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Flour's ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season. Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.
Pretty sure any pastry chef will strongly disagree with that. If anything, baking is the cooking activity most akin to an exact science. The amounts need to be carefully measured, the temperatures need to be exactly right (e.g. Italian merengue), the baking time needs to be correct to the second for some dishes (lava cake).
Yes, the measures can change based on the flour or its substitutes (ground pistachio for example), but the processes involved require an equal amount of precision.
A lot of chefs call cooking an art, but baking a science.
I am a former pastry chef and baker. You'd think it's very precise work but it's actually mostly intuition based on experience. You know the recipes and tweak them as you go. Also the batch sizes are many times bigger than a home cook ever makes so a cup of flour more or less usually makes no difference to the end product. With leavening agents the margin of error is smaller obviously.
This whole thread is pretty triggering to me. People think that if the recipe is exact enough, it'll come out perfect the first time and they won't have to make any tweaks sure to their ingredients, their equipment, or the environment.
There's a reason why I generally won't make a recipe for the first time for guests.
Lol. Dude, you're laughably wrong about this. Omg, I could just imagine trying to get lava cake out to the second or it being no good. Not even talking about how much temp, elevation, and humidity effect things to make "perfect recipes" non existent.
Also, "oh no. Your nutmeg is now 6 weeks old. You'll have to add an extra 0.9% of it to your recipe"
Cupcakes aren't like making Walter Whites blue meth, Hun.
And weather/storage. If flour is stored in a humid environment in a paper bag (like on a store shelf), it will get heavier as it takes on water. This messes up the weight of flour but also throws off the amount of water in the dough.
That said I prefer baking by weight, not because it’s more precise, but because I don’t dirty dishes for measurements.
I am currently pursuing engineering PhD working on bakery products.
Sometimes baking is indeed an exact science :D
It's just that the typical home baker has to guess and assume a lot of things. But then, a chance of failure is naturally expected.
In the industrial realm, baking is quite scientific, I'm sure. It's a much more controlled, and measureable environment than a home baker's.
Take our ovens (please!) - you want 450? OK, how about I give you 420 to 475 as I cycle on and off? Lol
Even in the industrial realm you'll deal with the variability in your ingredients (e.g. moisture content of flour), but you'll have the capability to measure that, and have systems to compensate for it automatically. (Yes, I'm jealous!)
Hehe, yes, we have those and even more, because while industry can still afford some slack (but can measure moisture, humidity while proofing, precise temperature, air contamination etc.), we scientists cannot :D
We have industrial-scale ovens and proofing chambers that cycle in the range of ±5 degrees and can control humidity through steam injection, professional-grade planetary mixers and big stationary 100+kg dough mixers, automatic devices to measure moisture content (although compensating for it goes manually), devices to measure gluten deformation, sugar content on all phases, structural properties of dough and finished product, microbial contamination of flour, dough and products, leavening activity of yeast and gas retention of dough, also рН meters and automatic titrators, chromatographs, colorimeters, ultra-precise scales...and that's only what directly relates to the baking process :D
...although yep, very regular baking takes a while under those circumstances
It's not, you will be blown away at how much you can wing it and still make a delicious cake or cookies.
If you know the factors that affect the flour, you can control said factors, thus predict your results based on such factors, more or less a measurable margin of error. Ergo, baking is precisely an exact science.
How would you find out those factors about wheat?
Random sampling flour batches. And you'd think I'm joking. But no, this is exactly how we invented cookies. Cookies were baker's experimental tool to test their flour and, by ovserving the cookie, predict what they needed to change in their bread recipes to produce the exact result they wanted.
Did you make that up yourself, or did someone else actually get you to fall for that? Testing bread flour has nothing to do with the creation of the cookie.
The story might be apocryphal, but bakers indeed do use cookies to test proportions of ingredients. You're not going to waste a whole pound of flour just to see the effect of more or less butter in a particular recipe. You do a little bit and bake them in cookie proportions. Specially when you have to make several hundred pounds of cake at a time, you can't afford to err on the measurements, and you do need to know variations in the flour.
Dude, you're so wrong about all of this. Bakers typically use the same ingredients from the same providers. So they know what to expect.
And when it comes to a dough or batter, a baker can tell by look and feel if the proportions are off and will adjust accordingly.