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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

There just isn't a culture around cooking (non-professional setting anyway) of doing experiments to validate your claims so myths, inaccuracies and just-so stories are rampant, even when experiments are very cheap and practical to do.

I'm not sure how you change this. I find it really grating how much contradictory cooking advice there is and how complex some recipes are without justifying the extra steps make any difference.

If you're making bread for example, some recipes will say don't add the salt with the yeast because it will make it rise slower and some recipes say it won't make a difference - it should be simple to confirm this with an experiment in a day to settle it for good and move on but for whatever reason this doesn't happen.

Is there a good reason why you couldn't settle how to caramelise onions with a few experiments?

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I agree with your point that there is right answer for a lot of these things. I'd love to read a blog testing the contradictory cooking claims ;)

My suspicion is that most of the contradictory advice is for things that don't matter that much.

I'm not sure about salt in the dough. I'm sure I've done it both ways, and both times it was fine so I don't care that much.

When making a stew: meat-before-onions or onions-before-meat? I think the "right" answer is meat-before-onions, but if you do it the other way... it's not going to really affect things too much.

Things that really matter have mostly universal advice (preheating the pan, salting pasta water, etc.)

> My suspicion is that most of the contradictory advice is for things that don't matter that much.

I agree, I think game changing advice would get noticed and passed around quickly, and for things that make no difference or minor difference you'll see lots of people sharing contradictory anecdotes.

Also holds true for many other things, e.g. parenting.

The answer for typical French/American (broadly) stews is meat before onions to get a good sear, and a good fond, to base your stock on. Doing this properly (including not crowding) will always give better results. You should really remove it before the onions also, but that’s an extra step.

I thing with a lot of things like this the better technique is known, but often more work and the lesser technique isn’t a disaster so people use them. Also doing all the steps “right” will give you a better result , but missing sometimes even one will leave you about where you would have been not bothering.

And some of these things compound. In your example, there is literally no way to really recover from an improper sear in a beef stew that calls for it; it's probably the number one cause of mediocre versions of these.

(I'm trying to be careful here because there are equally valid was of doing this - an American stew using Moroccan techniques, or vice versa probably won't work as well)

It's not formal experiments as such but I quite like Felicity Cloake's How to Cook the Perfect ... column: https://www.theguardian.com/food/series/how-to-cook-the-perf... which has both a home cook feel and a 'let's go and test this out' feel about it.

That series has always been a joy to read. Whenever I want to know what the established wisdom in making a classic dish are I'll check to see whether she's covered it first and use that as my starting point.

Agree with you for most recipe books and websites, however a few rise above the crowds. Serious eats, Cook's Illustrated, and most likely more.

>If you're making bread for example, some recipes will say don't add the salt with the yeast because it will make it rise slower and some recipes say it won't make a difference - it should be simple to confirm this with an experiment in a day to settle it for good and move on but for whatever reason this doesn't happen.

The book you are looking for in general is called "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee. As are many of the recipes from Serious Eats and by extension J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.

Salt does make yeast rise slower, but usually your bulk fermentation has to be done with salt so it doesn't really matter exactly when you add it. The real reason this discussion happens is due to how salt affects the formation of gluten through enzymes in the flour which is why some breads benefit from an autolyse process that purposely omits the salt for an initial fermentation.

There is actually a ton of semi-scientific testing out there regarding bread baking in particular, so if you want to know something there is a good chance of finding an in-depth blog post about it.

There are good experiment/evidence based writers out there, they're just mostly drowned out by all the noise.

Harrold McGee

J Kenji Lopez Alt

Nathan Myhrvold (yes, the one and same)

As some of the other comments explain, the problem is a lot of authors use the word "caramelize" when what they actually mean is "brown." This happens on restaurant menus too, as a sort of term inflation thing to try to make things sound more dramatic than they are.

Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Bread by Nathan Myhrvold.

And pretty much any formal chef education.

I'm not familiar with formal chef education, how much more experiment based is it compared to amateur cooking? With the latter, it's rare you'll find an online discussion about cooking that's settled with an authoritative reference, it's mostly people sharing anecdotes and their favourite recipes.

Formal chef education has the student in the kitchen with the instructors - and I suspect often the book is ignored until the basic principles and methods are known (at which point the book doesn’t need to detail them).

The most basic formal chef education in Norway is two years mostly of theory (yes, books) and then two years working in a kitchen. If you have ambitions you are now barely above the busboy on the pecking order.

You can get the same accreditation if you are able to document 5 years of relevant experience and are able to pass the written exams.

But most of those discussions are between people who haven't got a culinary education.

My point was that there are chef educations where you actually learn things that most amateurs only guess at. But, as Myhrvold's work shows, there are plenty of things that are not necessarily at the level of scientific certainty.

I'm convinced that the reason there isn't good science around cooking advice is that a lot of food will go to waste while finding the right answer, and people don't consider the answer worth the waste. Even self-described experimenters will often just make one version of the experiment and one version of the control, and that settles it for them.

I feel the same exact way.

I wish there was a website or app that solved this issue once and for all.

There's obviously variation with cooking and no humans taste are exactly the same, but they're pretty damn similar enough to narrow the variation considerably.

Instead, you get thousands of blog posts that are inaccurate with 1,200 star ratings here and there, spread across an infinite, desolate web landscape.

It's not right.

There is a french guy that has a YouTube channel in which he does exactly that: he learns to cook a kind of food by doing experiments. He's also a maker that builds some of his tools. And he is funny and entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FrenchGuyCooking

Usually salt is not added in the beginning when recipe has step of activating yeast. Then you don't drop pure salt into just activated yeast - kind of make sense.

Although I am not good at making bread by any means, I've tried salt/no-salt with pizza dough and it clearly made a difference.

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