Extra: What Do We Mean When We Say That Baking is an Exact Science?

On a phrase that does a disservice to both baking and science

Thanks for reading my newsletter! This is an extra edition reflecting on the phrase “baking is an exact science,” and I was motivated to write it after discussing it in a fantastic recipe writing workshop led by

Lukas Volger

at the New York Public Library. This is not a deeply researched essay, more of a rough opinion piece. The next regularly scheduled edition of Ultracold will be a longer exploration of my attending a giant physics conference during the International Year of Quantum, and it will run on April 28th.

All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. Find me on Instagram and Bluesky.

Extra: What Do We Mean When We Say That Baking is an Exact Science?

I have a confession: I rarely make my favourite chocolate cake with a scale. I don’t even always level the flour once I spoon it into my measuring cups. It’s a real baking sin, and I am unrepentant about it. I stand by this cake as much as a person can stand by a cake, but I don’t treat making it as an “exact science.”

I have spent all of my life studying science, doing science, teaching science and writing about science, encountering the phrase “exact science” in the context of food always intrigues me, and people often say that baking specifically is exactly that. You can mess with a savory recipe, you can play it fast and loose with fried rice or a salad or a roast, but baking, baking is an “exact science,” they will say. Sometimes, they will clarify that that science is chemistry, but most of the time just invoking the s-word does the trick. This is to say that once this statement has been made, the conversation has turned serious, and the stakes have been raised. Who can bake and who is baking for? Now, after the phrase has been said, your answer to this question depends on what you think “exact science” means and how that makes you feel.

At some basic level, it is true that scientific experiments, and especially experiments that people may have experienced in high school and college, share some characteristics with baking. Leaving out ingredients, for instance, can ruin the outcome of the project, whether baking or scientific. The same is true for accidentally doubling the volume of a liquid or turning the heat up too high or letting a mixture rest for too long. The issue comes down to following directions in a cookbook or a laboratory manual. Of course, if a recipe has been developed, written, tested, edited and then published there is merit in taking those directions seriously. Like in high school chemistry class, following the steps will lead to more success than not following them - this is undeniable. But I still chafe at the emotional baggage that “exact science” invokes and the way it misrepresents both science and baking.

Several cakes in the making on my windowsill

The truth is that most bakers know that while some recipes do benefit, and even require, meticulous attention to detail, others can withstand imprecision just fine. For example, making banana bread is a lot more conducive to inexactness than making a cheesecake whose top won’t crack. A lot of breads made with commercial yeast also allow for a good amount of flexibility, as long as you don’t kill the yeast with overly warm liquids. I’ve improvised quite a few buttercream frostings over the years as well, and I’ve made both coconut caramel and lemon curd more according to vibes than an exact set of instructions. Maybe some of those bakes would have been better had I measured everything down to a milligram and timed it to a second, but even though I didn’t, I still enjoyed their tastes and textures. I am a PhD scientist and I am ok with that.

Baking does not have to be perfectly exact every single time, and science is also often not perfectly exact. In fact, very few scientific discoveries happen in the way an experiment may work in a school setting. Working scientists don’t necessarily have a lab manual because they are, in a way, just beginning to write it for whatever it is that they study. What experimental physicists that I went to graduate school with did the most of was troubleshooting and tweaking bits and pieces of their experiments. They were looking for a sweet spot where everything worked, but rarely did they manage to achieve perfection.

Hundreds of scientific discoveries get made every year because of some inexactitude or some error, even more happen under experimental conditions that are the equivalent of a cake that is very good but not perfect. Often, scientists keep messing with their procedures after they have published their discoveries in prestigious journals and received accolades for it. Often, they cannot be exact because there is no precedent, because they are the first people to ever make what they have made in the lab.

When people invoke exactness within science, what they often mean, I think, is that science involves math. This is another defining characteristic of science classes in school where you have to deal with numbers and memorize equations. The way science is taught in most contemporary classrooms leverages mathematics to elevate the stature of the subject and enact a kind of discipline that does not necessarily foster understanding - that’s the part of science class that most people remember, not the actual learning.

