Why Close Enough Might Be The Ideal Target

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 the very same thing in the kitchen, building

on our successes, creating space for our Feynman 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. Eddie Jensey'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 to find 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 of 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 Allison 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 said 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 going to run that through a sieve to sift it. Everything we do in this recipe is to

create lightness and airiness. When your butter is 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 and 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 going to 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. 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 going to 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 going to finish up the biscuits by brushing them with some buttermilk and sprinkling

them with some maldonsalt. You can certainly stop there for an absolutely amazing biscuit recipe,

but since we're exploring the best possible solution, I'm going to 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 going to 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 to fill it up with some jam. I use 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,

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 the 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 find two in the formula and like this recipe,

we create something that we can call our own. Until our next episode, I say so long. Feature

Fire, where food nourishes growth. Feature Fire is sponsored by Cassari Consulting,

where insight meets innovation. That's K-A-S-A-R-I Consulting.com.