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?
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?
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.
You should check out the super old website called “cooking for engineers”.
Noooo it’s broken!
I’m an American biochemist, I also never learned the english system because my school transitioned to metric too fast. The mental burden of trying to cook using english units after working all day in the lab using that same part of my brain leads me to just not want to cook 95% of the time. But when I do cook I have optimized processes for my few simple recipes. When I bake I usually use a metric recipe or convert a English one, and optimize it before making a large batch of something.
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 done 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
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.
All solids should be listed by weight.
All liquids should be listed by volume.
SI units only. (Grams for solids, mL for liquids)
More graduated cylinders and volumetric flasks in the kitchen please.
Why would you want anything by volume? Mass is so much easier. 50 ml of honey is way more annoying to get into a recipe than dumping it right into whatever container the rest of the ingredients are in while it’s sat on a scale.
5ml of vanilla is a lot easier to measure than by weight would be
Sure, we could say viscous liquids can use mass. I’d say most liquids with a viscosity close to water will be easier to measure out by volume than risk over pouring when going right into weigh boat / mixing bowl.
I agree. Mass all the way. It’s especially complicated when the liquids are viscous and stick to your measuring vessel.
The only time volume is permitted is if it’s too light for a typical kitchen scale to measure.
We should all use Einstein-Landauer units.
I thought SI Unit for volume is m3
True, but square and cubic units are inconvenient due to the way prefixes work. Use liters to solve that problem.
same thing, one cubic centimeter is one ml
But 1L is not 1m³
Liters are non-SI
1L is 1dm³ (10cm³)
They aren’t “official” SI units but i’d much rather see liters then teaspoons
Yeah I would also preffer liters even over m³. Was being pedantic on you saying it’s the same thing
To be completely pedantic, neither of those are SI compliant. A quantity-unit combination is not a single word and the two should always be separated by a space.
Autist and scientist here: you’re thinking of baking. Baking is the science one, cooking is infuriating because all of those really vague and inaccurate instructions are in fact as precise and accurate as they need to be. Seasoning is done with the heart, you do have to stir or knead u ntil it “looks right”, “a handful” is the right amount to add. The only way to find the “right” amounts is to cook over and over until you instinctively know what enough looks like.
Anyway the ingredient I really really hate is from Jamie Oliver’s “working girl’s” pasta, where he lists “2 big handfuls of really ripe tomatoes”. I HAVE CANNED TOMATOES YOURE GETTING CANNED TOMATOES JAMIE, I DONT HAVE FUCKING TIME TO GO LOOKONG FOR REALKY RIPE TOMATOES
Also standard teaspoon is 5ml. Just use that and taste to see if it needs more.
Even with baking, once you get good and learn what ingredients can be fanagled with, there’s definitely wiggling room like with cooking.
There is wiggle room in baking, but it relies on a deeper understanding of the ingredients than cooking. If a recipe wants 250g of flour and you only have 200g, you have to adjust the amounts of sugars and fats as well, and while the flavourings have a lot more wiggle room, some of them still require swapping out base ingredients for them to maintain the correct ratios.
With cooking if a recipe calls for 500g of potatoes and you only have 300g you can just put 300g in and keep cooking. Recipe calls for 300g tomatoes but you don’t want to waste the last quarter of your 400g can? We’re having an extra tomato-y sauce tonight. You have a lot more room to change ingredients around without it having a significant effect on the rest of the recipe.
That man fucks me right off. “Here’s how you can feed your family for a fiver”
Proceeds to use an entire fucking spice rack that’ll cost about 80 quid to get set up properly.
That’s not totally disingenuous. If you’re cooking for yourself rather than eating out or buying ready made things and you plan to do that a lot of it, some outlay on things that gets used across multiple recipes over long periods (can be years with spices) is reasonable to expect and also not to cost in recipe estimates. What reasonable to expect someone to have in their pantry already is very subjective so what to me seems fair to assume won’t seem so reasonable to others, but there are assumptions you can make. You wouldn’t for example criticise a recipe for failing to incorporate the cost of a pan if it tells you to pan fry something or a spoon to stir it or the cost of the water out of the tap. Most of those examples are equipment but I think there’s an extent to which you can write recipes with similar givens for ingredients as well, otherwise it becomes untenable to estimate costs. You don’t typically have to use the same spices as recommended by a recipe either. For some it’s essential but for many it’s just what you like or what you have so, don’t buy 80 quid of spices for one recipe, but if you can figure out which are most important for that recipe and which you also really like the taste of, buy just those and use them in this and many other recipes going forward. You gradually add to your collection because it takes a long time to get through and eventually you get to a point where you have most of the spices referenced in a given recipe or decent substitutes.
Sorry sib, but you gotta buy the spices. They’re like salt and oil, or pots and pans - you are almost always going to be using some of them, no matter what you’re cooking. It helps a lot to find an Indian supermarket, because you can get big packets of spices for much cheaper than the bottles in regular supermarkets.
Also too many spices has never been an issue I’ve had with Jamie, if anything I feel he overrelies on access to good quality ingredients. Yotam Ottolenghi is the spice dickhead, most of his recipes require a specific overpriced spice blend only he sells.
This may be true for experienced cooks but beginners need more precise instructions that are not “Until it tastes good”.
Thinking back on being a beginner, my problem wasn’t that instructions were imprecise, but more that I didn’t interpret “to taste” as a real instruction. It means I should fucking taste my food as I go, when at the time I would just taste it at the end.
So many bad meals can be avoided by sampling them over time and adjusting. I should know, having made too many.
I would classify this as an example of cooking logic (my own phrase) that needs to be learned. A lot of good recipes will assume the cook understands fundamental concepts like this, but it’s not necessarily the recipe’s job to teach you. Same as how IKEA assembly instructions might seem cryptic at first, but really boil down to using 3-4 different techniques to screw wood panels together. I do think there’s a general lack of awareness that cooking has a separate logic, and this means a lot of people never teach it to others.
