If she only had so many eggs and so much flour, there was only so much baking she could do.
She half-expected to see Bella at the door when she got home with her treasures. Yet when the woman wasn’t there, that also made sense. It seemed Jane had accidentally timed her arrival to town just right. On Lee-day, everyone she’d talked to had been in the best possible mood and had plenty of time for her. Now everyone was going about their work, which left her free to do hers.
Putting a block of ice and her perishable ingredients into the cold box, she stowed her shopping sack in a drawer. Then she placed her new book on the counter next to her older, less useful one. Hefting the new book’s leather cover open, she started to read it anew from the first word of Felicity Cast’s introduction.
The Beginning: Experimentation Cycles
Your oven is not my oven, nor is it anyone else’s. Your fuel is not the same as my fuel. Even your local ingredients will differ from what others have available to them at any given time.
Because of this, any written figures you encounter in the art of baking will always be approximations. If you move forward from a beginner’s level without adjusting for this reality, you will never truly know why a recipe failed to live up to its promises.
What follows is a systematic method of determining the exact way your kitchen behaves, and instructions for adjusting recipes to account for any variations. As we go, I have devised several ways to make the same actions test the quality of your local flours, and…
Jane wished she could give the writer a hug. She was a good learner, but the only things she had ever been called upon to learn were from highly formalized systems of magic. This book spoke her language. It was going to shave days or weeks off her learning process.
I wonder who Felicity Cast was, Jane mused. I suppose there’s no way to find out. Not right now, at least.
The experimentation process was as efficient as any Jane had ever seen. First, she mixed together a small amount of flour, water, oil, and salt. Next, she fired up an oven and baked a single batch of crackers. After checking the results, she adjusted the heat and tried again. To make each batch worth it, the instructions also called for a number of adjustments to the proportions of the ingredients, claiming they would make more of a difference than Jane might think.
Having a row of several identical ovens meant Jane could get it all done in one go. She spent the better part of two hours making every possible variation on the cracker dough, rolling it out, cutting the corners neat, and tossing each batch into an oven calibrated with specific amounts of fuel.
The crackers didn’t take long to bake. She nibbled a few as soon as they were cool enough. By some miracle, the simple recipe had been a success across the board, though some of the crackers were clearly superior to others.
Jane turned again to the book.
By now, you’ve tasted your first crackers and know which were cooked to that perfect, not-quite-burned brown that maximizes flavor and crisp. Referring to this chart, you can see where your ovens sit relative to others on a number of important factors. Here are the effects I’ve found of various oven efficiencies on the kinds of instructions you’ll see in more conventional cookbooks.
The book was as good as its word. The ovens in the bakery apparently ran a bit hotter than most, which meant almost anything Jane tried to cook in them would, without adjustment, have risked coming out like that first lump of rock-bread. Now she had a detailed guide on how to account for that by adjusting her fuel, something the previous owner of the bakery had probably known from the start.
It was just mid-afternoon now, and there was plenty of time for one more baking project to use up the last of her ingredients. Jane knew exactly what that project should be. She still felt a bit sore over the sheer invincible hardness of her bread from the night before.
Jane wanted revenge.
I’m almost an archmage, dammit, she thought, scowling at the oven. I can manipulate the winds, fires, and fey spirits of the world. I should be able to make bread.
Felicity Cast apparently agreed, because the first real recipe in her book was a loaf of bread.
The ingredients were almost identical to what had gone into the crackers: flour, water, oil, and salt, with just a small amount of yeast and sugar mixed in. Jane was glad for the simplicity, but a bit suspicious at the same time. It was hard to believe that the same basic set of ingredients that had created those crackers could really make fluffy, delicious bread.
She followed the instructions anyway. Jane had to admit that when it came to baking, she was as novice as novice could be. That meant she was fully unqualified to question anyone with any expertise at all.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The new cookbook mostly measured things in weight. Jane blessed the tinker’s admittedly handsome face for including scales in the equipment he’d brought her. She measured with exactitude, down to the last mote of flour. She mixed and kneaded for the precise amount of time Felicity Cast told her to mix. She let the dough rise to the exact size the book suggested, then packed it into a loaf pan and put it in the oven.
With an hour or so to burn, Jane decided to go find something to eat. Even if her bread turned out right, bread alone did not a dinner make. Not far from her house, she found a nice stand that sold steaming meat pies and selected a smallish one for herself. It was good, simple food, in a protein-wrapped-by-pastry sort of way.
“Haven’t seen you around.” The man running the stand slid a small mug of brown ale towards her. “You the girl in the bakery?”
“I suppose,” Jane replied. “I just moved in. This pie is excellent, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I don’t. Are you thinking of getting the bakery running again? It would be nice to have fresh bread close by, like we used to.”
Jane took another bite of the pie. The pastry was only part of what made it delicious, but that part was nearly perfect.
“Are you sure you need a baker? This is very good.”
