Experimenting with milk bread

Soon after I learned how to make milk bread, I wanted to add flavors like matcha, ube, and black sesame.

At first, everything was jumbled up in the Notes app on my phone. Before baking, I would, of course, sanitize my phone, then use it to record my every new move. My early matcha milk bread looked like this:

(look at that crust!)

After countless experiments that felt wasted and not optimized because I 1), couldn't compare to previous experiments because I forgot what they were like and 2), didn't have a clear takeaway, and I was blindly adding ingredients while only recording one or two highlighted ingredients. I realized I needed better methods of recording to limit the amount of ingredients that were wasted.

As an aspiring biomedical innovator, I had read numerous medical journals and realized I could adopt some of the structural elements into my baking records. In actuality, it was more like using the same scientific method I learned in 2nd grade. This new organization made things so much more effective, and having to scroll through my pages of research kept my momentum going, especially after working on a product like cookie bark for many months/years. 

The structure:

Objective:

Recipe

Method

Observations

Results

Ideas for future

Eventually, with very messy foods like cookie bark, it became difficult to type at the same time, and I'd gotten more creative to ask my Amazon Alexa to remind in a few minutes later when I had clean hands how much of an ingredient I used.

Not only is having organization optimal, it's also like a time capsule where I capture my thoughts in the margins in this huge process of running a small business and remember my progress.