Baking isn’t LIKE chemistry, it IS chemistry. Very, very practical chemistry.
It’s more the fact that garlic is drier than onion, and turns bitter when overcooked. Onion caramelizes.
Maybe I shouldn’t have used garlic in my example. I just made up a (to my mind) typical recipe instruction, sorry. But I still suspect that recipes are 75% woo. I’ve just been looking at some Nigella Lawson recipes, and she says things like “drop the meatballs into the sauce in concentric circles”. So the recipe would be ruined if I dropped the meatballs in rectangular rows? It’s the ludicrous over-specific instructions that set my eyes rolling.
I think that’s written for people who don’t want to read things like “Drop the meatballs into the sauce, taking care to place them far enough away from each other so they cook evenly and don’t stick together.” Instead, they say “concentric circles” to get the same idea across.
But yeah, a lot of recipes are crap. I tend to stay away from anything except very trusted sources. And overly-complex instructions are the least of the problem; I read recipes all the time where I go “that recipe will never work” or “there’s no way this is going to taste good” or “boy, that’s really confusing - they don’t mention if that’s supposed to be dry or canned beans, and if you use the wrong one you’re screwed.”
You actually want to add the paprika before the onions…
Good to know, thanks for that. I did know that adding salt to beans before they are cooked toughens the seed coat and makes it so they never, ever soften. Acidic ingredients like tomatoes will do the same thing to beans.
And paprika is especially susceptible to burning, so it should go in last, preferably off the heat before an ingredient with significant moisture content is introduced. So that order, onions, then garlic, then paprika, is pretty critical.
I actually find, in Indian food particularly, that frying the spices separately and adding them late in the process produces a better-tasting dish. Made me a bit sad to realize this, because the other way is easier & makes for an easier clean-up.
This is not at all my experience. Hungarian cooking–which starts with the trinity of onions, fat, and paprika, so they should know–always adds paprika after the onions reach translucency. The reason for this is, as stated in my previous post, to avoid scorching the paprika, which is really easy to do, it having a high sugar content. If you keep things moving fast in the pan, you might be okay, but, otherwise, to keep things stress-free, you add the paprika after the onions have cooked down, off the heat, to let it dissolve in the oil and release its flavor, without having to worry about it possibly scorching.
ETA: I should add that other spices I will cook in the oil/fat from the beginning, as they don’t scorch as easily as paprika.
Anyone else notice that the OP’s muffin recipe outlines the creaming method, not the muffin method?
Onions have a lot of water in them and take longer to cook. The aromatics in garlic tend to burn before the onions are ready. Similarly in a different vain, the paprika does not need to cook too long, just a few seconds. It’s bind up the oil you are sauting in and burn before the onions cook.:o
Advice for beginning cooks is if you are going to make an unfamiliar recipe, wait for a day of leisure and make it exactly as written.
NEVER make a dish the first time on a busy day the day of a party/special dinner. Hell, practice something for a few months first, playing with changing little things [less sweet, more sweet, less salty/spicy, more salty/spicy, slightly different ingredients.]
Some people are mechanics, they have to make something exactly following the recipe, any variance screws something up. My first mother in law was like that. Other people are artists. Dull boring pedestrian stuff becomes gourmet magic, they can take a box of random ingredients and make heaven. Most people are in between.
I have a fair amount of experience with baking (I make pastries at a local bakery and have done for coming on 5 years) and some experience cooking (as an amateur). I would say that in both types of food preparation the order definitely matters, but that you can often produce “successful” results using different orders and techniques.
Every single change to the way something is prepared changes the final product. The thing is, not every change ruins the final product and in many cases the difference is pretty much imperceptible. Furthermore, there are always changes that are usually beyond a cook or bakers control (e.g. air temperature, humidity). These don’t always have a major impact on the final product, but sometimes they make a big difference.
I think it’s a good idea to play around with recipes and try different ways of doing things because you can start to learn what the effect of changing a particular parameter is. As has been said above, it’s a good idea to start out by following the recipe exactly. That way you have a sort of baseline. Eventually you can try different ways of doing things and see what the results are. As a general rule changing amounts of ingredients (within reason) is less likely to mess things up than changing the order, although it really depends on the particular situation and there are a lot of exceptions.
Baking and cooking are both arts. They are also sciences. And, for that matter, they are both chemistry. Much like the way Sculpture and Painting are both arts, Physics and Astronomy are both sciences, and biochemistry and organic chemistry* are both chemistry. The main difference between the two is where we put our attention.
*I’m not familiar with the sub-disciplines of chemistry, so there may be a more apt comparison.
Actually, no. The first part is wrong, no matter what your grandmother taught you. Cook’s Illustrated did a number of tests that totally disproved the “salt makes beans tough” idea. You are supposed to salt beans before they cook. That way the salt gets inside rather than just sit on the surface.
Acids, OTOH, do toughen beans.
In baking, I often see recipies ask you to “make a well” (as in excavate a hole in) the bowl of dry ingredients, then add the wet stuff into the hole, then mix.
Why?
It allows you to incorporate the wet ingredients slowly, by mixing it with your hands. It generally gives you a smoother mixture.
Were you referring to my post? Because the recipes that call for wells do not call for mixing by hand.
I’ve often heard that the well method allows you to only use the amount of dry goods actually required to mix with the wet goods. Eggs might vary in their size, and even local humidity and such can affect the final mix amounts.
I will agree that candymaking is an exacting science.* But baking? I dunno. Certainly it’s less forgiving than cooking. But I’ve found baking recipes to be surprisingly elastic in my experience. You can’t vary too far from the ratios outlined but a quarter teaspoon vs a half or 3/4ths does not, ime upend anything. And I don’t do the two bowls shit. Dry and wet get all mixed in together and if that makes my brownies tough, well, they don’t hang around more than a day or two so either, it’s not that important or my roommates are particularly plebeian in their tastebuds.
*I suspect this is because I do not make candy very often and therefore do not know the stages very well, the way I do with doughs and batters. If I were to bake every saturday for a few years, I would probably find that candy is just as elastic but in a different way than baking.
Nobody taught it to me, I learned it from experience years ago. That was the only thing I could think of that would have affected why my bean soup remained bullet soup after hours and hours of cooking anyway, when I found it mentioned in a cookbook after the fact it seemed to apply to my situation. There wasn’t anything acidic in it, so it couldn’t have been that, if you have another explanation I’d like to hear it so I don’t make the same mistake again.
Same thing happened to a split pea soup back in the day, it was split pebble soup even after cooking for many hours. I stopped adding salt to the cooking water and it didn’t happen again – until I recently made baked beans from scratch (as opposed to out of leftover bean soup like my mom does) and put the acidic ingredients in too soon, and ended up with baked bullets. That’s how I learned about the acid thing, though by then I had the internet to look things up so it was easier to find the information.