The importance of knowing when to follow directions
You never think you'll be the one with a big bowl of curdled cream until it happens to you.
Thank you for reading Letters from Paris on the Genesee! If you have not already, please subscribe and this newsletter will appear in your inbox every Tuesday morning. You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more piping hot content.
As the saying goes, cooking is an art, but baking is science. It’s not quite right, but it’s not exactly wrong either. The process of cooking allows for much more adjustment on the fly. Baking, meanwhile, demands that you mix your ingredients together and once it goes in the oven, you just have to trust that you did well enough for science to occur.
A lot of people, including myself, believe this on some level. Cooking involves countless scientific reactions, but you don’t really need to understand them in order to be a good cook. You don’t really have to understand the science of baking in order to be a good baker either, but it’s much more obvious that precision and organization are necessary. I think this is what scares a lot of people about baking, especially those that don’t enjoy being meticulous or process-based when making a dish. Food is supposed to be fun, not homework.
But that little axiom doesn’t really tell you the whole story. Baking does require attention to detail, but disaster isn’t waiting inside the oven if your flour and sugar measurements were off by a couple grams. Truth be told, you can modify your ingredients in a lot of baked goods. You can find thousands of charts like this one from Food Network that shows how cookies can change depending on how you alter the ingredients. You’ll note that all of them look like cookies, in spite of this tinkering.
I’ve been baking a lot more over the past year or two, and this has made me much more comfortable coloring outside the lines when I’m working with desserts. Recipe directions are there to guide you, but you aren’t going to end up with something totally inedible if you don’t follow the instructions to the letter. Unfortunately, that rule doesn’t apply evenly to every step in a recipe. They’re all there for a reason, but some of them really must be followed exactly otherwise you’ll end up with a big problem. Last week, it finally happened to me. Luckily for me, it didn’t spell doom for my black-bottom peanut butter pie from Serious Eats.
I hadn’t made a pie in a while, so for my father in law’s birthday, I decided this was the time. I went outside the directions at two different places. One worked out fine, but the other absolutely did not.
A lot of the grocery store item shortages caused by the coronavirus pandemic are over, but every now and then you come across a strange one. I needed graham crackers to make the crust for the pie, and when I got to that aisle in the grocery store, there just… weren’t any. Every single kind of graham cracker, from every brand, was gone. I was almost about to give up and buy a pre-made graham cracker crust when I saw my opportunity: a box of Teddy Grahams. “They’re graham crackers,” I thought, “why wouldn’t they work?” Well, they did work, but I had to do some curious google searching to find out how many Teddy Grahams were the equivalent of 8 graham crackers. Of course, the answer I found was not even close to correct, but after undershooting it on several attempts and having to throw another handful into a food processor, I finally put together a whole crust. I figured I could use half the box and my daughter could use the rest as snacks, but I had to use almost the entire thing. Oh well.
My big problem came when it was time to make the whipped cream. You needed to make two different batches for this pie; one unsweetened and mixed with the peanut butter to make a mousse, and one sweetened to go on top of the pie. The unsweetened layer worked fine. But when it was time to finish the pie, I overlooked one extremely important instruction in this recipe. It said to put the beaters and bowl into the freezer for a few minutes before making it, and I decided that wasn’t necessary. On top of that, the kitchen was warm after several hours of activity, including oven use, and the bowl had just been washed so it was warm too.
Several minutes later, and after lots of concerned questions as to why the cream wasn’t forming into stiff peaks, it curdled. It separated into a pale yellowish liquid and grainy clumps. There was no saving it. Into the bin. Thankfully, my mother in law had some store-bought whipped cream on hand so we were able to finish the pie.
It finally happened to me. After years of seeing warnings about not letting cream curdle and wondering what kind of dummy would let that happen, I became that dummy.
So let my foibles be a lesson to you. No, you shouldn’t be afraid of exploring the space a little while baking. But don’t get cocky. Those directions are there for a reason, and knowing which ones you can and can’t ignore is extremely valuable.
Pizza update
We make pizza probably twice a month, if not more. Sometimes, in my darker moments, I wonder if I’ll ever get sick of it, but we haven’t reached that day yet. But we’ve been making some combination of sausage or pepperoni with peppers and onions for a while now, so when my wife suggested we make a Buffalo chicken pizza, I enthusiastically agreed.
I wanted to really make this pizza sing, though, which is what led me to fry my own chicken pieces rather than grilling them or using frozen chicken tenders. I didn’t have any buttermilk on hand, but if you have regular milk, you can make a cup of buttermilk substitute with a tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice, and filling the rest of the cup with milk. Add in some Red Hot, salt, pepper, and garlic granules, and let the chicken soak. I cut the chicken into small chunks, and let it sit for an hour.
Once it was ready to cook, I dredged the chicken in flour mixed with salt, pepper, garlic granules, and paprika, and gave it a quick fry, only about four minutes total.
The sauce was a mix of blue cheese dressing and Red Hot. I did it all by eye, but I would guess it was probably a quarter cup of blue cheese and maybe 1-2 teaspoons of hot sauce. It’s not a heavy layer of sauce, but I think lighter is better in this particular scenario.
The dough I used was the same recipe as in my first post, but I’ve made one major change since then with great results. Now, instead of letting it rise at room temperature, I divide the dough in half immediately after it comes out of the mixing bowl, and let them rise in the refrigerator overnight in freezer bags that have been coated with cooking spray. Let the dough come to temperature on the counter for about two hours before shaping it, and it will be a winner. I’ve found this approach gives you the big, irregular air pockets that you always look for in good pizza crust, as well as a generally lighter texture that still has a good chew.