I’m a mostly improvisational cook. I read cookbooks like other people read novels, as a leisure activity, but rarely refer to them while I’m cooking. Now and then I cook someone else’s recipe precisely as written, but I mostly use other folks’ ideas and methods as platforms upon which to build.
For years I was told that while this was a reasonable approach to take to savory cooking, it was the precisely wrong approach to take to baking. Cooking is an art, as the saying goes, baking is a science. Dozens of cookbooks, and dozens of cooks, told me that baking was too finicky, relied too much on precise chemistry and physics, for it to be played by ear.
In some cases this is completely true. I strongly suspect that the more formal and Continental the baking, the truer it is. It’s unlikely that you’ll get good results out of laminated doughs without carefully measuring the ratio of fat to flour, and I can attest from personal experience that tweaking a genoise recipe the wrong way can mean that the batter will go straight from liquidy glop to shaggy hunks without passing, even for a moment, through the desired state known as au ruban.
But not all baking is this way. What’s more, as an historian it is plain to me that baking hasn’t always been an exact science because technologically it could not have been. There was a rather long time that delicious baked goods coexisted with a complete lack of things we now take for granted like thermometers, ovens with thermostat-regulated heat, calibrated measuring cups and spoons, and industry-standardized ingredients. Recipes for baked goods, like all recipes, had instructions like “add butter the size of an egg with four egg yolks and a glass of sugar, beat for three paternosters.” If our ancestors could turn out tasty results whilst measuring by eye and beating for the length of time it took them to say a particular prayer a few times, well, let’s just say there’s more leeway in baking than some people want you to think.
Armed with this insight, I’ve let myself do a fair bit of improvisatory baking in the past few years. I wouldn’t have dared if I didn’t already have a lot of experience with baking from recipes, and a fairly solid knowledge of what many different kinds of batters and doughs are supposed to look, taste, and feel like. Knowing what you’re going for and roughly what will get you there is the backbone of any improvisatory cooking. That’s why there are some kinds of baked goods–tuiles, croissants, panettone–I would never try to improvise even though I do not doubt for a second that there are more skilled bakers than I who could improvise them successfully. I play fast and loose only with ones I know from experience are likely to be forgiving of my wayward instinctive “throw stuff in until it looks and tastes right” cooking methodology. Quick breads, sheet cakes, yeast breads, and drop cookies are the sorts of baked goods I improvise the most, with the best and most consistent luck.
One of the doughs I love to improvise on is brioche. Sweet, eggy, buttery, it’s a cousin of challah and all the eggy Eastertide breads. Brioche properly has its own method and its own proportions, but I think of it as also being a family of doughs. You can use versions of a “brioche” dough for lots of things. One of which is a crowd-pleasing faux-braid filled with a mixture of neufchatel (or cream cheese, if you prefer it even richer) and preserves. It’s sort of the cherry-cheese danish principle, applied to a loaf of bread.
This one does actually have cherry preserves folded up inside it, mixed with the neufchatel. I made the dough with a combination of wheat, barley, and oat flours, with some maple syrup and of course eggs and butter and yeast and salt.
Like most fruits, cherries darken when they’re cooked. The bright neon red you see in cherry danishes and commercial cherry pies is Red Dye No. 3, not anything that comes from actual fruit. If I’d wanted a more vibrant and truer color in this, I probably would’ve gone with tangerine marmalade or perhaps blueberry or elderberry preserves.
Another dough that bears up well under experimental conditions is a basic tea bread. Most sweet fruit and vegetable tea breads have a similar basis, and they can be tweaked easily into multiple formats with almost any flavorings or additions you like. Sometimes, when I end up with leftover bananas, I make something that is more or less a cross between banana bread, banana cake, and a fruit slump or pan dowdy: banana-bread batter thinned slightly with milk or soy milk and an extra egg, poured into a flat pan rather than a loaf pan and topped with liberal quantities of fresh or frozen berries or sliced fruit.
I call it Banana Situation, as in “oh geez, I really have got to do something about the banana situation before they rot.” Depending on what other fruit you use, it can be hyphenated accordingly. Banana-Peach Situation is particularly nice. This right here is Banana-Blueberry Situation.
No recipes were consulted and no measuring cups dirtied in the making of these baked goods. And they came out just fine in spite of it.
