When it comes to food, I have ALWAYS been a baker. I think this is rooted in my brain from my 4-H days. The Food division was the only competition I entered every single year for the 9 years I was in 4-H - it became my "thing," so to speak. However, at the County Fair you could only enter non-perishable items, which essentially limited you to breads, cakes and cookies. No pies, no meat, no candy, nothing with gelatin or fruit...very limited options. So naturally I became fairly adept at baked goods, which is great (and everyone's your best friend when they learn you know how to make desserts and candy, lol) but I always wished I had known more about cooking.
Cooking is such a completely different sphere of food than baking. It's all about palate, and while flavor is important in baking as well, it's a different beast with cooking. I love watching master chefs make these gourmet entrees with inventive ingredients that you wouldn't normally put together. I also love using inventive ingredients in baking, but with baking you then have to worry about they chemistry and whether or not it will "turn out," whereas with cooking you can generally add whatever you want and it will only affect taste.
Nothing illustrated this to me more than a dish I made yesterday. As you may have read on my previous post, I made a somewhat painstaking dessert called a Raspberry Entremet, which required 15 ingredients and took 8 hours to make. It was totally worth every penny and every minute, and making challenging dishes is one my favorite things to do, but sometimes it's nice to savor simplicity.
Which is what I did yesterday. I had a couple of friends coming over for dinner so I flipped through my State Fair book to see if there an entree category I might enter that I could use some practice on. I found one for sweet corn and starting perusing the internet and came across a dish manly enough to serve my friends: "Bratwurst and Shrimp Boil". I went to the store, bought the ingredients, and...well that was pretty much the majority of the prep! I browned the brats, cut up the ingredients, threw them in a pot and waited. And how did it turn out? DELICIOUSLY. And it took little to no effort to actually make. The contrast between this and the entremet, two delicious dishes in their own right, blew my mind. It was a nice relief to know I could get a good-tasting dish with a fraction of the effort :)
So while I don't venture into cooking all that often, the few times I do it seems to turn out pretty well. It's fun to think about the balances of flavor in cooking when you're so used to pastries. One of my friends asked what seasonings I added to the boil and I simply said, "Old Bay." Because not only is that all the recipe called for, but I knew that Old Bay is strong and that, combined with the Heineken I used in the boil, would serve as more than enough flavor - anything more would've been overkill, and the last thing you want to do is overwhelm the meat when it's so delicately steamed. And I was right, if I do say so myself ;) It's good to know I'm not completely hopeless when it comes to cooking!
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