When I taught 9th grade physics, I poured lots of energy into emphasizing that physicists use mathematics as a language and a tool and that it is the process of making sense of equations that matters more than memorizing every single formula exactly. When I was a physicist, I never worked in a lab, but I spent lots of time dealing with equations. I specialized in theoretical physics so most of my work was deriving then solving long mathematical expressions. My notebooks from graduate school are filled with lines of computations, Greek symbols and x’s and y’s everywhere. But I never called this “exact science” in any literal sense either.

Much of theoretical physics relies on making approximations. When you study extremely thin materials you approximate them as perfectly two-dimensional, simply ignoring whatever thickness they do have. Imperfect spheres or bumpy spherical-shapes are approximated as smooth and perfect balls, pretty much always. Physicists even have a joke about this: they tell each other that their reliance on approximations has gone so far that they would mathematically represent a cow as a sphere if that would help them finish their calculation. Our best models of the universe are also somewhat inexact because they contain particles that we don’t know everything about - the recipe for our cosmos includes some fudge factors, a sort of “add salt to taste” of the particle physics world.

Because of this, when “exact science” is invoked as a proper description of the care that sometimes needs to be put into baking, it always strikes me as being more about accessibility and status than anything else. It is no secret that most people think that science is hard, sometimes off-puttingly so, especially if math is involved. I can personally vouch that if you tell people that you’re a physicist they will respond with either “you must be so smart” or “I hated physics in school.” In fact, people who only know me as a writer or a baker are often surprised to learn that I had the chops for a physics PhD first.

The lesson I take away from this is that science is only for the select few, only for the exceptionally talented, and that it is a feat to do it. Who does it benefit to imbue baking with any echo of that sentiment? Whenever I hear it, I worry that someone else in the room just got dissuaded from trying to bake. The really confident bakers, or really brash ones, may go the other way and derive ego and importance from thinking they are more like enlightened and intellectual scientists than the hoi polloi who are just getting flour on their hands. Accessibility and inclusivity go out the window once any space is made for this mindset.

I forgive myself for that dimple in the little cake

The tension that comes from saying “exact science” to mean “difficult” or “only for the talented,” is also a gendered one. The image of the scientist in US culture, and a precise and discerning one at that, is a male one. The homecook that stands a chance of messing up a baking project by being inexact? Almost certainly, this person is imagined to be female. She probably hated science class in high school.

Relatedly, invoking science and precision moves baking further from creative pursuits like art and closer to what we think of as more cold and rational fields like engineering. This opens room for recipes to become more like algorithms and formulas than vehicles by which the recipe writer and their reader can exchange sentiments of personal history and nourishment. It impoverishes the experience of baking, it takes something emotional and soulful out of it.

Such a loss feels particularly poignant for baking rather than cooking more generally, because baked goods are so often meant to be shared, and be a shared pleasure. Breaking homemade bread together, making a birthday cake for a loved one, bringing a pastry to a crush, these are all communal, connecting, beautiful experiences. The sweetness and richness of baked goods, the implication of bodily pleasure and indulgence also demarcates baking from more utilitarian types of cooking. Though I have messed up many pots of rice by being too inexact with timing and measurements, I have never heard anyone say that “cooking rice is an exact science.” Some of the explanation for this discrepancy in what gets called “exact science,” at least among white people living in the United States like me, lies in these higher emotional and communal stakes of baking.

If being a good baker requires being like a perfect scientist, that is a barrier to entry into baking for many people who may find that persona intimidating or who may have received lots of cultural messaging about how they simply could not become that person. It is also a real obstacle to creativity and what, I think, only the word “joy” can do justice too. As

Alicia Kennedy

recently wrote concerning incursions of science into cooking: “what worries me about a focus on “innovation” for the sake of a “perfect” squash or strawberry, a profit-driven soy patty, or new techniques for simple things like boiling eggs is that they could have the effect of deterring people from cooking. Learning how to pick fruit or vegetables at the market and getting into the kitchen to cook them will always be acts of trial and error, and they should be fun.”

