ritual” stage. My problem was that I approached it as an academic subject: an expert tells you what you need to know when you ask, and then you try it. But the people around me knew how to bake in a practical, non-theoretical sense. So while my mother would immediately tell me how to fix a too runny batter and the importance of quickly working a pie dough, she could not explain why that worked in terms that I could understand. Much frustration ensued on both sides.
A while ago I came across Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking” and Jeff Potter’s “Cooking for Geeks”. These books explained what was going on in a format that made sense to me—starch gelation, protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and so on - *and* linked it to the language of the kitchen. Suddenly I had freedom to experiment and observe but with the help of a framework of explicit chemistry and physics that helped me organise the observations. There has been a marked improvement in my results (although mother now finds me unbearably weird in the kitchen). It is also fun to share these insights: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1263895622433869827.html
The lesson of my experience is that sometimes it is important to seek out people who can explain and bootstrap your knowledge by speaking your “language”, even if they are not the conveniently close and friendly people around you. When you get non-working explanations they usually do not explain much, and hence just become ritual rules. Figuring out *why* explanations do not work for you is the first step, but then one needs to look around for sources of the right kind of explanations (which in my case took far longer). Of course, if you are not as theoretical explanation-dependent as I am but more of the practical, empirical bent, you can sidestep this issue to a large extent.