Good evening, friends and neighbors.

Bakers live at least 24 hours in the future. We get a reputation for being sticklers and detail-oriented, because we are somewhat literally programming ourselves for the next few days. We predict eventualities, contingencies, and even our own potential failings.

Cooking is about control- ordering and directing everything from your ingredients, to your environment, to your equipment, to yourself. Baking- being necessarily hands-off for an enormous part of a process that is itself time-consuming- requires this to the extreme. It leads to bizarre truths of kitchen- the sauce for your steak having been started earlier that morning, or that freshly-baked pie starting it’s production nearly a week ago.
To invoke that much control, attention, and planning is practically a martial art- one that cooks call “mise en place.”