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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

The best cooks I know all have an excellent sense of smell and rely heavily upon it to get the timing right.

Try putting that in your official recipe.

My mother in law has taught me a bunch of her recipes, and a lot of them have a step that she describes “...until it has a smell”, like “fry the spices until they have a smell”, which is actually a specific aroma, but I have no idea how to write down an aroma in my notes.

We need to develop a stink-line-based notation system for aromae.

this is why most of the recipes were desserts (which are typically baked goods). Baking is much more about getting the proportions right, and often uses refined ingredients and you usually don't make changes after it starts cooking.

When you cook something in a pan and are using fresh ingredients that don't come in standard sizes and strengths then a feedback loop becomes much more important

The smell reliant cooks I know apply it equally to baked goods. They crab at me for opening the oven to check by eye. They can smell that it isn't done yet.

This would include my mother and oldest son. I have many years more experience cooking than my son and I still help him with understanding recipes because I have a better skill base than he has. I cannot cook like him. He is a much better cook than I am.

I am happy to do vegetable prep, a thing he loathes and sucks at, and happy to play consulting chef to fill in his knowledge gaps. Meal quality went up when he took over the cooking and he enjoys it a lot more than I do. I think I don't enjoy it in part because I'm not really that good at it. He only had to run me out of the kitchen a couple of times and then I was very happily all "Fine. Be that way. I will stay out of your kitchen." (said with a winky, basically)

I will admit that "when is it done" is a big judgment call in baking, so that's a good point.

Also opening the oven changes how it cooks, so I can see them being crabby :)

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