Why baking is like analytics

I have been doing analytics consulting for all of my professional life and I have been baking only in the past year, that too only on weekends. I love baking as long as my results are sweet and I like my job on most of the good days. The similarities between these activities goes much further to me when I think about it. So here's one of those ridiculous lists which lists out why:

1. Baking is neither an art nor a science. Same goes for analytics. They deceive you into thinking it's a science and numbers game. But you need a feel, otherwise known as common sense for both. For example, you cannot add 100g of flour that the recipe calls for and say but it s not supposed to be this liquid. Just like you can't say you don't know why your numbers fell off a cliff.

2. There are some things you only learn by doing. These are two of them. There are siren like recipes which seem so super easy for a complicated sounding cake or biscuit. Theoretically, we are all on the same page and then your oven steadfastly refuses to yield results. While you may give an awesome theoretical spiel on a math model, you might see them all come tumbling down when you actually get to work.

3. Half baked results can always get you in trouble, though you may try to spin it otherwise. It is not easy to eat a half baked cake. You will choke just like you would when you eat one, if you try to deliver half baked results.

4. You need to follow instructions, step by step. Missing an instruction or mixing up order of events can prove to be costly mistakes. Procedure and quality checking at each step is important.

5. All measurements need to be accurate. Guessing and approximation isn't always the best idea.

6. Practice! Practice! Practice. The longer you do it, the more number of hours you put in practicing initially, the better you get at it. Soon you are almost perfect and hardly make any mistakes at all.

7. It's easier to explain to others how to execute something- whether a cake or an analysis, It becomes difficult only when you have to do it yourself and then you might have to ask the person you explained it to for help

8. An extra pair of hands is always a good thing. Delegation helps you get to timely and accurate  (read tasty) results.

9. Stirring the pot too much isn't always a good idea, Like an over-beaten cake, over analysis only falls flat on its face.

10. Appearance is more important than you think. The shape and embellishments of the cake make the first impression before it is even tasted. Your content and analysis may very likely go for a toss if you are not a pro at formatting and 'prettification'.

Philadelphia in Food

I spent the best part of this summer in Philadelphia, working. Like all my travels and most of my posts, this is all about the food I experienced in this very friendly city.

Lunches at Potbelly and Corner Bakery.. Enjoying a hurried mushroom melt and trying to eat crunchy chips quietly in a client meeting. Actually finding choices, vegetarian dishes I like in the office cafeteria..

Madelines with my friend.. Midnight snack and accompaniment to long overdue catch ups..Roti Canai at Banana Leaf with a foodie co worker.. Conversation was better than the food.. Missing home and succumbing to Philadelphia Chutney Company.. Living to regret the moment of weakness. 

Enjoying my share of farmers markets on Rittenhouse Square.. Knowing basil lemonade Popsicle could taste so good and getting complimented on my 'spring' shirt. Tasting veggie hot dogs as you listen to weird music at the Old st market.. Discovering you happened up on to the Old st market by mistake.. Trekking on purpose to the Ben Franklin parkway for the Fair on Parkway and getting disappointed with the 2 food trucks.

Experimental tasting with tasty kake and orange fair trade chocolate... Loving the icecreams at Franklin Fountain. Veggie burgers at Devil's Alley and Hip City Veg. Vegan cupcakes and OJ at Animo.. Falling in love with wok stir fries at Honeygrow on my first day and coming back many times.. Finishing up with a Smore melt in the mouth cookie from Insomnia Cookies..

Stumbling on to a perfect Italian place BYOB like most in Philly that I can't remember the name of because I went around looking at so many menus before I walked into one. Discovering super relaxed fine dining down the road from your house.. Having a Parisian breakfast at Parc Rittenhouse looking at the park, feeling Parisian with all the dogs around. Trying to repeat the experience at Devon and failing miserably. 

Having one pastry of each kind with Mom at Metropolitan bakery. Trying mojito icecream at a weird gelataria on 20th street.. Buying my friend tiramisu from Miel. Marvelling and getting disgusted simultaneously over chocolate pasta at Max Brenner. Having had too much of a sweet thing, biting into red chillies at Han' s Dynasty. Finally trying and liking Indian food in the US at Indeblue. Realizing a childhood obsession with Dr. Seuss having French toast breakfast at Green Eggs and Ham

Summers of Art

Art and I have a love hate relationship - the love is all from my side and the hate all from the other. I have always loved to draw and paint since I was a child. I didn't so much like going to art contests unless it was the on the spot kind, where you could make up your own worlds from your imagination. I like drawing in detail. Where somebody might choose to draw a single dominating entity in a painting, I would rather draw a million tiny pictures complete with the latch on a house's front door. My technique however has always been flawed, despite or because of multiple art classes I have had.

