A lot of people who love to cook don’t enjoy baking.
On the surface, it makes sense: baking requires scientific precision. Measurements must be exact.
The people who prefer cooking to baking don’t want to follow rules. They don’t want to measure things. They want to feel their way through it. What they love about cooking is the freedom to improvise, to go off-script, to experiment and be creative.
On the other hand, there are people who love to bake but don’t like to cook. For them, baking offers predictable outcomes. If you follow the recipe, you’ll get the desired result. They don’t need to think about whether to add a dash more of one ingredient or a little less of the other. It’s paint by numbers.
When they cook, they worry about how the dish will come out. Success one time doesn’t guarantee success in the future. Every pot of soup is different.
The key to mastering cooking and baking is to find the middle ground.
If you want your cooking to be consistent, you need to develop and follow recipes that will give you predictable results. Experiment, but write down what you do so you can replicate it.
Master bakers would be quick to tell you that baking offers plenty of room for creativity and experimentation. The key is understanding proportions and the science of alchemy.
In both cases, you get better by mastering techniques and being willing to make some bad dishes in order to find recipe that works.
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