Baking and pastry, I’ve often noticed, gets treated with a mixture of awe, admiration, and contempt among kitchen workers. On one hand, we’re often the guys that have easy-to-grab snacks on hand. “Hey Matt… um… any of these cookies happen to ‘fall on the floor?’” Our weighing of everything, our techniques, and (frequently) the vision of us patiently stirring pots of bubbling stuff that smells amazing makes what bakers do look like alchemy or wizardry. Occasionally, there are some cooks with chips on their shoulder that insist we’re “useless” and “can’t do anything without a recipe book.” (Yes, I actually had someone say that to me once. To my knowledge they still have all their teeth, God knows how.)

Somewhere along the way, though, I’ve managed to cultivate an image out here that compels this question from my coworkers: “Dude, how old ARE you?”

It started with a friend of mine back when I worked in the cafe.

I frequently listened to podcasts and audiobooks, and when I spoke it was often to talk about some interesting tidbit of history I’d learned along the way- like the story of Catholic monasteries trying to buy off King Henry VIII from taking their lands by sending him the deeds of their lesser holdings hidden in a pie at Christmas. As the story goes, the steward, one Jack Horner, figured one of the nicer pieces of property wouldn’t go unnoticed so he grabbed it for himself. As such, because Jack Horner “pulled his plum” out of his “Christmas pie,” the bribe wasn’t quite enough and the monastery was dissolved.

Enough trivia like this, and my friend said “Dude, you’re talking like you were there.” So the joke became that I’m secretly a 500 year old alchemist and that being a baker is my cover.

My penchant for being a history wonk aside, the fact that baking relies so much on precision and pre-knowledge makes the work a lot like alchemy.

The fact is that the idea of “cooking is art or philosophy, but baking is chemistry” is true, but a bit reductive. Chemistry is as much a part of grilling, roasting, pickling, homebrewing, fermenting, stewing, or any other kind of cooking you can imagine- just not necessarily so consciously. That is, unless, you decided to dive deep into food science to find the exact reactions, temperature deltas, and so on to make that steak a perfect medium-rare.

Bakers get the moniker of “chemist” or “alchemist” because we have to be conscious of these reactions. We have to know what everything in a batter will do because the actual cooking of it- making a mash of raw ingredients into an edible cookie or cake- happens without our influence. We have to know what adding an extra egg will do to our cookies, or how to manage replacing the pumpkin in a pumpkin cheesecake.

(Food Science Fact because this came up: pumpkin is about 80% water by weight. If you have a pumpkin cheesecake and want to make it not pumpkin or vice versa, you have to either add or remove 80% of the weight of pumpkin in liquids. Otherwise, you wind up with either a puddle or a baked cheese puck.)

So what does that mean? That unless we are very confident in what we are doing or have a certain recipe firmly in our repertoire, we are going to measure carefully, move gracefully and slowly, and take/reference notes to make sure that we’re not wasting time or ingredients.

It also means that if a certain baker has a penchant for the weird, fantastic, and nerdy, has a knowledge (and small collection) of symbols, superstitions, and esoterica, and is already accused of being several centuries old… I am going to play up the food wizard/alchemist shtick as much as possible.

After all, what’s the point of being a mad scientist or alchemist if you don’t get to wear a lab coat and slightly scare people?

Do my various symbols, charms, superstitions, and weird spoons actually influence the quality of my work? Not to my knowledge- but they do make me laugh a bit and feel better as I work. Mood and mental state definitely impact how successful I am, so maybe they do have a little magic to them.

It’s not magic if you can completely explain it, right?

Stay Classy,