
Ask HN: How did people bake before thermometers? - werber
I was reading about https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mille-feuille and then googled when the thermometer was invented, https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thermometer , then I googled &#x27;how did people bake before thermometers&#x27; among other things and couldn&#x27;t find a satisfactory historical reason. Anyone have the knowledge?
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blue1
By using empirical rules related to the state of the ingredients (look,
physical properties, etc). French especially has developed a very rich
technical vocabulary for this. For example, the continuum from sugar to
caramel has very precise phases (and words to name them) that you can
recognize by color, consistence, and so on even if you can't measure the
temperature of the sugar.

~~~
werber
Oh that makes a ton of sense, do you know of any pre thermometer texts about
this, thank you for bringing sense to my bar discussion

~~~
ori_b
Not a pre-thermomenter text, but a good summary:
[https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/sugar-
stages.htm...](https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/sugar-stages.html)

~~~
pjc50
To bring this full circle, my wife's sugar thermometer has the stages ("soft
ball" etc) marked on it alongside the temperatures.

To insert a side rant on the subject: this is why IoT cooking gizmos like
smart pand get a terrible reception. Because there's already a full set of
tranditional techniques for cooking, most of which are fairly easy to learn
with time.

~~~
venomsnake
Sous vide is revelation for delicate proteins and transforms low and slow for
tough ones.

For everything else there is pressure cooker (which by the virtue of its
design is extremely high tech/precise instrument).

------
pjc50
Strange question for HN .. anyway, plenty of people bake today without a
thermometer. It requires "knowing your oven", such as by doing a reference
batch of cupcakes to see the heat distribution. There's also various
techniques for assesing whether a cake is done (does a wooden skewer inserted
come out clean?)

Coal and wood fired ovens usually have a huge thermal mass so once it's up to
temperature with a particular size fire it will stay there.

Edit: the gas oven doesn't predate the thermometer, but traditionally is set
by "gas mark" rather than a thermostat. Old recipies would say "gas mark 7"
etc.

~~~
jon-wood
That's far from an old thing - gas ovens are still in wide use, at least in
the UK, and recipes will commonly mention both a temperature in degrees and
the appropriate gas mark.

Having said that, gas ovens are a pain to use until you've got used to the one
you've got. I've never had one where the actual temperature of the oven
matched the gas mark it was set to. Typically you'll have to benchmark it with
an oven thermometer and then adjust whatever the recipe says to fit.

Gas hobs however, you can take from my cold dead hands. I'd rather use a camp
stove than an electric hob. Nothing beats instantaneous heat adjustments.

~~~
Xylakant
> Nothing beats instantaneous heat adjustments.

You can get that with a good induction stove. I still prefer gas, but
induction is pretty good. Other advantages of gas are for example the ability
to use non-flat pots (woks or similar). On the other hand it's much harder to
clean.

------
Udo
Once a year, my friends and I rent a cabin somewhere off the grid. Sometimes,
those cabins (or small ex-farms) still have working stone ovens. It's not
hard, you make a big fire and when the wood has been reduced to embers and the
stone has soaked up the heat, you put your baking goods into it. It works
great for pizza, bread, pastries, everything. You have to inspect the state of
the process from time to time, but as you get more experience you need to do
it less frequently.

Personally, when I bake things in modern ovens, I don't use the thermometer
either. Sort of, because they still have a thermostat of course. But in
general you really don't need a thermometer for baking.

~~~
werber
How do you inspect and decide what the oven is right for?

~~~
werber
Do you put different things in at different periods of the burn cycle, and how
do you determine what to put in when

~~~
Udo
I would say by trial and error, although I didn't really experience any bad
results yet. When the fire has reached the ember stage, temperature can remain
stable for a long time.

In general, you can put in things with a large surface-to-volume ratio at
almost any point, like pizza, pretzels, or buns. If you put them in early they
just get done faster. With larger things like bulky bread loaves, I would wait
a bit until the oven cools down somewhat because they are at risk of heating
up slowly on the inside while the outside is already done. Personally, I find
the bread variants with larger surfaces more appealing, so I don't have a lot
of experience with the bulky ones. With pastries it depends on the temperature
tolerances of their components.

Really, I would suggest you try it out yourself. I found that intuition works
pretty well, even for me as a city-dweller with a non-agricultural background.