When summer holidays came up, we always headed to my grandparents' house for a relaxing month or so. Since I was prone to be a couch potato, more often than not and did my holiday homework, we had plenty of that, at the absolute last minute, I was kicked out of the house for art classes to a nearby school. Best part of it was that it was right across the road and I could go there all by myself. What surprises me from the classes I remember and the assignments she gave me was how I didn't end up hating art. What does a seven year old understand of shadows and light? She had a class of much older years and I was the odd man out. Half of my book pages were filled with eraser smudges and clueless shading in lieu of appropriate shadows.

The story was repeated when I attempted to take after school art classes. I wanted to be in this boisterous gang of my classmates and friends who were in the lower art class, fooling around more often than drawing. Little did I know what I was getting into. I was put again in the advanced class. We had a super old curmudgeon of a teacher, she was an excellent artist to say the least, but a very bad teacher. We were a bunch of about 10 unfortunate students. It was difficult to sweat over a cheetah when you knew on the other side of the wall, people were drawing flower bouquets and stick men figures. Our topics were always unusual and challenging. But it gave me a lifelong trauma of joints and movement. I definitely did not learn in all the time I spent in that class about proportion. My paintings are still filled with disproportionate limbs. My characters move with the elegance of an actor in his first movie. 

I moved to the other class, but needless to say, I didn't learn anything. The most I learnt were in my school art classes and the one oil painting class that I took thankfully at an appropriate age, when I actually understood what the teacher was saying. Apart from these scheduled learning periods, a lot of my spare time in my summer holidays were spent in painting and drawing. I would stock up on paints and other material from the R.S. Shoppe on L.B. Road in Chennai and spend many pleasant afternoons over some glass painting or canvas. I also used my pictures to cheer up my hostel rooms. So reminiscing over all my old artwork,  I decided today was a great day to immortalize some of them on the world wide web.

Birthdays- Reine de Saba/Queen of Sheba cake

Predictably, as the title goes, this post is about birthdays. Birthdays were the most special days when you were a kid. Diwali and Fancy Dress competitions aside, it was the day you could wear color dress to school and hopefully given probability was on your side and there were no other birthdays in your class, you would be the only one. Everyone at school outdid themselves trying to think of what chocolate they would bring that year and all those with birthdays outside the school year bemoaned their loss. As we grew older, chocolates were replaced by small gifts like pencils and erasers. I remember myself giving away a glittery eraser ball which I bought in Bhutan, which did less of its job and did more of looking pretty.  There were also those times when you could celebrate your birthday in school, get your parents to bring your cake and cut it in class with all your friends, it was always awesome to get a free period in addition to cake.

At home, I had a birthday party every year all the way from year one until I think I was 12 years old. I had a bunch of friends over and games and cake and snacks. The highlight of my evening was always the bread balls that my mom made. I made them myself twice- once when I was in France and once when I was in Delhi, they are in my head very close to soul food, because it is comfort food closely associated with happy memories for me. I always tried to grab a few before the guests came in.

Anyway, all snacks aside, coming to the most important part of birthdays- cakes, I don't remember too many of my childhood cakes. I remember one Bugs Bunny Cake, the resemblance was too obvious to ignore. I had cake less frequently for my birthday and more frequently for fun. So, this birthday, I decided to put my new found interest in baking to test and make myself a birthday cake. 

