A chaotic practice habit in food technology when your life is busy, is to work for an hour, then wait three or four days to practice again and do just enough to try to recall what you did last time. This schedule will leave you feeling like you are not making progress as fast as you actually are. A daily practice habit does not have to be an hour long, it just needs to be consistent. Consistency is key to developing your skills in food technology because physical ingredients respond to every subtle difference and you will develop your eye for detecting variation when you compare samples every day. You can learn a lot in a short amount of time if you maintain a narrow focus and keep good records.
A consistent daily habit starts with committing to practice within a single class of food products for several days or a week, instead of practicing across a series of unrelated food products. Practice within a single class long enough to begin to recognize patterns within the category. It might be a day or a week practicing only with emulsified sauces, fruit fillings, soft baked goods or texture-modified yogurts. When you are a beginner, if you switch categories every single day, each day will feel like a new discovery but will also feel disconnected from previous discoveries. This can be motivating, but it also makes optimization harder because your lessons are not concentrated in one area. Repetition is not a bad thing in this field. Repetition is what will allow you to begin to recognize meaningful differences. After 3 or 4 days of practicing within the same category, you will begin to be able to recognize which differences matter and which differences are just noise.
Even 15 minutes a day is better than nothing. In those 15 minutes, the first 3 should be spent reviewing your previous days records and identifying a single target to accomplish during your practice, such as a smoother texture, a brighter flavor, less syneresis or better texture upon cooling. The next 7 minutes should be spent preparing a small sample and monitoring a single variable. The last 5 minutes should be spent evaluating the sample in some way, then keeping a record of your findings. A very common pitfall is to spend all of your time on sample preparation and not leave any time for evaluating your sample and keeping records. Without the evaluation and records step in your daily practice, you are just engaging in busy work and the next time you practice you will have to start over from a knowledge standpoint.
If you start to fall behind schedule, cut back on the scope of your practice rather than just throwing in the towel. If measuring out ingredients, heating a sample and washing dishes after feels like too much to fit into your day, change your practice for the day to a records review. Compare two different days records side-by-side to see if you can find any repeating defects. Watch how your product has been behaving over time in a display case. Taste an old sample and a new sample side-by-side. Plot where your texture has changed the most. You don’t just have to learn about food technology by preparing new samples, you can also learn about food technology by training your brain to recognize cause-and-effect. Your habit is less likely to disappear if you have multiple modes of operation, rather than just one.
You will also become more receptive and responsive to feedback if you maintain a consistent daily practice habit. If you’re practicing something different every day, feedback will always be general and less useful. If you have a daily habit, your weaknesses will become more apparent. Perhaps you always add too much sugar which masks your acid. Perhaps you always cook at too high a temperature which reduces your flavor. Perhaps you always add a certain stabilizer which works, as long as you get your moisture content just right. Each of these lessons will be easier to accept if you can see that they are true over the course of several days of consistent practice. A consistent daily habit will help you to develop your judgment.
A consistent daily practice habit will eventually begin to change the way you work with food systems. You will begin to think less about relying on serendipity and more about relying on well-baked decisions. A short daily practice habit can help you to develop your judgment, process and decision-making skills without you even realizing it.