~~~
Xylakant
There are some kinds of food that evolved out of that question. French tarte
flambée (a very thin pizza-like dough with a topping of sour cream, bacon and
onions) was used to determine if the oven has the right temperature for bread.
If the temperature is right is bakes in a handful of minutes. So you'd heat up
the oven and do a couple of test-bakes with a quick tarte. Then you'd bake the
bread while not heating the oven. After the bread, the oven has the right
temperature for cakes.

------
ygra
Baking things often works at a fairly wide range of temperatures. What matters
I that the inside of what's being baked gets to a certain temperature and you
can achieve that with different oven temperatures. It just takes a different
amount of time. Then there are techniques like poking a fork or a toothpick
into your cake to see whether the dough sticks to it or not. If not, it's
done. And then there's trial and error and experience. Others mentioned a gas
oven which a) doesn't have a precise temperature and b) often an uneven heat
distribution. Works just as well, though, with a bit of learning.

------
DanBC
I think your question is a bit more involved than "just cook it". Pastry
evolved over many years. Techniques were developed and learned and passed on.

This involves more than just the temperature of the oven. When baking bread
you want long gluten chains, so you need the bread. But for most pastries you
don't want that so you need to distribute the fat without building up the
gluten chains.

[https://vintagecookbooktrials.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/a-sho...](https://vintagecookbooktrials.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/a-short-
history-of-pastry/)

> The many different kinds of pastry which are made in Britain today have
> evolved over the centuries from a crude flour and water dough mixture
> invented by the Romans. The paste was wrapped around meat and game before
> roasting and was not intended to be eaten. It served only to retain meat
> juices and aroma.

------
jinushaun
Like everyone here has already mentioned: knowledge and practice.

Knowledge of cooking was passed down from generation to generation via
schools, guilds and families. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Thousands
of years of trial and error passed down. People measure by sight, sound, touch
and smell. For example, there are multiple ways to guess steak doneness.
Simmering is visually different from boiling which is different from a rolling
boil. If you're frying something in a pan, you can guess the temperature by
sound. If you're making a stew or braise, it's done when the meat breaks
apart. Doesn't matter what the cookbook says about exact times because
environment and cooking equipment is different for everybody. Water boils
before 100 C at high elevation. I moved to an area with high humidity in the
summers and all my baking recipes from home failed.

With practice, you also build an intuitive sense of doneness. For example,
I've cooked enough "black on the outside, raw on the inside" chicken to know
how hot the heat should be and how long it should take--even without a
thermometer or a timer. Like others have mentioned, sometimes you just have to
cook a proxy item or sacrifice a piece.

One of the big differences between new cooks, and experienced cooks is that
people who have cooked for a while are constantly tasting, touching and
inspecting their food. New cooks tend to follow recipes word for word and only
taste at the end. Then they get surprised when something is under/over cooked
and under/over seasoned.

Lastly, I think previous generations had different expectations of consistency
and quality. Modern society is hyper-precise. Traditional recipes have a huge
margin for error.

------
mmaunder
I've spent hundreds of hours baking bread over a period of months. For some
reason I got into the habit of baking a fresh loaf for the family and one for
my sister-in-law to take to work, daily.

I started using a bread thermometer. Experimented with various breads and
converged on trying to make a great basic french boule. Doing this at 6000
feet in Colorado in a conventional oven is challenging.

I could write at least 4000 words about bread, so I'll cut to the chase. I
eventually got rid of the bread thermometer because I had my recipe down. The
trick is measuring quantities (by weight, not volume) and using the same
recipe, oven configuration and oven temperature every time. Once you figure
out what works, that is. Once you eliminate variables and all you're left with
is temperature or 'doneness' it's easy to just use time instead of
temperature.

