Adventures of Mason #6

Everything I Know I Learned in a Kitchen

Or: Why Baking Still Vexes Me

For most of my teens and twenties, I worked in restaurants.

I've been a barista, a fry cook, a bartender, a server, and even a shift manager briefly. I learned how to cook in these restaurants—not from culinary school or cooking shows, but from the kind of education you get when someone hands you a spatula during a dinner rush and says "figure it out."

I did figure it out.

And once I "retired" from that line of work, I got REALLY into cooking. I've made fried pickles from scratch. I've made my own onion blossom with moderate success. (Although I will say: onion petals are a more enjoyable option for home kitchens. Less architectural ambition, same payoff.)

I began to understand the art and science of it. The way flavors build on each other. The difference between sautéing and sweating. How to know when something is done by feel, by smell, by the sound it makes in the pan.

Cooking made sense to me.

Baking, on the other hand, has always vexed me.

The Biscuit Incident

Two Sundays ago, I made biscuits. They were great. Light, flaky, the kind of biscuits that make you feel competent and maybe even a little smug.

The following Sunday, I made the exact same recipe.

They were terrible. Crumbly. Dense. The kind of biscuits that make you question whether you actually know anything about anything.

The only variable was humidity.

One week was dry. One week was not. And apparently, that's enough to completely sabotage your dough if you're not paying attention.

I had just enough dough left over to experiment. I added some milk. Mixed it in. Shaped one more biscuit.

That one was spot on.

The Difference

Here's what I've come to understand: cooking is jazz. Baking is classical music.

Cooking allows for improvisation. You can taste as you go. You can adjust. You can decide halfway through that this needs more garlic or less salt or a splash of something acidic to balance it out. The recipe is a suggestion. Your instincts are the real authority.

Baking demands precision. It's chemistry pretending to be food. The ratios matter. The temperature matters. The humidity in your kitchen matters. You can't taste it halfway through and add more flour. You commit to the recipe and hope you read the conditions correctly.

I'm good at improvisation. I'm less good at trusting a process I can't adjust in real time.

Which explains a lot about both my cooking and my personality.

What Restaurants Taught Me

Working in restaurants taught me how to move fast, how to multitask, how to stay calm when everything is on fire (sometimes literally). But more than that, it taught me how to adapt.

You learn to work with what you have. The delivery didn't come? Figure out a substitute. The grill's not heating evenly? Adjust your timing. Someone ordered something we don't technically serve? Make it work anyway.

That's the skill that transferred. Not the recipes—I barely remember the recipes. But the ability to see a problem, assess what's available, and improvise a solution.

That's why I could look at those crumbly biscuits, recognize the dough was too dry, and know to add milk. Not because I'm a great baker—I'm not. But because I've spent enough time in kitchens to understand what "too dry" feels like and what will fix it.

The Pattern

I think about this a lot in the context of making art.

Theatre is like cooking. You rehearse, you plan, you have a script—but then you get in front of an audience and things change. Someone laughs at the wrong moment. A prop breaks. Another actor makes a choice you didn't expect. And you adjust. You stay present. You find your way back to the truth of the scene even if the route there is different than you rehearsed.

Design work has elements of both. There's the precision of technical requirements—the measurements, the materials, the structural integrity. But there's also the improvisation of creative problem-solving when something isn't working and you need to pivot.

Parenting is definitely cooking. You can read all the books you want, but every kid is different, every day is different, and you're mostly just tasting as you go and hoping you didn't oversalt the whole operation.

What I'm Still Learning

Perhaps everything I've ever learned that was worth learning happened in a kitchen.

How to work under pressure. How to collaborate with people you don't necessarily like. How to take feedback without taking it personally. How to recognize when something needs more time and when it's already overcooked. How to clean as you go so the mess doesn't become overwhelming.

How to adapt when the conditions change.

How to add milk to dry dough.

I'm still not great at baking. I still approach it with more anxiety than I'd like to admit. I still prefer the freedom of cooking, where I can trust my instincts and adjust on the fly.

But I'm learning that even baking—rigid, unforgiving baking—has room for adaptation if you understand the principles underneath the recipe.

You just have to pay attention. Feel the dough. Notice when something's off.

And be willing to add a little milk when everything's too dry.

If you worked in restaurants, you learned something. Maybe not what you thought you were learning, but something that's probably more useful than the actual job description suggested.