“And I spend all day making it. Unless I want to eat only pies, I have to buy my bread elsewhere, at least sometimes. Let me know when you’ve got things going. I’ll be glad to be your first customer.”
The other customers sitting at the long counter seemed to agree with him, even if they didn’t say so out loud. It was rather comforting. Jane knew that she had a long way to go as a baker, and that she would be competing against experienced, trained people. It hadn’t occurred to her that people might use her shop anyway, just because it was nearby.
She finished her frankly excellent dinner and made it back to her house a bit before the bread was due to come out of the oven. The aroma filling the room as she walked through the door was a hopeful indicator that things might have actually gone well this time. Of course, there were thousands of ways she could still imagine failing, but any little port in the storm of bread-worries was welcome.
As far as she knew, she had done everything right on this loaf. She was at least sure she had followed the instructions as exactly as she was capable of.
Yet that somehow made the stakes feel much higher. Before, she’d been trying her best with a terrible source of knowledge. Any failures had felt justified.
Now, if it failed, it would absolutely be her fault.
Her hand paused just before she opened the door to the oven, as if delay would somehow lower the possibility of defeat. Shaking off her apprehensions, she steeled herself, flipped the lock-lever on the hatch, and began pulling it down.
Please, little loaf. Don’t be an abomination. That’s all I ask.
Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the light inside the oven, but when they did, the sight they beheld was almost too much to take in. Using a good, thick cloth, she snatched the pan out of the oven and set it on one of the many steel racks around the kitchen. For a while, she regarded it in stunned disbelief. She had been ready for failure, but nothing could have prepared her for this.
“It’s perfect.” She poked lightly at the golden-brown top of the loaf with her fingertip and was rewarded with the sensation of just the right amount of give. “How could it possibly be perfect?”
She dove towards her book to try and figure out how a simple ‘next experiment in line’ had enabled her to bake something she might actually want to eat. The book was calmly factual about it all, as if the author had considered success to be a certainty here.
By now, you have removed your loaf and found it to be perfect. This is not a matter that should provoke surprise. In the end, bread is a gift from the gods. It is far easier to make than it should be, considering how important and pleasurable it is.
The bread you hold in your hands is likely as good as bread can be. Could it have been studded with small, crunchy seeds? Certainly. Could you have added fruits or sweets to the dough? Of course. Even some ways of shaping and laying out the dough have significant effects on the end product.
They are not, however, better. Each product you create will come with its own complexities, but none will be superior to a simple loaf of bread, correctly baked. This single accomplishment will stand as the foundation for all your learning to come. Now sit, sample your own work, and allow yourself a moment of pride in your achievement.
Jane was glad to. Strictly speaking, the recipe called for letting the bread rest a while before she cut into it, but the desire to taste her own work was more powerful than prudence. Grabbing one of the sharper-looking knives Allen had supplied her with, she pried the loaf free of the pan, sliced off a thin sliver of heel, and cut a half-inch piece of the inner loaf.
The aroma was stronger now. It, along with every aspect she could see and feel, seemed right.
It’s taste that makes the bread, though. No more stalling, Jane.
Almost trembling, she finally took a bite.
It was good. The bread was perfectly chewy, the crust was just crusty enough, and the flavor was perfect. It wasn’t complex. It hardly could have been, given the short list of ingredients. But every flavor that was present was perfectly balanced.
This was bread. Real bread.
It’s delicious. Jane was surprised to find she was crying. I made delicious bread.
She wasn’t starving, but she ate every bit of the slice of bread before cutting another, spreading a bit of butter over it, and trying it again. It was just as good as the first. This wasn’t an illusion. If Jane had bought the bread at a store, she would have been pleased with her purchase.
She had no ingredients left, but there was no way she could stop there. She turned back to her now-beloved teacher of baking, reading at a lightning pace to figure out what the genius behind the pages thought of as her next step.
Foundations are meant to be built upon. In the pages that follow, I will teach you everything I have learned about all the products of a hot oven. Each one, from cookies to pies to more complex dessert breads, presents its own challenges and adjustments. Conquering each in turn will move you slowly but unstoppably towards mastery.
That was it, then. Everything about the approach made sense. Now that Jane had a teacher she could trust, becoming a baker felt well within reach. It was simply a matter of learning how to bake each item a bakery needed, one at a time, until she could do them all.
Suddenly, her little Lee-day party took on an entirely new weight.
She had funds and about a week’s time to learn how to bake. There was no way she’d become an expert on everything in just a week, but cookies seemed well within the realm of possibility. Pies, too.
Pulling out a pen and paper, she began to plan, making notes of early recipes that looked achievable. As visions of impressing her friends danced in her head, she absentmindedly sent out a few magical whirlwinds to gather the ash from her ovens and the scattered flour from her kitchen.
Then a familiar voice sounded from the door.
“What in the world?” Bella stood in the open doorway, staring openmouthed at the ash and flour swirling into a neat pile. “Magery? How?”