Daily Dose of English 41
Baking
Daily Dose of English 41
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about baking. which is not cooking, they're not the same thing, but they're similar. There's a lot of similar aspects and things that are shared between baking and cooking. Cooking is the more general term, and that's what people tend to do every single day. I'm gonna cook breakfast, I'm gonna cook lunch, whatever it is, right? You cook pretty much every single day, or somebody cooks for you, right? You almost can't avoid it. But baking is something that's a little less common to do at home. However, it's still a very common activity, hobby, whatever you want to call it. Baking is where you make baked goods, which is where we get the word from, right? Which are typically made of flour or some kind of base of like carbohydrates, which is flour, essentially. So there's flour, or you can do things out of corn, for example. Slightly different versions, but it's all essentially the same thing, which we would call flour. Wheat flour is the most common, but you can get all sorts of different kinds of flour. Almond flour, if you're gluten-free, for example. There's lots of different kinds of flour. Oat flour is actually really useful, which is, it's just oats ground up into a fine powder. But oat flour is really useful for making, especially like breakfasts, because it's very easy to work with, very cheap, and it's relatively nutritional. Anyways, baking is when you combine flour and other ingredients to make things like cakes, pies, cookies, usually they're desserts, but not always, right? Bread baking is also a, is baking, right? Making bread. What other kinds of baked goods are common to eat? Muffins are also pretty common. Those are not really a sweet, however, they typically are pretty sweet and have sugar in them. Muffins, bread. I guess you could consider lots of, I guess that's just bread, right? Yeah, I was gonna say other kinds of bread, but that's all baking. A lot of people like to bake, like I said. However, it's still not the most common activity, especially in certain countries, right? Some countries bake a lot more and some countries bake less. It often has to do with how hot the country is, right? Because if you turn on the oven, which is where you bake the things, when you turn on the oven, the entire house or apartment is going to get warmer. And so countries where it's really hot, typically don't bake as much at home. That's not always true, right? That's just sort of a generalization, but you can kind of see that pattern in places where it's really, really hot. People aren't going to bake in an oven. However, in pretty much every country in every culture, there's some kind of baked good that's really common or popular. In Europe, it's often breads or cakes. Other parts, there's sweet bread. There's so many different kinds of baked goods out there that depend and vary vastly depending on where you are. There's also very different kinds of ovens, which is really interesting. Right, there's often, there's the small ovens, there's, I guess, pizza ovens, right, there's those huge round ovens that are underground that people sort of have to go into to put bread into. There's just as much variety within baked goods as there are among ovens. Okay, not quite, but pretty close. I like to bake. However, I don't do it that often. I'm not exactly sure why. I think part of it is that it just takes longer than I necessarily want to spend on cooking or making food because baking tends to take a while. Um, cooking does as well, but I, I kind of have to cook, right? I don't really have a choice. I have to make food and eat it. Um, which I like to do. I'm just going to say like, I think I mentioned that in episode like one, but I like to cook. I also like to bake, but I just don't do it as often. When I do bake, it's typically for a reason, like a birthday, I'll make a cake, for example, or a special occasion. I made some pies on this last Thanksgiving, right? I also sometimes just get the desire to make cookies, and I'll make cookies, or bread, or whatever it is, right? I'll do a thing here or there every couple weeks, and then I'll enjoy my baked goods, and then I won't do it again for a while. There was a time I was baking a lot more bread. A couple of years ago, I was baking bread once or twice a week, which was really nice actually, because that bread was really good. But you generally, in order to make bread well and have it often, you just have to get into a good rhythm and pattern with it. And I bet I could do it here. But I just haven't really figured it out yet. I need to figure out the timing. I need to figure out how I want to do it. There's just a bunch of questions. I do have an excellent baking book though, and I've learned a lot from that book. And so I understand baking fairly well, right? Not the best, but it's fairly well. And so I feel like I'm really, oh, I'm pretty good at it, right? Not necessarily the best baker in the world, but people enjoy my baked goods, I guess. And also they're just, it's just good. I don't know. It's fun. It's nice. And I like to have bread. So maybe I will start to make bread more often because it's really nice to have around. Anyways, there's a lot of other ways that baking is useful. Okay, this is a weird transition, but I'm gonna talk about a TV show that I watched in Czech, which is called in English, actually in the British version, The Great British Baking Show. Or in Czech, it was The Whole World Bakes. And it's a baking competition show where 12 people start out on the show and every week they have to bake three different things for the judges. So they start with a relatively simple sort of introductory task, right? They have to bake something and then they get judged on that. And then they have to bake something brand new that they've never seen before, right? They get to prepare for the first one. They know what they're gonna have to do ahead of time. So then they ask their ingredients and they prepare. But the second task, the second thing they have to bake is totally brand new. Nobody knows what they have to bake yet. And they get very specific instructions on how to bake it. And it's usually something very difficult. Because baking can be very, very difficult. And they give them not very much time, right? They give them only a couple of hours to bake something quite hard. And then they get judged on that. And then there's a third task, a third baked thing they have to make, which is in Czech, it's called the creative task, the bigger thing. It's often like a big cake or something very large and impressive. And then they get judged on that. And then the judges decide who is off the show, who has to leave, who goes home. And it's a really nice, it's a very sweet show, honestly, no pun intended, right? The food looks very good, but also everybody's very nice in it, which is really cool because they're not super competitive. They help each other all the time. They have fun together. They talk to each other. And so the vibe of the show is really nice. The feeling is, is fun. And so I watched two seasons of that in check and I really enjoyed it. And it was really helpful for my learning. And if you're interested, there is a British version and an American version, and I think there's an Australian version even. It's a fairly successful show, and it could be a great way to learn new English words or baking words. So if you're a person that likes to bake, I definitely recommend watching a show like that because you're going to learn stuff that you know. You already know a bunch of the words, and so when they say, I need more butter in the bowl, you can be like, oh yeah, I know those words. I understand that really easily, or whatever the example is. I'm sure you already know the words butter and bowl, but that's just an example. Um, I know that my, I never really watched the British version, but it's really popular in the U S and it was just sort of funny. My parents have both watched like five seasons of the great British baking show, which is funny. Um, there are a lot of different accents in it, right? So actually they put on subtitles because they couldn't always understand where, where people were from. Um, because there's so many different accents in, in the UK and Britain. Um, So it can be a little bit harder to understand, but it's really good practice for your listening and your general ability. And if you need, you can just turn on subtitles. I don't really have anything else to add about baking, but I'm curious what kind of baked goods are common where you're from. Because I've been to several different countries where the baked goods are so different. Like I said, there's just a ton of variety. Where I'm from, there's a bunch of different things, right? The U.S. is a bunch of different cultures sort of mushed together. And so we have things like breads, but then there's also plenty of cookies and cakes and pies. I think pies are one of the things that I think of most, and I think of American baking. But there's still plenty of stuff. And in Mexico, it's sweet breads, right? There's so many different kinds of sweet bread. In Germany, there's tons of just normal breads, right? There's so much variety out there. So tell me down in the comments what kind of baked goods are popular where you're from. Or do you like to bake anything special? Let me know. But that's everything for today. I'm really glad that you could make it and hang out for a little while while I talk about baked goods, and I'll see you again tomorrow for the next episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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