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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

I learned to cook a lot from the 3x5 cards my mom has in a cupboard.

They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter.

Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway.

I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.

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> I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.

Interpretation is also why many people are really bad at it (and art).

If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.

But other than that point regarding the main topic, I don't disagree.

I usually make most food I'm tangentially familiar with without a recipe. But when I'm encountering a new one from a region I'm less familiar with, I need to go through a few recipes before I get the framework for it.

> If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.

That's not fair, I practically never follow a recipe to the letter, and mostly don't use one at all. But I read them for ideas or the broad strokes behind something I haven't made before.

Eh sure, but I could see a newbie making this recipe, putting too little oil, having it start smoking, then burning the cutlets and undercooking the chicken. That's not interpretation, that's just poor instruction.

Take the Serious Eats version. Yes, it's 10x more complicated, but it has photos and careful descriptions and measurements: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/09/the-best-chicken...

> Take the Serious Eats version.

Ad ad ad... some irrelevant random video trying to play when I clearly don't want it to.

The site is really not about the quality of recipe, though they could be made better via your contribution.

Yes it is a shame, because their recipes (especially from Kenji López-Alt) are really good. But if you keep one open to read from during cooking, you will see every video they have available playing in the little box.

The obvious move is to ctrl-c ctrl-v the recipes to the ad-free site ;)

ad blocker ad blocker ad blocker... :)

Serious Eats is one of the best recipe websites. Yes there is ads (have to pay the bills some how), but they dive into the how and why food is made the way it is. Not the fluffy "this is the way grandma used to make it". E.g. https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/04/how-to-make-tonkatsu-jap...

You're trying to cut out the middle man in learning how to cook.

It doesn't need to be complicated. Everyone who cooks knows the answers to these questions because they can remember that time their oil started smoking or they burnt this or undercooked that. Just start trying it, you'll learn as you go.

I've heard that for a lot of cooking it doesn't matter, and for some it matters a lot.

A large category where it matters a lot (I've heard) is baking. If you're making a soup or a sauce or some mashed potatoes, most of your changes are predictable and linear -- less salt means less salty. Less butter means less buttery. But when you bake things interact in sharp ways, and the ingredients interact with each other in more interesting ways. Maybe "less predictably" with certain priors -- not in a strong sense (it's chemistry). But in a weaker sense, "why didn't it rise" isn't answerable by "didn't add enough X" for any fixed X, and in most recipes 2X won't mean "twice as much rising".

A stick of butter is standardized though. It's a quarter pound.

In lots of countries, butter isn't sold in sticks, and using measurements like "sticks", "cans", or "packs" of something is annoying if the unit sizes differ between the author's and the reader's country. I can deal with cups or ounces - they're not intuitive for me, but they can be converted. But "cans" or "packs" are just plain guesswork. That makes it unnecessarily hard to try new dishes where I don't already know what the result is supposed to look or taste like.

I used to think recipes were very imprecise.

But I've written down notes (for myself) when configuring a server, so later I'll know what I did. (super helpful)

Thing is, sometimes I write the exact command, but other times I just say general stuff like "setup an account" or "install devtools" ...

which is just like a lot of cooking recipes.

> They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter.

I don't understand the complaint here. A stick of butter is half a cup, 8 tablespoons. The standardization is more ironclad than pretty much any other product you can get in a grocery store.

Not everyone on the internet lives in the USA. I have absolutely no idea what a stick of butter is without googling it. UK butter is sold in 250g blocks.

A cup means 280ml here, but 237ml in the US. A literal tablespoon varies from 7ml to 25ml, and is defined to be between 14.8ml and 20ml depending on locale.

Why not just specify in terms of litres and grams, which are the same everywhere?

> Not everyone on the internet lives in the USA.

So? What we have here is someone whose mother wrote down recipes involving sticks of butter. There's no ambiguity about the amount or the geography.

What if you moved to the west coast from the eastern coast (of USA) where a stick of butter meant something different?

This is a time interpretation could be a horrible difference.

https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/east-coast-vs-west-coast...

Isn’t that just a difference in shape? I think either way it’s the same amount of butter.

Correct, one "stick" of U.S. butter is exactly 8 tbsp regardless of shape, and almost all grocery store brands will be individually-wrapped 8 tbsp blocks.

One stick of butter is defined as 8 tablespoons, no matter the shape it was packaged in, or if you're getting it from a butter churn.

My way of putting it: "cooking" is what we call [chemical] process control when we don't give a damn about consistency of the outcome :).

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