Just like I usually dont.
So for example, I taste the water before I boil my pasta to see how salty it is.
Hardly undersalted the pasta so far.
Can’t say I do it always for the other cookings ;)
Yes, and I’m explaining that a significant part of being an experienced cook is just the understanding that cooking isn’t precise. You do not need to work out what sized teaspoons the author was using, just get any of the teaspoons out of your drawer, fill it up, mix it in, and then taste to see if it seems ok. The final result will depend on factors you can’t control for - the conditions ingredients were grown in, the age of spices when they were ground, the specific cultivar you’re using - and the author doesn’t have your personal tastes, so while they can tell you the ingredients to use they can’t give you the precise amounts that you’ll enjoy. To find that out you need to make the dish repeatedly with small adjustments until you hone in on your tastes.
That may be true.
But for anyone not reading it and getting instructions like “Go by feeling” when I don’t even know if the dish tastes as it should be is like requesting me to run before I can even walk.And this cooking lession will sooner or later be revealed to a beginner but it’s very frustrating to think one cannot cook while it’s just a smaller skill-issue someone needs to overcome.
This would only make sense, if all people were baking with the exact same ingredients, in the exact same environment, with the exact same equipment. You know, like in a factory.
For households and the like, it makes sense to have a bit of variation, until you find the way that makes it perfect for you.
People should try to think of recipes as performance notes, not as magical formulas. “This is how I made this, this time.”
This is pretty much how so many experienced home cooks eventually get to the point where they can eyeball the amount of each ingredient they need.
You should look for kitchen tested recipes.
I’ve been cooking at home, and occasionally in restaurants, since I was about ten or so. So, 40ish years.
No single standard is better than the others. It does suck that there isn’t a single one that is used as a base, and then gets converted by the cook into their preferred units and structure, but even that has issues.
The good news is that most cooking, and even most baking, is very forgiving of the kind of discrepancies between sizes of lemons, onions, etc. You don’t really run into trouble until you’re dealing with things that react chemically based on the ratio of ingredients, which is still most common in baking, and not even all baking.
Even in those types of recipes, it’s usually flour that’s the problem, not leaveners, since flour compacts readily and to a high degree. But, then again, most modern recipes like that are going to be in weight measures, or in baker’s ratios. You’d be using a scale for the fiddly recipes.
So, generally, just guesstimate your produce size the first time you make something. It’s not going to be so far off that the results will suck if the dish itself doesn’t. Then you tweak things until it fits what you prefer, which is what happens anyway as you build your recipe book/collection.
My old recipe book had scribbled notes in the margins from years of refinements. When I copied that into a digital recipe manager, I added them in directly. Now, I’m able to just enter the original recipe, then add my notes as parentheticals or whatever as I refine.
Even with those detailed notes, a given recipe won’t always be reproducible as exactly the same. That’s because you just can’t standardize everything. You use good produce, there’s going to be varying water content, slight differences in flavor compounds, more or less sugars, so to get the same results over time, the cook has to know how to adjust for those things on the fly.
Of equal import is that no matter how scientific your process of recipe development is, the table is never the same as the cook. My taste buds and brain aren’t the same as my wife’s, my kid’s, my cousin’s, etc. So there’s limits to the benefits of standardized recipes on the plate.
Now, formatting? That’s a huge help.
You want your ingredient list to include instructions about when an ingredient is used in multiple places. You want lists broken down in sections when a recipe calls for multiple procedures (like making the main dish, a sauce, and a crust).
In the instructions, make sure the ingredient quantities are included for redundancy.
If there’s an instruction about duration that’s variable explain what the variables change. As in: bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Okay, great. What’s the difference? If my stove runs hot and I go for the short time, will I see golden brown, and will 15 be burnt or just really dark? Yeah, you can’t expect identical results from one circumstance to the next, but at least drop an “until golden brown” at the very minimum.
That applies to any variable, imo, but it can get to be too much detail in complicated recipe.
Cooking and baking are chemistry, physics. But they’re also an art. The more you try to strip a recipe of flexibility, the less successful it’s going to be for the next cook.
If you’re asking scientists about writing protocols, you clearly don’t know how scientific protocols work. If anything, scientists need to take lessons from recipe writers on how to write protocols. Scientific protocols are notoriously difficult to replicate.
Here’s a burger recipe written like a scientific methodology:
Raw beef patties (Carshire Butcher) were prepared on a grill (Grillman) according to manufacturer’s instructions. The burger was assembled with the prepared patties, burger bun (Lee Bakery), lettuce (Jordan Farms), American cheese (Cairn Dairy), and various toppings as necessary. Condiments were used where appropriate. Assembled burgers were served within 15 minutes of completion.
Methods sections are limited in word count, and if a lab is hoping to get a few more papers out of a paradigm, they may be intentionally terse. There’s a big difference between how we write protocols in-house and how we write limited-length methods sections.
I don’t share this notion, as a scientist. Especially not in industry. SOPs are extremely detailed to the point of including lot numbers, etc. If done right it leaves no room for interpretation.
Fair call, many fields tend to write just like you described haha.
Maybe chemistry scientists could be a better reference.
Chemistry might not be much better. It’s because scientists generally assume that readers already know how to do the techniques, and so the only information they would care to provide are the ones that wouldn’t be considered obvious. Such as equipment brand, the name of the technique if there’s multiple techniques that do the same thing, or experiment-specific modifications to the technique.
My understanding is that it’s a holdover from older times, when scientists were charged per word, and so methodology would be cut down to remove anything considered “general enough” knowledge
OP right now
I’m out here wondering if there’s even one.
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.
