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?
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
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
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.
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.
You should look for kitchen tested recipes.
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 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.
As someone who bakes bread, and sometimes biscuit, pancake, and cookie type things, I feel this way also. But I wonder if the reputation for needing precision doesn’t stem from something I don’t bake, like cakes.
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.
Ratios.
not exactly an answer to what you ask but I wanted to share this knowledge: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/recipe
its a standard(ish) schema that many popular recipe websites use, so you can very easily parse them and do unit conversions
Cool stuff, thanks for sharing!
avoid rigid recipes and prefer cookouts
- 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
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.
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
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.
1L is 1dm³ (10cm³)
They aren’t “official” SI units but they dont require funny conversions and 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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.
I have a similar experience with some basic fermenting (e.g. kombucha, pickling). I’m growing cultures of microbes like yeast and bacteria and while I’ve been able to spot some obvious unwanted cultures on failed batches, there’s a surprising absence of reputable info and unfortunately I’ve had to get by on the brewing equivalent of gym broscience, mostly on reddit, some of which I’ve spotted is misinformation. The SEO AI-generated articles plaguing search results don’t help either.
They do publish pretty good information about home canning, though in batch sizes more and more of us aren’t going to do because we’re not putting up 10 acres worth of vegetables.
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
there are several of these from the usda!
https://nchfp.uga.edu/resources/category/usda-guide
they are really well made pdf’s with a lot of good info on exactly what you’re describing.
I make my own hot sauces and kraut.
Those are great, definitely gonna be saving those
I basically want that kind of guide for curing meats and other such things
Also there are some blind spots, something I was just looking for recently is canning some of my home-cured meats to save some space in my freezer. I know it’s a theoretically possible undertaking, I can go to the store and buy a can of corned beef after all
But reputable sources like the USDA and NCHFP are kind of silent on it and pretty much leave it at “we can’t recommend doing that, curing can change the density and water content and such and we haven’t gotten the funding to test it.”
I can find people who have canned their own bacon and such, and apparently not died of botulism, but I don’t exactly trust the processes cooked up by some off-grid homestead tradwife mommy-blogger.
On thing that drives me nuts is weight measures for dry ingredients vs numerical egg measurements. Just give me ingredient ratios normalized to the egg mass.
Same could be said for “an onion” or “3 cloves of garlic”. Just give me the weights, please.
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