Would you rather see the possibilities or have the answers? In this episode, we practice aiming for approximation and then fine tuning though iteration. We explore the difficult act of knowing when to recalibrate while we revisit a recipe from the past and make it our own.
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Feed Your Fire Podcast Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Feed Your Fire. I'm your host, Kim Baker. Today, we're going to talk about one of the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal, as the architects of our life, freeing ourselves of the rigid ideas that don't serve us, and leveraging concepts that do. And we're going to do that very same thing in the kitchen, building on our successes, creating space for refinement, and savoring every bite.
Would you rather be able to see the possibilities or have the answers? Don't worry, there's no quiz at the end of this episode.
We're sort of trained to be solutions minded. And yet, whether we're talking about things in our personal lives or our careers, rarely is the solution to something a direct hit.
Just recently, I was on this panel at my alma mater—a little shout out to the Spiders, and we were talking about entrepreneurship and how the reality of the experience differs from what I might have thought when I was studying. And my answer to that question is that in real life, the process is much more iterative.
It's not just that you refine your tactics along the way sharpening them as you go. It's that even the vision and possibility of what you're creating is honed by the feedback of the live environment. We're trained from an early age, we're given a question, and we're expected to provide the answer.
But even in disciplines as precise as math or data science, the idea of iteration is embraced, where all you need to start is an approximation, which gets recalibrated throughout a repetitive process. And not only is there an expectation of refinement, there's this idea of finding the best solution, knowing that not all answers are of the same quality. And yet we put this pressure on ourselves to get it right, that we somehow should have known better, that we should have chosen differently, or moved along faster.
Our intellectual frameworks exist in an organic world. And when we create these rigid linear expectations, we're setting ourselves up to fail. When what we really need to get started, is just knowing where to direct our arrow. What's inherent in these mathematical processes of iteration is knowing when and how to recalibrate. And that, I believe, is the secret sauce, and the part that may be most difficult.
In business school, I remember learning about the downfall of Blockbuster. Any Gen Z's listening might need a history lesson here, but Millennials and above will certainly remember the old video rental chain that essentially failed to recalibrate. They had defined their offering very tactically, and when streaming came to play, they stayed too rigid, and they failed to adapt and iterate.
Revisiting something that's working seems risky, but not making necessary adjustments might be the biggest risk of all.
And I would bet we've all seen this in one form or another in our personal lives. We can get caught up in our own routines, and we miss the writing on the wall. Or maybe we just want things to stay the same, so we don't bother with an assessment. But taking a minute to challenge or revisit what we know is a flex. It's a sign of strength, not weakness.
What we could learn from data science is to create space for reflection, to have it be a critical step and not an afterthought. We also have to get clear on what we're measuring. The wrong metric can lead to misdirection. And lastly, we have to listen for feedback. This can come from people or our contextual environment.
Today, we're going to practice these ideas in the kitchen. A couple years ago in season one, we had made these biscuits. The episode was about doing things differently, getting out of our comfort zone. And as part of that exploration, we prepared a recipe that wasn't our own. We prepared a well-known recipe from Alison Roman, the luckiest biscuits. And I had this idea to come back to something that we had already done, building refinement into our process and the idea of when and how to recalibrate.
I started with reflection. Even though the recipe that we prepared was, in fact, delicious, there were a lot of other recipes online that got five-star ratings.
I wanted this recipe to be my own, and I set that as my objective. I did a bunch of research on the ratios of ingredients, helping me to understand their interaction with one another, and a framework for how to begin. I also wanted to bring some innovation to the recipe, and so I'm here to share that iteration with you today.
We're going to start by cutting two sticks of European butter into small cubes, and pop them into the freezer. I like to let that chill for at least 15 minutes. Then when you're ready, put 470 grams of flour, which is about three and a quarter cups, into a mixing bowl. Add a pinch of salt, and about a tablespoon and a half of sugar, along with a teaspoon of baking soda, and two and a half teaspoons of baking powder.
Then we're gonna run that through a sieve to sift it. Everything we do in this recipe is to create lightness and airiness. When your butter's cold enough, add it to the mixture, and with a paddle attachment, let it run for a few minutes until those cubes of butter are like pebbles.
Then pour a cup of buttermilk in gradually, barely having the mixture just come together. The dough will be kind of scraggly, and that's exactly what we want. Then pour the dough out onto a clean countertop.
We're gonna work it with our hands, getting everything just incorporated without overworking the dough. Form the dough into a rectangle shape. Then use a bench scraper to cut the dough into pieces. I personally like to create mini biscuits that are about an inch and a half square. But you can certainly cut these larger if you prefer.
Now, unfortunately, like all good things in life, these require a bit of patience. So after we cut them into squares, we're gonna place them on a parchment-lined baking sheet and pop it into the refrigerator for a bit. You want this dough to be really cold when you bake it. Once you've waited about a half hour, or as long as you possibly can wait, we're gonna finish up the biscuits by brushing them with some buttermilk and sprinkling them with some Maldon salt.
You can certainly stop there for an absolutely amazing biscuit recipe. But since we're exploring the best possible solution, I'm gonna take it a step further. And using a small spoon, like almost like a measuring spoon, or your finger, poke a hole in the center of each of those biscuits. Now these are gonna rise when you bake them, so you kind of have to go deep if you want any chance of the jam staying in the center of the biscuit. And once you've made that indentation, I want you fill it up with some jam. I used some apricot peach on some, some strawberry preserves on another. Feel free to use your favorite or whatever you have on hand. And then pop them in the oven for about 12, maybe 15 minutes max. The jam will kind of have risen up with the dough and spilled a bit onto the outside, giving it kind of this deliciously rustic flair.
I highly recommend you eat them right out of the oven. But if you must, remove them from the parchment paper and let them cool on a rack. If you're wondering what the feedback was...{sounds of cheering}. Yeah, you can say it went over pretty well in our house.
I like to think of this recipe as your ticket to freedom. Not just because these biscuits have sort of this nostalgic Americana vibe, but because setting up the expectation for iteration relieves us of the impossible task of trying to get it right the first time, every time. It gives us permission to explore, to take one step forward, and maybe a step back. But eventually, we fine-tune the formula. And like this recipe, we create something that we can call our own.
Until our next episode, I say so long. Feed Your Fire, where food nourishes growth.