Comment by jimmies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmies | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have a Nepali friend who was at the time doing a Ph.D. in biology. Part of his daily routine is to do DNA/RNA extraction, which is highly time-consuming and precise. It involves using pipettes to transfer a minuscule amount of stuff from one tube to another, wait for hours, spin it, add some enzymes, spin it, etc. Sometimes you do what you're instructed to do from the kit and the extraction still doesn't produce a useable result.

He had a pretty snuggly relationship with his advisor, and from time to time would bring his food to the lab to share. He told me one day, the advisor decided to ask him how to make the food. Like any biologist, she came to his house with a notebook, fully expected to be able to take notes. She expected him to show her the recipes like what you do in the DNA extraction. Instead, what he told her was... put a reasonable amount of this herb and that herb into the pot, then cook until done. She got frustrated and threw the notebook away and gave up the dream of cooking Nepali food.

I am Vietnamese and there's that special Vietnamese dipping sauce recipe that I wanted to make to treat my Chinese friend at the time I stayed at her place. I got really frustrated when I was following a recipe to make it and couldn't get it right and wasted 3/4 of what I bought. My friend was like... so... let me try. And she just mixed shit randomly, tasted it, and tried adding more shit by her instinct, and it worked!

I do enjoy cooking by the book from time to time. At the same time, there is a lot of Asian food that is made by instinct. It is part of what made the food interesting. It made the food part of an envolving species instead of being fixated.

BTW, learning from mistakes, my biologist friend now has a website with real recipes you can sorta follow, please like and subscribe™ if you want to make Nepali food: https://avikarn.com/foodblog/

> Instead, what he told her was... put a reasonable amount of this herb and that herb into the pot, then cook until done.

Maybe I'm a biologist at heart, but this is what really annoys me in the cooking scene. "Reasonable", "a pinch", "add to taste". It's like with the famous owl drawing tutorial - "1. Draw some circles; 2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl". You have to already be an experienced cook to be able to use such recipes.

> You have to already be an experienced cook to be able to use such recipes.

and there's only one way to acquire cooking experience: namely cooking. A "fake it until you make it" attitude is helpful; at worse you'll make some nasty food.

That's not faking it, faking it would be if you convinced someone else you were a good cook before you were one. I don't see how that would help...

When I was first learning to cook, I found this very frustrating too. Like, why can't someone just write down the precise amounts of everything and then a great recipe could actually be reliably shared and repeatable?

My moment of enlightenment came when I realized that many of the fundamental units of cooking are wildly variable. A recipe for baked potatoes that says "Add 1.3582 grams of salt" can have as many significant digits of precision as you want, but it won't fix the problem. One potato might be 50% bigger than another. Even potatoes of the same size may vary in water content, starch, etc. Even different kinds of salt vary in how salty they taste.

When a recipe says "Add 1-2 tsp salt" or "adjust to taste", it's not that the recipe is vague, it's that it's parametric. What it's really saying is that the ingredients you already have going will influence how much of this new ingredient you need so that's where you need to make some choices. The vagueness itself, compared to other ingredients which have precise quantities, is a useful signal for you to know which parameters need tuning and which don't.

It is a problem that it means you can't guarantee a new recipe will come out great the first time you make it, especially if you are a new cook. You're basically turning a knob blindly to see what happens. But for most recipes, there isn't really an easier solution. Imagine a recipe like, "Weigh the potato and then immerse in water to measure its density. Add a quantity of salt based on the following formula..." Would that work? Maybe. Would it be less work than just trying it a few times and getting a feel for it? Probably not.

It's not just weight that's variable, it's flavor too!

I cook all of my family's meals, and when I started out years ago, I tried to write down recipes exactly, weigh everything (how much is a cup of flour when density varies?), but then I realized, all the damn ingredients aren't the same twice.

Carrots can go from bitter to sweet, potatoes can range from starchy to gooey, herbs can be really subtle, or really strong, it depends on the weather. Even in my own garden, the herbs are completely variable. The only thing that seems consistent is meats and inorganic things like salt. Corn fed beef is different from grass fed beef, for example, but within each category, pretty consistent.

So, frustrating as it is, it's near impossible to write a perfectly reproducible recipe.

i mean i get it, but there is a middle ground between "add 1.3582 grams of salt" and giving no numbers at all.

There's a reason cultures of practice form, in which tacit knowledge is passed from master to novice across generations. Working with a skilled practitioner (cook, baker, carpenter, machinist, sysadmin, programmer, etc.) is an effective way to acquire a skill.

Not all knowledge is explicit (spoken/written). Some needs to be done to be learnt. This puts a fundamental limit to the amount of intergenerational knowledge and skill transfer, BTW.

Centuries old recipes for English[1] food is pretty terse and makes assumptions too (like you know what and how to make some base for the recipe). The detailed recipes are a modern take which make minimal assumptions so that most novices can read one and follow instructions.

[1]http://www.medievalcuisine.com/site/medievalcuisine/Euriol/r...

For me a recipe is just a description of the steps to recreate the main gist of a dish. In a dish, you have the main steps giving the most flavour, and stuff added or swappef to enhance it.

Once you understand which are the main steps giving most flavour, you can play with the rest to adapt it to your taste. Precise amount are not needed, except on the first time you make an unknown dish.

For example I tried to do chocolate mousse several times, but always failed at the chocolate heating phase and incorporation to the egg mousse, even though i followed the recipe to the letter. I kept failing until someone told me that the main steps is to have the chocolate liquid while cool (she used coffee for this), and that incorporation need to be done gently. Since then i never failed at it, and replaced chocolate with fruits, without following a recipe.

>>I do enjoy cooking by the book from time to time. At the same time, there is a lot of Asian food that is made by instinct.

There's nothing unique about "Asian" food in this regard. You can codify anything culinary, and you will get a stable result (more or less. Some produce is better seasonally, old meat doesn't taste as good, etc but that's all cuisines). You can also cook "from the hip" and make things that fit your personal tastes.

I've taken several invented recipes to the full formality of 1/10 gram weights and full timed instructions and such. That process is difficult; "it needs a pinch more salt, weigh out 0.2g, try, 0.1g more, ... mark it +0.25g for the next batch."

It is nice when someone can replicate you dish without your input.

Don't weigh what went in, weigh what's left over. Before cooking something, weigh out exactly, for example, 10g of salt, 100g of oil, etc. At the end of the preparation, reweigh the ingredients and the difference is what went into the dish.

This is much easier than weighing 0.2g at a time.

The Egg Ramen Pad Thai must be really good... I'd add some stir-fried bacon bits. https://avikarn.com/food/2019-07-27-ramen/

it's not instinct, it's a combination of using your sense of smell (thinking with your nose) and practice (pretty much trial and error).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com