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When people talk about baking, they often focus on the end product. Tender cookies, domed muffins, rich brownies. But the real charm of baking starts long before you roll out your pie crust.
to cook Can be many things: an act of creation, connection, control. There’s something comforting about its structure: measuring, stirring, transforming a handful of ingredients into something delicious.
Even if life doesn’t always seem organized, follow the recipe and things should go according to plan. It’s like therapy, with a gift at the end.
“Baking is how I best connect with the world around me – creating something amazing and sharing it with others and seeing how much joy they get from something I’ve created with my hands,” says Chef Joan Chang, co-owner of Dough Bakery. boston and author of baking cookbooks.
“It’s a way to make the world a little sweeter, one cookie, cake, pie at a time.”
An outlet for all kinds of emotions
When it’s cold outside, there’s something comforting about a warm kitchen and the smell of something sweet.
But baking can also be cathartic for more volatile emotions: The term “rage baking” was popularized by writer Tangerine Jones, who took to flour and sugar to vent her anger at the world’s injustices.
Baking can be about maintaining traditions, or possibly just about curiosity (what is a Julecake, anyway?).
involving the head as well as the heart
Hannah Scobey, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Pittsburgh, loves the chemistry aspect of baking—for example, how butter behaves differently at different temperatures, or why the proteins in egg whites break down when overbeated.
She also finds the process therapeutic, a much-needed break from work.
Ron Ben-Israel, who focuses on elaborate wedding cakes as the chef and owner of Ron Ben-Israel Cakes. new york cityAs a child he was drawn to “watching ingredients transform through technology” in his mother’s kitchen.
“Particularly the process of mixing egg whites into meringue fascinated me,” he said.
tapping into someone’s past
For him and others, there is an element of nostalgia. Parents’ rugelach recipe, the pie that their favorite aunt made Thank youThe cookies they helped decorate as kids.
Or, it’s a way to mark the calendar: a crisp, buttery crisp in the fall after an apple picking expedition, Irish soda bread on St. Patrick’s Day, a favorite birthday cake that must be made every year.
The beauty of getting your hands dirty
alex george Lily P Crumbs of the blog finds something satisfyingly tactile and tangible about baking. Cracking eggs, rubbing butter – there’s a lot of sensory pleasure to be had, especially in a screen-centric world. Kneading dough for bread, spreading icing on cinnamon rolls.
Her readers, she says, “love the process as much as the payment.”
thrill of discovery
George loves inventing new types of baked goods, seeking inspiration whenever she tries a new food: “Savory food is my favorite kind of thing. An incredible French onion soup, I recently made inspired my Caramelized Onion Biscuits with French Onion Soup Mixed Butter.”
Avid home baker Bernard Wong of New York City also enjoys studying new techniques. They’ve experimented with laminated dough (think croissants and puff pastry), and more recently played with an East Asian technique — known as tangzhong in China and yuden in Japan — of pouring boiling water over the dough to partially cook it, resulting in soft, fluffy bread.
Wong enjoys satisfying a craving by making something herself. For example, she can’t find anadama bread, traditional New England yeast bread, “but I know how to make it.
“It’s affordable, I can control what’s inside, and it passes the time and keeps my hands busy when I’m in my apartment,” he said.
He often chooses high-quality ingredients and still saves money compared to buying a finished product. For example, he spends money on expensive chocolates like Callebaut and Valrhona, and puts as many chips as possible in his cookies.
speaking the language of sweets
Even better, sweets like this can be shared and be a way to express a feeling. It can be as simple as “I missed you,” or “I thought you might need something sweet to get you through this moment.”
Scobey recently made banana cake with cream cheese frosting for her coworkers: “I loved seeing all my friends come over to my table to get a slice.”
As Chang says: “I’m grateful that I get to do something that I love so much and that other people love too.”
At its core, baking sounds promising. It might be about feeding others, or celebrating, or creating a moment of peace in an otherwise chaotic world, but it’s also about the belief that if you measure out ingredients and follow the steps, something good should come out of it.
Oh, and Julekke? This is Norwegian Christmas Cake.
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Katie Workman writes regularly about food for the Associated Press. She has written two cookbooks focused on family-friendly cooking, “Dinner Solved!” and “The Mom 100 Cookbook.” She blogs at https://themom100.com/. She can be reached at Katie@themom100.com.
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For more AP food stories, visit https://apnews.com/hub/recipes