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Comment by heelix | Hacker News Reader

You get goofy measurements like that when someone takes the time to measure what a dash of this, a pinch of that, and a tad of something else into a non-eyeballed, quantifiable amounts. And yes, some times you have to be exact, sometimes... not so much. Cooking is organic chemistry. :P

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No, you get goofy measurements like these converting weights / baker's percentages to volume. Yeasts are one thing, but salt is much worse. You can get roughly twice as much salt per volume in table salt vs. common kosher salts. I have a jeweler's / drug dealer scale that can weigh small amounts very accurately. If I scale a loaf up or down, I have complete confidence in a repeatable result.

Baking is not like other types of cooking where you can adjust as you go.

Some baking isn't— I follow the recipe closely when it's time to make a cake or cookies, but bread is super flexible (same for rolls, buns, pizza crusts etc).

As long as I get half a tablespoon of coarse salt and a 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of water per loaf, everything else works itself out based on feel. May not be as repeatable as if I was in a bakery and needed to deliver identical loaves every time, but I've been cranking out delicious bread for my family for a decade and never had an issue just adding flour under it feels right.

You also get them when someone who is baking commercial quantities of bread in a batch has to scale their recipe down for a home baker who can't physically bake, let alone eat, that much. Bread recipes are designed to scale up and down, so at some point having 25% more of some ingredient could definitely make a difference.

And also when converting from metric, for example.

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