Cooking is art.
Baking is science.
Source: username checks out
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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With sufficient experience, understanding, and intuition it is possible to yeehaw baking and get delicious results. I have enough of none of those things to do it, but there are at least several people who can.
My philosophy on recipes when cooking a new dish, is read at least 5 recipes, then follow none of them. I've made quite a few dishes with this method, most came out just how I wanted, and none yet have been bad. It's a bit free, but not full yeehaw.
As a former professional baker, nah.
Most of these home bakers talking about how “precise” their baking is aren’t actually that precise. They:
- measure ingredients by volume rather than weight
- have home ovens that vary in temperature wildly
- never consider ambient humidity/outdoor temp at all
Cooking and baking aren’t that different, there are hard and fast rules in both, but also if you’re good at one, you’re also good at the other, because they are the same thing. Can you follow a recipe that involves cooking meat in the oven? Then guess what? You can also bake a cake. I’m sorry to be the bearer of good news
From what I've seen, bakers can usually cook. The reverse... eeeeh...
They just haven’t practiced it. If you’re a good cook, you absolutely have capacity to be a good baker, because they’re only semantically different things. If we called it cooking a cake, no one would draw this distinction, and some other languages/cultures don’t.
If you can prepare, mix, and properly cook ingredients then you can prepare, mix, and properly bake ingredients.
so you are saying i could put like twice the amount of eggs in the cake, and quarter the amount of flour in and it will still be an awesome cake? Like I can do when cooking?
It would be something different but not bad. Clafouti is made like that, lots of egg not much flour. It's lovely.
But if you know the recipe how would you miss by that much?
You wouldn't put twice the salt and half the main ingredient in something you were cooking without expecting it to turn out very differently, right?
What recipe where you’re cooking can you change ingredients by such extreme amounts? Pasta bolognese or lasagne with 2x as much meat and a quarter as much pasta would be all wrong. Do you put 2x as much oil in a sauce and expect it to go well? When you make a roux, don’t you have to like. Balance the amount of butter with the amount of flour?
When you cook rice, do you experiment with different amounts of water? Or do you just cook it until it’s cooked?
In general, though, yes, stylistic decisions like how much egg vs. flour is how you make different types of cake. There’s not one platonic ideal of cake because baking isn’t as precise as advertised.
What recipe where you’re cooking can you change ingredients by such extreme amounts?
some examples:
- chilli has lots of leeway in the amount of chillis, beans and meat, and seasoning.
- when I make potatoes with sauce and meat, I can add 50% potatoes and reduce meat by 50% and it's still good (albeit less meat).
- frenchfries with very little salt is good
generally my exact compositions depends of packages sizes and what is available, and how cheap I am. i.e I usually put full cans in it, and thus round to the next full can. And when I want to save money, I put half as much meat in it)
Pasta bolognese or lasagne with 2x as much meat and a quarter as much pasta would be all wrong
80% meat lasagna sounds awesome.
Balance the amount of butter with the amount of flour?
That is something that needs to balanced, but even then I am +-20% i guess.
When you cook rice, do you experiment with different amounts of water?
Rice is the one thing that needs exact measuring for water.
Or do you just cook it until it’s cooked?
I know someone who cooks rice like pasta, i.e. with lots of water, and in the end uses a sieve for the excess water. I may be crazy, but I am not that crazy.
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It never made sense why baking is put on this weird pedestal compared to "cooking".
100%! This is what I’m saying. If you can cook, you can bake. Sorry/not sorry.
I don't always measure for baking - for bread and pastry I do weigh everything (ETA not because there is an ideal - there is still a range of amounts that will work - but because I want to know what the hydration % is) but for cakes I do them like cornbread, it's more proportions - I know that for 3 eggs I need a certain amount of flour, I know how much baking powder and salt per cup of flour, and how much fat, milk or buttermilk or yogurt or ricotta, whatever - know it will work if I get it in the ballpark.
For cooking yep I am a yeehaw no recipe anarchist. Or more accurately, I read recipes for inspiration then don't look at them while cooking, but I am old and have made so many mistakes over the years I know what I'm doing. It feels like intuition but is experience.
Your last paragraph is just how my mom bakes. It’s entirely possible to bake without recipes once you have the experience, like you’re saying.
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I remember one of the first days in my high school chemistry class our teacher said she was bad at baking and could never get recipes to work.
That was the moment I knew chemistry if I was going to learn anything it would have to be from the book that year.
Anyways so I don't think I ever learned chemistry
Knowing the science behind all methods of cooking is what made me a better cook. Alton Brown is the shit for teaching the science behind why things are done. No other TV cook has taught me more about how to cook with my own ideas and not simply follow someone else's recipes.
You gonna back that up with a SOURCE, senator?
(Please I need to learn how to cook before Pepsico forecloses on my boat)
Alton Brown on YouTube for his recent stuff. Good Eats for his original show.
Teaches why you do stuff and not just what to do.
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You can totally yolo baking, just don't expect consistent results.
Actually, even if you do everything exactly the same it's best if you don't expect consistent results.
Why does this get repeated so much as if it is some kinda rule when it often isn't.
I do all my baking on vibes. The sourdough feels about right, in it goes. Nothing at all was measured. Even temperature is vibe based.
The more you learn about something the less complex it gets. People say things like this that don't have a clue about baking. No, for the most part it is not true at all.
Because a lot more people regularly cook than bake
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You haven’t seen me bake. There are no maps where we are going. I follow dark magic and shepherd the carbs to their full potential.
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What you can fuck with in baking is vanilla. Douse to your hearts desire.
Ingredients I always ignore the amount given in recipes:
Garlic, lime juice, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, chocolate chips, raisins. There's probably more.
Always more with garlic. Calls for "2-3 cloves" means at least half bulb. On spice, I'll hold off if I'm cooking for others that can't deal and just leave that on the side when serving.
I've put double the garlic a recipe called for before and it was still not enough. Who the hell are these people writing recipes for? Vampires? Or do recipe writers live in some place that has really strong garlic??
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It is technically possible to use too much garlic, but at that point you're concerned about the amount of money being used to season a single item.
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Opposite, dude! Or let me redefine that. Cooking is also a no holds bar situation. Kitchen is a fuck around space and we can fail any way we want to as long as no one sees it. Do you want to try some garam masala pesto on my basil orange bread?
Isn't that the situation described in the post, not the opposite?
I'm just saying that baking is the same if you've got the balls or lack of self-preservation to experiment.
I didn't get that you were talking about baking since you didn't mention baking and explicitly mentioned cooking
One requires specific chemical reactions to happen in specific orders.
One make food hot
Bread is like cooking there, I'll just throw stuff in and try new stuff while baking bread
It'll be edible but sometimes it may be DENSE lol. I love me some bread, so I'm going to enjoy it either way
Former head chef: Yes. Our pastry chef was the alchemist and I was the magebomb.
As a former line cook and a baker this is correct.
Simply stated, Cooking is art, Baking is science.
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