by C. Devlin » Sun Dec 02, 2007 3:20 pm
I'm pretty much in Robin's camp. Initially, when I was learning to cook, I followed recipes religiously, which I think is a good thing in the beginning (following James Beard's maxim: "The kitchen is no place to get creative"). Now, I'll read a recipe and either follow it because it sounds okay, or I play around with it or substitute ingredients either because I want to or because I'm missing some apparently essential thing.
Baking, on the other hand, has been very different. I still play with recipes, develop them beyond whatever's there, according to what I'm looking for in flavor and so forth, but I keep notes along the way, because once I get what I want in a baked thing, I want to be consistent with it, so winging it would be disastrous.
And that's even truer for breads. I think every bread baker develops her own formulas, learning the basic fundamentals of how doughs work and then playing around til you get what you're looking for, but writing it all down step by step and keeping really good notes. It's painstaking and a little tedious. But for me, as I was learning, the best advice I found came from Steve Sullivan, the founder of the Acme Bread Company in San Francisco. Julia Child (I think) asked him what he attributed his success to, and he said, "Taking good notes." It sounds so simplistic, even trivial, but it's absolutely crucial.