Scientists of Lemmy, how would you standardize or improve cooking recipes?
-
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 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
-
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."
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook
I'd really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.
I've recently been experimenting with curing meats, I've done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.
And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.
And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren't dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.
I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it's a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and...
When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I'll ever work with, and also doesn't scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I'm not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.
Seconding the national center for home food preservation document.
One thing that I like experimenting with that i have to search for every time is the time/temperature curves for pasteurization of different foods. Every "knows" you are supposed to cook chicken (and most "prepared foods") to 165 °F according to the FDA/USDA. What most people don't know is that that temperature is what your food needs to hit for 1 second to have the proper reduction of bacteria (e.g., 7-log for chicken, which is a really high bar). You get the same reduction with 15 seconds at 160 °F or an hour at a little over 135 °F. You can easily do that with a sous vide bath.
It's really cool for people who are immunocomprimised or pregnant because you can cook a steak to medium rare, but hold temp for a couple hours, and it's just as safe as if you cooked it to way hotter and ruined the meat. You can also do runny egg yolks.
Here's the first link that came up when I looked for it, but I'm sure you could find the actual government publication.
https://blog.thermoworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf
-
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'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.
-
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.
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.
-
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.
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'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?
You should check out the super old website called "cooking for engineers".
-
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.
-
You should check out the super old website called "cooking for engineers".
Noooo it's broken!
-
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?
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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 get used across multiple recipes over long periods (can be years with spices) is reasonable to expect and also not to be costed in recipe estimates. What exactly is reasonable to expect someone to have in their pantry already for a recipe is very subjective so what to me seems fair to assume won't seem so 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 that recipe and many others going forward. You gradually add to your collection as you try new things and when you have some spices and a recipe calls for you to get more, it's not such a stretch because you're not buying a ton of them at once just the few you don't have and consider it worth trying. It takes a long time to get through spices and eventually you get to a point where you have most of the spices referenced in a given recipe or decent substitutes or you only need like 1 extra one that will help you cook more things in future. If you're sure you won't use a spice outside of the one recipe you're looking at, just skip it.
-
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]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?
-
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!
-
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
