Food With A Point - A Palatable Report On Gastronomy - Journal

Baking With Numbers

Ever made something in your kitchen that turned out to be a whole lot better than you thought it would be? Or how about that time you really wanted to please someone and what you cooked up ended up even surprising you because that’s how impressive it was? Not that those moments are necessarily rare, when we please others or exceed expectations, but when we manage to impress ourselves, that’s more unusual and often amazing.

I once had that happen with a dessert I didn’t botch and for a very discerning audience. A lovely rosemary cornmeal crust tart with lemon mascarpone cream and sliced pears. Deliciously light and luxurious at the same time, it was the type of dessert I would order in a restaurant and be wishing the portion had been bigger. And the fact that I managed to evoke that feeling from myself by myself was almost awkward – that’s how uncommon that feeling is for me in the baking department. And my guests? They were convinced I was just being modest about my lack of skills in the confectionary department – how disappointed they may be in the future…

These days, while I’m still cooking in my kitchen, I’m also cooking up a storm of data (in the totally objective sense, of course) and I am in complete awe at the whole process. For those of you who knew about it and had the time to fill it out, the results of my recent survey are in and now the best and scariest part of the process needs to take place – analysis. For months I have been talking about, anticipating, postulating and presuming all these theoretical concepts that I would ideally reveal with the compilation of 2 months worth of rankings and ratings. Easy to claim and wish, definitely harder to actually sit and face SPSS (stats software) on my laptop and click on the “analyse” button. Believe me, when the status bar says “running reliability…” for 2 seconds, it feels like 100 hours.

Like baking, statistics is not my forte and so I look forward to working in that domain as much as burning myself on the oven door when taking out a cake. But it’s a necessary part of the process, like dishes, that will inevitably lead to some conclusions, hopefully positive and able to contribute to the sciences of marketing. And just like baking, the art of uncovering meaningful results from a long list of numbers and tests requires patience and attention with a sprinkle of flexibility. And so far, it’s looking promising, but I still have to wait – it’s not done yet.

The problem with this is that I’m not a generally patient person… When I decide to move forward with something, I like to be able to work immediately towards results and to have an overall idea of what the outcome will be. As per last week’s post, I tend to be more comfortable when allowed a bit of control over situations in my life. But with statistics, and a data set that is culled from the general public, this cannot be the case. Rather than tell those numbers what they need to be disclosing and what I want them to confirm, I have to let them do the talking and on their terms.

The commonality with baking here becomes almost comical with the precise measures and procedures. Consider any complex cake. The batter must be well made, the cream properly whipped, the chocolate not burned and separated and the fruit puree properly strained. Yet, and as with primary research, even if all these are individually well executed, there is no guarantee that once in the mold and in the oven that the contents won’t seep out through the loose cracks of the springform pan. The oven itself could decide no longer to work or be too hot or too cold, the cake may not rise completely, or at the end of the experiment, the cake may just refuse to unmold.

I started this research project with a good theoretical base, executed several steps always with the guidance of esteemed researchers, backed my actions by published and proven methods and with total objectivity. Now that I have my 200+ respondents, nicely entered in my spreadsheet, I can only anticipate that this will all serve a purpose. And while anxiety nearly killed me before starting the process, it is slowly subsiding as I uncover the dimensions, limit the variance and check my alphas. The picture that is emerging is slightly different than I thought but that’s not a bad thing at all and I find myself smiling because I really like the process of the investigation, and maybe I kind of like this type of statistical analysis… But mostly, I am surprised by the passion it has ignited in me. I’m so engrossed with this data set that it keeps me up at night and has me talking about it to anyone who will listen. And like a baker, I’ve actually gotten up earlier than I need to in order to work on it.

I am beginning to accept that there are some things I may not want to be good at but may have a knack for and also realizing that some of my personality features, patience for example, will be tested at time and that these will significantly affect my approach to tasks – perhaps in a positive way. The biggest revelation this week for me was that there is no greater satisfaction for us impatient ones like the reveal – and so we embark on journeys even if it means that we’ll have to wait, put in a lot of effort at obscene hours of the day and work through them to get to the sweet centre we know is there. Stay tuned…

Here are the pieces that appeared on this site in the past week, in case you missed one (use the search engine at the top of the page to access these and others):