So to answer your question, I think they used to use trial and error, then
consistency. Or perhaps a baker who taught the apprentice the exact method,
perfected over time.

With a crisp loaf, you can just knock the underside and you'll get a
reasonable idea of whether it's done. But a few fails (or not perfect results)
will eventually get you to where you need to be.

Just for fun, here's some more detail: If you're interested in bread in your
conventional oven, I'd highly recommend the awesome experience of making bread
out of just flour, salt, yeast and water - a classic french recipe. And then
hand knead it. Don't fall to the temptation of adding an egg yolk, sugar or
olive oil just yet. It's like adding cocaine to soda. Of COURSE it will be
more popular. But get the basics right first.

A few tips for your conventional oven: Get the thickest pizza stone you can
get and a cast iron pan. Put the stone on a middle rack and the cast iron pan
on the lower rack.

Use a moister dough (70 to 80% IIRC) and calculate the percentages of water vs
flour based on weight. A scale is essential and a huge time saver. Make a nice
wet dough and learn how to knead it. This will give you that wonderful crumb
with big spaces. Learn about when to knead and when to rest. For better
results, make an autolyse where you just lightly knead only the flour and
water first and let it rest for 30 minutes before adding the yeast and salt
and kneading. Sounds odd, but it gives amazing results. Calvel's technique
(Julia Child's guru).

Preheat the hell out of the stone in the oven AND the cast iron pan under it.
Boil a kettle _full_ of water. Put thick gloves on for this next part.

When you put the bread into the oven, put the moist dough directly on the hot
stone. Then immediately pour just a few ounces of the hot kettle water into
the pan under the stone and shut the oven as soon as you can (with a face full
of steam). You now probably realize that filling the kettle all the way saved
you from having to tip the whole kettle into the oven and getting a nice steam
burn. And those gloves were handy weren't they?

What you've just done is simulate a commercial baking oven in your crappy
kitchen oven. The bread will rise suddenly and then the crust will start
forming after about 7 mins. Let it get nice and crisp. Check it at around 30
to 45 mins depending on your oven temp. Use a bread thermometer. Take it out
when it's 195. Flip upside down on a bread rack and let cool. Resist, resist,
resist the urge to bust it open because you'll damage the fragile loaf at this
point. After about 10 mins you can cut it if you want to serve hot bread.

When I was in my bread phase, my wife and I would eat hot bread fresh out of
the oven with mature cheddar that would soften on the hot slices with red wine
late at night.

~~~
Moru
I also got into a bread-baking period a while ago. It's wonderful to eat your
own bread every morning even though it's not always perfect. Makes it much
more interesting that you can test a new flower mix every time.

The base receipe I used was 240 g flour, 0.35 l water, 5 g yeast, salt

And the most important part, 12 hour leavening time, no kneading and a cast
iron pan preheated in the oven. Makes for very easy baking.

------
Broken_Hippo
Mostly, by learning small tricks. Stovetop isn't all that much different to
cook on once you get the fire going - stoves and grates of sorts have been
around for some time. Baking - you'd stick your hand in the oven and see how
long you can keep your hand in there and things of that nature. (keep your
hand in 2 seconds but not more and the oven is ready).

If you are really curios to see it done, I'd suggest visiting a live history
museum - the only one I know of is outside of Indianapolis, though. They put
the research in to make it historically accurate, including the cooking you
see them do, and employees are generally knowledgeable about their roles.

------
madez
By sight and experience. It‘s not very difficult to cook food without
thermometer. We still do it, for example when grilling with coal. Also, humans
can eat raw, over-cooked and everything in between for nearly all foods.

~~~
werber
I get that, I can cook free style fine and somewhat consistently. But how did
people bake the same thing multiple times and establish pastries, like what
was the process I guess would be a better question

~~~
quanticle
>But how did people bake the same thing multiple times

They didn't. The concept of food or beverages that taste the same, no matter
when or where they're made is an extremely modern invention. It really only
came about in the late 19th and early 20th century when industrial processes,
statistical techniques, and physical sensors became well developed enough to
reasonably guarantee the same outcome over and over again, for run after run.
Prior to that, people just accepted a greater level of inconsistency in their
foods, because that's all they'd ever known.