Perfectionism either discourages people from trying anything at all, because anything even slightly imperfect will feel like failure, or it locks them into a mindset of chasing a very specific outcome and not enjoying the process. Much like in laboratory science, sometimes it is mistakes or unplanned changes to the procedure that end up leading to the most rich and surprising outcomes. And it is often the spirit of experimentation, rather than exactness, that leads to the next best thing. This is why laboratory experiments performed in high school chemistry classes, for example, are not actually experiments, because someone is sure of their outcome. In the kitchen, experimentation can be more open-ended, in the true sense of the world, and that’s a freedom worth taking seriously and cherishing.

Science is ultimately also a creative profession, or at least as creative as it is exact. It requires imagination and wild ideas and true experimentation. So, by using “exact science” as a shorthand for saying that some baked goods require precision, we may be doing a disservice to both baking and science.

A blind belief in science being a perfect method of obtaining knowledge, an ultimate tool for finding out exact truths, for determining exactly how things should be made or run has already proven harmful as it is espoused by some of the world’s richest and most damaging people. Definitions of gender dubiously rooted in biology, eugenic tendencies in healthcare policy, blind commitment to destroying the environment to keep making AI bigger, plans to colonize space, what all of them share is an overzealous clinging to a false exactness of “science” as something absolute instead of something made up and practiced by humans. In the hands of totalitarians, science easily becomes a tool of oppression, and overemphasizing its presumed exactness is part of the totalitarian playbook.

So often it is much more useful to say something specific and direct about a project’s difficulty, be it in the lab or in the kitchen, than to reach for this loaded use of “exact science.” It is a lot more friendly, and a lot more useful, to say “if you overmix cake batter it will become gummy so you have to carefully monitor when to stop mixing” or “chocolate seizes if you turn up the heat too much so try and turn it up in small increments”, than to make a blanket statement about all of baking, and all of science. These are statements that can be dusted with encouragement and glazed with care, that don’t have to be cold and mechanical, that don’t have to feel like a terse line from a high school lab manual.

This coconut crumb cake with passionfruit curd was a technical failure

Now, I am not advocating that anyone improvise their first ever attempt at laminating dough, nor am I encouraging anyone to throw out their candy thermometers and kitchen scale and never be careful about a measurement ever again. It is true that sometimes a recipe will fail if the pinch of carelessness or experimentation that you have added is too big. But failures can be fun too, many are still edible, and a lot of confidence in the kitchen comes from both getting through failures and not giving up and using those failures to learn exactly what sort of tweaking is ok and what sort is not from those failures.

I’ve made so many loaves of sourdough with an uneven crumb or a shape that betrayed my fraught relationship with time. They still made for good toast and sandwiches and paired well with soup. Though they were technically failures stemming from my inexact approach to baking them, by taking joy in eating them I could also exercise the kind of autonomy that they could not had I been thinking of my baking like my PhD thesis - a work to presented to others for heartless scrutiny. No one had to peer review my loaves of bread to affirm that I truly love a bready sandwich.

At the same time, these bread-making failures did also help me understand where I might be bale to revisit my baking process in order get a different outcome, and occasionally gave me incentive to revise some chemistry that I have forgotten too. Because there is lots of chemistry that happens in baking, and it can be really helpful to understand it. Chemistry can help you understand why, for instance, baking powder and baking soda are not fully interchangeable. It will also help you come up with ways to substitute eggs in vegan baking if you, like me, think that always using applesauce is really not that great. Consider the fact that you can whip aquafaba into stiff peaks in a similar way to how you would whip egg whites. This is due to the chemistry of proteins. This is a fun fact, and it is really useful. It underscores that science is so cool exactly because it has the ability to make space for trying something new and creative. In the case of eggs, it can also point to more seasonal and sustainable choices, as

Teresa Finney

notes in describing her fantasy bakery, which would only use eggs for some part of the year and plant-based substitutions for the rest.

I’ve loved science my whole life because practicing in it has always made me challenge my assumptions and expand my horizons, and it has taught me to think about process. I think that attitude has helped me an awful lot in the kitchen too. But I still don’t want to mark what I do in there as “exact science.”