Eileen’s Lesson: The Difference Between Baking & Cooking

I like to cook and bake. I didn’t used to be all that good at it, but over the years, I’ve gotten better. Baking and cooking are very different though.

Baking tends to be more precise than cooking. With baking, many times the ingredients may or may not make sense, but they are required to create a “chemical reaction”. In addition, the order they are added is also critical.

For example, when you’re making chocolate chip cookies, you need to mix your flour, baking soda and salt together in a separate bowl before it is added to the ingredients. Let’s say you don’t follow this order or you delete the salt or use baking powder instead of soda or your ingredients are out of date. Well, the cookies, just won’t look or taste right. What if it is raining? Well, you may need to modify your ingredients or cooking time. High altitude? Same. Electrical or gas oven? Same. And sometimes, even when you think you did everything right, and adjusted for the new environment, surroundings, and you thought your items were fresh and correct, the cookies just didn’t turn out the way you thought they would. And you have no idea why, because cookies can be so temperamental, even for the experienced baker.

Hmm. Sounds like the workplace—you have the way things are supposed to be (policies), but they may be out of date, and the environment has changed. And no matter what you do, things just don’t turn out the way you thought they would. Perhaps it is time to call an experienced baker, I mean HR.

-Eileen