What’s your ‘Heston’ experience?
Baking. Measuring isn’t fun. I’d rather wing it.
It’s absurdly easier with a scale. I don’t know why the US standardizes to volume.
Especially for things like butter. Who measures butter in a cup, America?! Unless you just have vats of liquid butter sitting around, in which case I guess scooping up a cup is pretty easy… But even then, weighing it out is better, I think.
We do sticks so it’s not that much of an issue.
But flour? The difference between sifted and packed is huge, it makes a huge structural difference, and people have genuinely written recipes measured pretty far across the range on density.
I came across an American recipe using cups of butter a week or two back, so obviously not everyone got the memo! Sticks isn’t so bad, but I do wish it was all just done by weight. Whenever I encounter recipes using sticks, I still have to convert it because butter is sold in different quantities here.
I agree about flour, it absolutely needs to be done by weight!
I’m saying it’s sold in sticks. The recipe is always cups or tablespoons, but 2 sticks is a cup and tablespoons are marked on the wrapper to just cut off.
Right, but in my non-US country, the recipe is in grams or ounces (ie, by weight) and butter is sold in different-sized sticks to in the US. So, whenever I come across US recipes, I have to do some kind of conversion that involves me looking up how much butter is in a cup, how big a US stick of butter is, or how much a tablespoon of butter weighs!
But how big is a knob of butter!?!?
What? Baking is super easy. Follow the instructions. That’s all there is to it.
Recipe calls for 250g of sugar? Put in 250g. Not 260 (close enough). Follow the instructions. Works every time.
Seriously, using a scale instead of volumetric measurements is an instant level up in baking.
But that’s hard
I’m used to winging it while cooking
Precision is not in my food preparation repertoire
You can wing it with baking, at least for some types of stuff. Oatmeal raisin cookies don’t really take precision, as an example.
The pizza dough twirling thing.
Fun fact: acrobatics are made with lower hydration dough.
If you want dough with crispy outside and soft inside you’re looking for a 65-70% hydration. Acrobatics with this will rip it apart. To open a higher hydration dough you use this technique: https://youtu.be/xzbW8CZx538
Hollandaise sauce.
For me personally, literally all cooking. If it’s more complex than boiling pasta or using an air fryer, I’m useless at it.
And I find it so hard to motivate myself to get better because I often fuck up and have to throw out food when I try something new in the kitchen. Plus I’m usually cooking because I’m actually hungry and want to eat, so that risk factor of knowing I might need to start over and make something else if I screw up isn’t something I want to deal with.
Yeah my stopping point is similar. If I fuck up then I have no food and still have to clean
Exactly! And worse yet, if you fuck up, the cleaning is often more time-consuming
Anything that requires a professional grade oven. Your home made pizzas won’t cook the same. Despite them having their own charm
We’ve got a simple little hot air oven, works awesomely for souffle, slow cooking, drying, even warm fermenting, you name it. Plus it’s extremely efficient. No one uses the large one anymore, especially now while my wife and I discover french kitchen en detail ;)
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A perfect omelette. Every egg is different, “the perfect pan” is a myth, omelette is simple to learn, extremely hard to master. Never had one.
