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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

A while back I took flying lessons. They have a procedure and checklists for most things. This is decidedly a good thing. Checklists are great for reducing errors and should be used in more situations.

Of course there is also a question of whether these procedures can be updated. And whether you can improvise in an emergency. You need more training for that. But this doesn't mean checklists are bad.

Another example: when cooking a new dish, if you start with a recipe you'll probably get up to speed faster than just winging it. This doesn't mean there's no creativity.

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Totally not against checklists, especially in aviation. It's just something is rubbing me with the recipe for business involving such degree of micromanagement.

> Another example: when cooking a new dish, if you start with a recipe you'll probably get up to speed faster than just winging it. This doesn't mean there's no creativity.

Fair, but a recipe is about as far from a checklist as you can get while still retaining bullet points. The degrees of freedom in typical recipes are so large you could drive a train through (it's probably unintended - people writing down recipes having zero experience with precise communication). I'm not a very experienced cook, so ambiguous recipes are a pet peeve of mine.

Yes, and that looks like another argument in favor of very detailed procedures for beginners. (Better than typical recipes.)

Former chef here, the variance in balances of different chemical constituents can be so massive between two pieces of fruit picked from the same tree that precise recipes would be useless without requiring each reader to have access to a mass spectrometer (and any clue as to what its readout means). This is largely where the "art" in culinary arts comes in. While you could teach someone to read a mass spectrometer to determine the exact chemical result that a given mixture of different ingredients applied to a specified heat curve, it's more likely that they'll just have to learn how to approximate it via taste, smell, and sight.

Good baking books will actually get a lot closer to having specifics in them. They can do this however because a lot of the ingredients that are used in baking are rated based off of various levels of one or more of the chemicals that will significantly affect the result of your baked product (ash level, acidity, sugar content).

This raises an interesting question, relevant for more than cooking: In a process with variable "inputs" , is there a method(probably statistical) to create a recipe that will work,even with this variability, while minimizing the expertise needed ?

"Time Tested" recipes have already done this work - they've performed the process over a long period of time with a wide variety of small input changes/variable ingredients.

For example, the Toll House Cookie recipe has been executed how many millions of times with predictably good results.

Why did you stop being a chef? Too much stress from crazy restaurant owners?

I’ll answer for him. It’s a terrible, stressful, dangerous job, with insane hours & criminal working conditions, that pays peanuts. Might just be my opinion.

Thanks. What are some of your favorite jobs/careers? Or are you still looking?

I have never deviated from a recipe in twenty years except for being out of ingredients. And I only have one recipe that I can remember without referring to the printout. Checklists have entirely replaced the need for knowing how to cook and I'm glad.

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