~~~
douche
I would think that people that were baking all the time would build up so much
practice and experience that they could probably be surprisingly consistent.

If you were a professional baker, or you had to bake all your own bread, I'd
think you would become intimately familiar with the performance of your oven,
with the characteristics of your leavening agent (probably a continually
refreshed yeast or sourdough culture that you'd keep going for years), and
with the local flour.

Although, since I'm currently reading through the Aubrey-Maturin novels, I
wonder if the predominance of all these puddings they are always eating had
something to do with them being easier to prepare reliably, compared to baked
deserts.

~~~
mseebach
Yes, or course there'd be some level of consistency, but nothing we'd
recognise as the industrial level of consistency we're used to today. The
specific characteristics of the local flour will change from harvest to
harvest, and plausibly through the season as well depending on storage
conditions. The sourdough is a living organism with "temperament", and ambient
factors like temperature and air moisture (which obviously change from day to
day) affects the outcome as well.

------
galago
I don't think my gas stove has an accurate themostat of any kind. I use my
hand if I'm making a pizza or something. You have to keep an eye on the thing
that's cooking I guess. If I cooked pies everyday, I would probably get it
nailed down by trial and error. I wouldn't ever need to know the exact
temperature as a scientific measurement though. The hand measurement is like
"hot" vs. "really hot".

------
brokenhope
Everybody has an unique tongue/mouth so a taste which is connected to old
memories. I do beleive temp control is good if someone want to automate their
receipe but for new cookers it is like casting double to short, best tastes
can be only found with tons of expriments by trying never tried.

------
galphanet
I heard that the acadians people where praying in front of the over. If they
can stay there until the end of the pray, the oven is ready to bake the bread.
Otherwise, they had to wait a few more minutes. I think it was this way
because they didn't learn how to count.

~~~
stan_rogers
It wouldn't be about "not learning how to count", but about keeping a rhythm
that makes the time predictable within a relatively small variation. I used
similar tricks for long exposure photography back in the long ago. (There was
a period in the late '70s and early '80s when radium illuminated dials had
gone away, their replacements didn't stay illuminated long enough, GraLab-type
timers were too bulky by far, and neither LEDs/micro fluorescent segment
displays nor LCD side-lighting on watches were up to the task. I had, between
cadets and the regular force, more than a decade of military experience then.
_British Grenadiers_ \- a marching tune - takes 16 seconds to play/whistle/hum
through once, breaks down easily into 4-second chunks, and only "feels" right
if the speed is right for a 120 paces-per-minute march. _Heart Of Oak_ takes
32 seconds, etc. That allowed me to be remarkably consistent across exposures
without a usable external timing device. Habitual prayers, especially when
combined with something like a rosary to keep the count accurate, would have
the same sort of consistency.)

------
shalmanese
The way I've seen described most often is that you stick your arm in the oven
and count the number of seconds before it becomes uncomfortable. Early
cookbooks used this method to describe various oven temperatures.

------
gosub
There's a story in _Primo Levi - The periodic table_ where a raw onion is used
in the recipe for a varnish and nobody knows why. Turns out that it was used
in the past to measure temperature (it would fry at a certain temp) and people
kept doing it even when it was no longer necessary.

~~~
werber
Was that for pastries? That's super interesting

~~~
gosub
No, it was a chemical plant.

------
manojlds
Reddit is the best place for questions like these, in my opinion. You will get
better answers and discussions.

~~~
werber
The comments on here are the best I've seen anywhere, but I'm scared of
trolls. Also, I think it's a legit hacking question

~~~
garblegarble
I agree about the quality of discussion on HN - although you should also find
the communities at AskCulinary and AskHistorians quite troll-free -
AskHistorians in particular has a very strict policy on rigorous answers that
can be fact-checked.

~~~
werber
Oh these look great! Thanks

