Cookbook Chronicles: Endless Tinkering & Gustatory Satiation
When you've tested a recipe so many times that it stops making sense.
Welcome back to my Cookbook Chronicles series, where I blather on about the process of recipe development and writing. A huge shout out to the team at the Everything Cookbooks Podcast for mentioning my post on recipe development in their latest episode!
Endless Tinkering
I love the possibilities that baking and cooking bring. What new flavors can I combine? What is in season? What am I craving? As a giant nerd, it goes beyond that. What new technique can I try? How can I improve the texture? Do I need slightly more or less [insert ingredient here]?
This summer, I developed a Black Forest Cake recipe. I had a vision for it, but it wasn't quite exactly where I wanted it to be. I made the cake part seven different times in one week. Finally, I got it. But I still had the urge to make tiny tweaks. I realized that I should stop when I caught myself noshing the plain cake over the cooling rack. It must be OK if I can't stop snacking on it. (Or else I need lunch.)
When do I stop testing? How do I take a breath and say, "This is great enough?" For the cookbook, "good enough" won't cut it. It must be as great as I can make it.
Preparing for the Great American Baking Show helped me with this problem. We only had a short time to put our recipes together that, at some point, you just had to say, "that's it" and move on to the next bake. For the book, I push it further to make sure it’s great, but I need to stop myself from an endless cycle of testing and re-testing to achive some mythical perfection.
I'm sure that when the book comes out, I will have found a new technique, ingredient, or ratio that I wish I had employed. I like to think I’m a perfectionist who knows when to say, “enough,” accepting that even if a recipe appears in print, I might keep tweaking it. Because baking is my creative outlet, playing with recipes is part of the fun.
The endless tinkering gets me to another point.
Gustatory Satiation
If you do many tests for one recipe, sometimes you reach a point where you're unsure if a recipe is actually tasty. Have you ever said a word over and over and over again so many times that it stopped sounding right or stopped making sense? That phenomenon is called semantic satiation. Well, it happens with recipe testing, too. You make and taste something repeatedly, and sometimes, you don’t even know if it's delicious anymore. You may have enjoyed the first or second iteration, but by the sixth, you have no idea what you’re tasting. It stops making sense.
I was chatting on Instagram with Danny Hieber, Ph.D (@linguisticdiscovery), who has fantastic content about linguistics, and told him about this problem. He dubbed it gustatory satiation, so I'm taking it that term and running with it.
Gustatory satiation first reared its head with me while preparing for the Great American Baking Show. I made some recipes so many times that I couldn’t decide if they were tasty or not. One time, I even asked myself, “What is cake supposed to taste like?” So I relied on others to tell me how they tasted, then taste another iteration and give me feedback. There were times when I was so thoroughly sick of putting sweet food into my mouth that anything sugary tasted bad and made me queasy. (At home, I love to nibble on scraps or lick my fingers, but I even lost that joy.)
While working on the cookbook, I’ve hit gustatory satiation with a few recipes. I have to put those recipes on the shelf and return to them once my palate (and mind) reset.
Hungry for some recipes?
A new series of the Great British Baking Show, AKA the Great British Bake Off kicks off this week. Last year, I watched along and offered commentary and a recipe for each episode. Here is a round-up of those 10 recipes for your baking pleasure.
Next week, I’ll share my thoughts on the new batch of bakers!
Happy Baking,
Martin
When our youngest daughter was in high school, she brought a group of friends to our home who had never been there before. I had been working on a cake recipe and there were 16 cake layers all over the kitchen. They stood there in awe, jaws gaping, not knowing what to make of it. I handed them forks and said, “Get busy kids. You’ve got a lot of cake to eat.” They wanted to come over all the time after that. 😂
Really interesting Martin and definitely rings true for me as well. But I have also come to the point that I have to accept that recipes will never be set in stone and each iteration brings something new. So now I try and focus on being super clear at the outset about what I'm trying to develop and measure the tests against that. And once a recipe starts to "sing" for me (i.e. it is so right from all possible perspectives that having one bite practically makes me want to boogey in my kitchen) I know I am done. It doesn't meant there might not be alternative ways of getting to the same place, or other delicious additions, flavours etc. but that is for another time.