Reading and Learning

I'm not one to be able to mess around in the pantry, find a bunch of ingredients, and come up with something. When I want to bake something, I work from recipes. Over time, I will redo a recipe -- I think the one we use for home made mac and cheese is on its fifth or sixth iteration -- to make it easier for me to use; since when I use a recipe, I tend to skip over the casual references to things you really should have done before -- place in pre-heated oven, or pour drained and washed beans into pot -- so my solution is either to bold face those items, or, more often, to put them up front in the recipe. (A minor quirk that I picked up from listening to a routine by George Carlin: I now will occasionally change Preheat the oven to .... to Heat the oven to... As he said, being hot is what an oven's all about; it's not as if you're just heating it so that you can do something else with it.)

As I'm reading Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, I find myself wanting to try this stuff out right away. I don't want to read it, memorize it; I want to glance at it and then try it. And then later, go back and say oh, I guess I was supposed to chill the dough first....oh, I guess the oven should be heated longer before I put the dough in. Because though I hear about concepts by reading, I learn about them by doing. It's that learning that gets translated into the alterations in the recipe, the places where I explicitly say things that a better baker or cook would just know. So, in a way, Ratio is very seductive to me, because the basic idea behind the book is that you don't have to follow recipes; you can use a simple ratio for the basic ingredients, and then go with what seems right to you. Want to make some bread? Measure out five parts of flour to three parts of water. Want to make some pastry dough? Three parts flour to two parts fat to one part water. That's it. And so I would try that, and then be surprised when the bread dough doesn't rise, or the pastry dough isn't particularly firm, or not at all flaky. Because, it turns out, that it's not quite 5:3 for the bread, it's more like 5:3:.2:.1 for the addition of some yeast and some salt -- and it might help to chill that dough overnight; if you want it to rise faster, put more yeast in, but realize that speed is the opposite of taste; chilling lets the flavors develop. And the salt is a nice thing to have, too.

But I don't have the skill to think that, so if I see 5:3, I think really? okay, lets try that. A better baker would know that though it's going to work, it's not going to work -- you're not going to bite into it and say Yum! Instead, you'll say Yeah, this is...okay, but not very good. I think that what has to happen -- and I bet this is part of the magic of a culinary school -- is that first you have to make the really ultrabasic dough -- the 5:3, for example -- just so you can see what it's like. And then you make the 5:3:.2:.1 version, to see what the yeast and salt do. And then you make the version with something added (which of course implies that you have a clue as to what can be successfully added; more info from the instructor, to be scribbled down hastily in the notebook).

I want to learn this stuff, but I want to learn it -- to develop the reflexes, the well of course you know that knowledge. Which means not only that I'd have to buy this book, just to have it long enough so that I could go through this learning process, but I'd actually have to do the experiments. I'm not much of an experimenter in the kitchen. That thing I did the other day, with the pizza dough, baking it in three chunks that were rolled out differently, just to see? First time I've done that in a long time. Usually, when I bake, I want to get it done. Leave the experimentation to others.

Ratio says No, do the experimenting: you'll waste a lot of time, but if you keep at it, you'll like the result. And I think: Huh. Maybe. Because, after all: the author did go to the Culinary Institute of America, and that counts for something, n'est pas?