That is the story of how I came to make Julia Child's Reine de Saba  or "Queen of Sheba cake". It was apparently the first French cake that she tasted and fell in love with. I was feeling particularly brave when I embarked on this bake. It helped that a lot of home cooks all over the world had tried this recipe and had a lot of advice and warnings. It was a bit of a longish process to make this cake. There was a lot of mise en place involved. But the final product is so totally worth it. It of course followed the original Julia Child recipe, which was helpfully posted at http://theculinarytravelguide.com/2012/06/13/the-jc100-reine-de-saba/

On my kitchen counter:

113 g baking chocolate- I used dark

2 Tbsp of fresh brewed coffee decoction

113g butter (softened at room temperature)

2/3 cup + 1 tbsp granulated sugar 

3 eggs- yolk and white separated

Pinch of salt

1/3 cup ground almonds

1/2 tsp almond extract- I replaced with vanilla as I didn't read the recipe properly

1/2 cup cake flour- involves substituting a Tbsp of all purpose flour with corn starch (sift it)

How you go about making it:

1. Grease 8 inch cake pan and line with parchment paper.

2. Place chocolate and 2 tbsp of coffee in a small pan and cover it. Place over a larger pan with simmering water until the chocolate just starts to melt. If you leave it too long, it will burn, so take it off and allow it to melt gradually.

3. Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy and beat with egg yolks.

4. Beat egg whites and salt to a soft peak and add sugar and beat to stiff peaks ( culinary trivia- this is a french method of baking, which leavens the cake without use of baking powder or baking soda)

5. Add chocolate which is now melted to a smooth consistency to mixture in step 3. Add the ground almonds and extract and mix well. Fold in egg white and cake flour alternately one fourth by one fourth.

6. Preheat oven to 180 degree celsius. Place batter in cake pan and push up along the circumference. Bake for 25 minutes until circumference hardens and cake is still a little oily when tested in the middle with a needle.

This is the best part of the recipe- Glacage au Chocolat ( Chocolate butter Icing)

- 57 g baking chocolate- again dark

- 2 tbsp fresh brewed coffee

- 5 tbsp unsalted butter

- Bowl filled with ice cubes and water covering them

Use same procedure mentioned in step 2 to melt chocolate to a smooth mixture. Add butter tbsp by tbsp and beat to mix well. Beat over ice and water until it cools to spreading consistency. Spread over the cake with a spatula. 

Now your cake is all shiny and ready to eat. Makes for a perfect birthday cake.

Dum Aloo- Saturday Special

Over the weekend, we had guests at home. So of course, in anticipation of this, my dormant cooking cells decided to get enthusiastic about cooking. My mother made a safe bet with mutter paneer, so I opted to get a little experimental and make a recipe that I have been reading about often- Dum Aloo Punjabi. There are so many variations of this dish, so I went through a million recipes before I hybridized the following one and then anyway veered away from what I decided. I had help too from an expert cook who was one of the guests, so she tasted my in progress dish and gave me some ideas about what I should do to make it taste better. So finally, I was happy to make a tasty dish out of it. It tasted better with dosas according to most of us than with rotis for some reason.

Start with the masala powder. Powder together 2 tbsp of coriander seeds, 1 tsp of jeera, one clove, a little cardamom and cinammon until it is a fine powder.

Soak and slightly cook about 10 cashew nuts in hot water. Grind to a fine paste. Chop up two onions finely. Puree 3 tomatoes which have been boiled in hot water and peeled. Cook the potatoes in a pressure cooker for about 2 whistles of the cooker or until boiled firmly. Then saute potatoes in oil until light brown all over the surface.

In a flat bottomed pan, add about 3 tbsp of oil and saute bay leaf+onion+ginger garlic paste, until  the onion turns completely brown. Add tomatoes and saute until the soften. Add cashew paste, above ground masala powder. Add turmeric and chilly powder depending on how spicy you want it. Also add salt and a pinch of kitchen king masala if you have some. Add two spoons of curd (Some dum aloo recipes are based completely on curd and have no tomatoes at all. But I didn't like the idea so much considering I don't like curd so much. But this curd was added as a fix to make the dish a little sour and bring balance to the additional spice it needed. and some water to combine. Allow it to boil until the raw smell goes away and the masala combines well. Add potatoes to the mixture and allow to soak on low flame for sometime. Take it off the heat and serve hot.

In other food related news, I finished reading the book, As Always Julia. It's a tome of a book, that I happily bought for a buck in the discount shelves outside the Strand Book Store in New York. It is a compilation of letters between Avis De Voto and Julia Child. It feels like when you are reading this book, that you are going through the whole experience of publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking with them. It's a great book also to understand the then political and social environment albeit from a Democratic point of view. Also both of them were excellent at French and tended to lapse into it in the written form quite often. So it was good practice to read and understand French as well.