Scientists of Lemmy, how would you standardize or improve cooking recipes?
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Noooo it's broken!
Yup, it's broken (https://www.cookingforengineers.com/). Why?!!!
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People should try to think of recipes as performance notes, not as magical formulas. "This is how I made this, this time."
This goes for baking too. Baking is no more science than cooking, and cooking is no more an art than baking. People who claim otherwise annoy me.
You need to figure out what ratios of what, do what in your recipes, and then explore how that can change with different brands/varieties of the same ingredients, different ovens, humidities, elevations if you travel, etc. Book learning can only get you so far, you need to put in the kitchen time to really understand.
The art of making good food is in being able to recreate and adapt all the science experiments you did.
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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.
I know it feels that way - believe me, I mentioned I'm autistic for a reason, and that reason is I had plenty of meltdowns over the impreciseness of instructions before getting it - but it's not running before you can walk, it's walking before you run. Being precise and scientific about your cooking is the Olympic sprint of cooking, the high level michelin-starred stuff, not worrying about precision is the first teetering steps that lets you start to refine your technique.
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I was thinking saying that expecting precision from a natural product is a fools errand. So embrace the imperfection and go crazy
Yep. imperfection is a feature not a bug.
Trying to eliminate every variable and be able to follow a precise formula is absurd. And if you manage to do that you are going to make food that is as good as what you can buy in the frozen section of any grocery store. That highly processed stuff is made by eliminating all the variables and following a precise formula.
Just enjoy the variation, taste your ingredients and food at every step you can and adjust until you like it.
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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 think a major one is to try to avoid trusting in unfounded precision.
If you want to make lemonade like a chemist, you don't just weigh out some lemon juice and add it to water and sugar. You measure sugar and citric acid content of the batch of lemon juice, then calculate how much water will dilute it to the right pH, and how much sugar will bring it to your desired osmolarity. In reality, no one is going to do that unless they run a business and need a completely repeatable. If you get lazy and just weigh out the same mass of stuff with a new batch of lemon juice, you could be way off. Better to just make it and taste it then adjust. Fruits, vegetables, and meats are not consistent products, so you can't treat them as such.
If i were to be writing recipes for cooking, I would have fruits/vegetables/meats/eggs listed by quantity, not mass (e.g., 1 onion, 1 egg), but i would include a rough mass to account for regional variations in size (maybe your carrots are twice the size of mine). Spices i would not give amounts for because they are always to taste. At most, I would give ratios (e.g. 50% thyme, 25% oregano). Lots of people have old, preground spices, so they will need to use much more than someone using whole spices freshly ground. I think salt could be given as a percentage of total mass of other ingredients, but desired salinity is a wide range, so i would have to aim low and let people adjust upward.
Baking is a little different, and I really like cookbooks that use bakers percentages, however, they don't work well for ingredients like egg that I would want to use in discrete increments. For anything with flour, I would specify brand and/or protein level. A European trying to follow an American bread recipe will likely end up disappointed because European flour usually has lower protein (growing conditions are different), which will result in different outcomes.
I will say in defense of teaspoons, most home cooks have scales that have a 1 gram resolution, though accuracy is questionable if you are only measuring a few grams or less. Teaspoons (and their smaller fractions) are going to be more accurate for those ingredients. Personally, I just have a second, smaller scale with greater resolution.
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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?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can't ever be sure which one a particular recipe is using.
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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.
Diameter of pots is big, too. You get way more evaporation with a wider pot.
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5ml of vanilla is a lot easier to measure than by weight would be
To be honest, I don't think I've ever measured vanilla, it goes right in the bowl, lol. Small quantities are often easier by volume, though, for sure.
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Yep. imperfection is a feature not a bug.
Trying to eliminate every variable and be able to follow a precise formula is absurd. And if you manage to do that you are going to make food that is as good as what you can buy in the frozen section of any grocery store. That highly processed stuff is made by eliminating all the variables and following a precise formula.
Just enjoy the variation, taste your ingredients and food at every step you can and adjust until you like it.
There are science behind cooking but its mostly with methods instead of inputs. If anyone is interested [Salt Fat Acid Heat](https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/] and (The Food Lab)[https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0393081087] are more scientific about methods and made for home cooks. You can also look at On Food and Cooking which is much more textbook like about the science of cooking. Its there but not in standardized measurements and units for recipes
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Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can't ever be sure which one a particular recipe is using.
Damn, the imperial system really is messed up…
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Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can't ever be sure which one a particular recipe is using.
And there are Florida ounces, which as a Canadian confuses me to no end.
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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?
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.