I’m sick of having to look up what country an author is from to know which variant of teaspoon they’re using or how big their lemons are compared to mine. It’s amateur hour out there, I want those homely family recipes up to standard!
What are some good lessons from scientific documentation which should be encouraged in cooking recipes? What are some issues with recipes you’ve seen which have tripped you up?
Recipes should be written with the quantities in the procedure. So instead of reading
Mix flour, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl
It should be
Mix flour (300g), salt (1/4 tsp), and sugar (20g) in a large mixing bowl
That way you don’t need to read/refer to ingredient list, read/refer to ingredient list, etc
I really appreciate the recent trend of some cooking websites to do this on mouseover. Best of both worlds for readability and convenience. Not great when you’re in the kitchen and not using a mouse, I’d hope a mobile or printable version just writes it out like you did there. Love Auto scaling recipes too where you can click to adjust number of servings, bonus points if they have some logic so they don’t tell you to use .71 eggs or something.
I was a professional chemist for around ~7 and love to cook. My suggestion is to stop expecting precision with an imprecise and natural product like cooking. Are your lemons larger? They also might be sweeter, tarter, juicer etc. than others. Same thing with teaspoons. The spices you are using may be more or less concentrated than who wrote it.
Lean into the uncertainty and be free. Double or even triple spices to see if you like it. Measure with your heart
That’s just people who know how to cook, beginners want to follow recipes to a T and almost always come up with sub par results to someone who knows how to cook because they already incorporate what you’ve mentioned. This is just “make sure people cooking know how to cook” lol
I was thinking saying that expecting precision from a natural product is a fools errand. So embrace the imperfection and go crazy
OP right now
I’m out here wondering if there’s even one.
You should check out the super old website called “cooking for engineers”.
Food science is truly complex, so in order to accurately replicate a recipe, you need to standardize pretty much everything. Currently, there’s plenty of variation and you just compensate by winging it and keeping an eye on the pot a little longer.
In order to reduce variation, we need to standardize the following:
- ingredients: The composition of meat and carrots varies a lot.
- heating methods: An oven set to 200 °C is not exactly 200 ° at every location and all the time.
- weigh everything: Volumes are complicated and messy.
- use a timer: This applies to all actions like stirring, heating etc.
All materials and methods should be accurately documented, because things like the coating or weight of your pan can introduce unwanted variability.
Cooking is not a standardized or reproducible process at home, because the variables outside of anybody’s control. Modern mass recipes give only the illusion of being reproducible algorithms, but they will never achieve that.
Grappling with the complexity of different tooling, supply chains, seasonality and so on, all within a recipe, is a futile effort. That complexity must be handled outside the recipe.
I just want cups gone for solids (and viscous stuff). It’s such an idiotic system. 1 cup of diced carrot … wtf how should I go about measuring that in the grocery store? Just tell me 1 large carrot or by weight.
I know it doesn’t need to be exact but it just doesn’t make sense to do it this way. Even with imperial units, you have ounces, why not use that?
- examples from professional recipes – measurements are given as weights (in grams) – no worrying about how much brown sugar in a “packed cup” or if your cup of flour has been sifted enough or what exactly is meant by a “cup of spinach”
- examples from baking recipes – measurements are given as percentages – allows easy scaling up and down
Peer review…
Too many cooking sites are let’s exchange your recipe and end up with either stuff missing or absurdly high amount of sugar (as a rule of thumb divide by 2 the amount of sugar) or a lack of salt/spice even when they’re notsimply forgotten.
Published books tends to be a bit better as in principle they’re revised.
Peer review is how scientists correct that. Often it’s as simple as on figure 2, the labels are too small and sometimes it’s I don’t get how you’ve built your experimental setup can you clarify this section? It’s rarely catching biq mystake but really improves overall quality
At the end of the second paragraph, you’re missing a space between “not” & “simply”.
In you third paragraph, you used the singular “tends” instead of the plural “tend”. In addition, though I believe the sentence to be grammatically correct even without them, adding commas before & after “as in principle” would make the sentence a bit clearer.
Finally, your last paragraph. The second sentence is quite long, it would be more readable if you added commas before the “and” & after the second “it’s”. A comma could be placed just after “Often”, but the sentence remains legible even without it. The sentence could use quotation marks to improve readability further, which would end the sentence on a question mark followed by an ending quote. This would be grammatically correct in American English, but as the sentence is not a question, a period should be added to the end. While it may have been intentional, for comedic effect, “biq” should be “big” & “mystake”, “mistake”. If I’ve understood the sentence correctly, the newly-corrected “mistake” should be in its plural form, “mistakes”, and be followed by a comma. The sentence should also end with a period.
Are your oven’s thermometer and kitchen scale within their calibration due dates? Is that timer NIST traceable? The measuring cups ARE Class A glassware, aren’t they? Please, at least tell me you’re getting your ingredients from certified suppliers… No, the spices from the dollar store down the road are most definitely NOT on the approved list, no matter how cheap they were! Dear Lord, how are you going to blame the recipies when your kitchen is still operating in the Dark Ages?
Dependencies chart!
Also, putting the amounts in the directions and not just at the beginning.
Also, putting the amounts in the directions and not just at the beginning.
Fucking genius. Someone get this man a promotion
avoid rigid recipes and prefer cookouts
Ratios.
So you’re basically telling chefs to research and write out for you all the variables?
Baking is a science, cooking is an art.
Every recipe handed down through generations has notes, changes, etc…that’s what makes it beautiful.
I am lucky to have my grandmother’s cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from…but I don’t use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.
There is no exact science you’re looking for, the garlic grown here won’t be the same as the garlic grown there, your experience won’t be the same as someone who has cooked for years saying ‘fuck it, throw that in there and let’s see what happens’.
…lol, amateur hour
(to be clear, I was saying ‘amateur hour’ tongue-in-cheek ;)
I am lucky to have my grandmother’s cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from…but I don’t use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.
That’s wonderful! All I got was a disintegrating notebook of delights. I do like deciphering it but not when I’m hungry!
I get it!
Now to really boil your noodle I used to work with a lot of (French) chefs who when they wrote out recipes for magazines and such (pre internet) they DGAF if it was accurate or not… “if zey screw eet up, zey sink it is zere fault”
Haha I wonder if they just didn’t want to share their secrets!
The only secret French chefs have (and they will deny this) is that they love Ketchup
A German cookbook that I have first introduced me to the hub and spoke method of recipes. As in, it provided a base recipe at its most simplistic fashion, and then after that recipe, it listed ways you could modify that recipe for different kinds of dishes. Essentially listing points in the original where you could modify it in specific ways.
And this was no modern cookbook. It was printed back in the 60s.
