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It wouldn't hurt for all recipes to convert over to grams except perhaps for very small measures. "Four cups of flour" can have a substantial swing by weight, making a real difference in something like a loaf of bread. If you aren't an experienced baker or never made a particular loaf before, it is really hard to know by feel if the hydration is right or wrong. Every kitchen should have a scale so cookbook authors can count on this. And please please please don't use ounces instead: they are too coarse, and they are inexcusably used for both weight and volume.

I'd also like the phrase "medium heat" outlawed but I know that is a bridge too far. My stove has four burners in a ridiculous range of heat output. Each has a "medium" setting. My pancakes are much better off now that I've got an IR thermometer and can keep the pan around 350 - 375F.

Bread sure, bust out the scales, but most recipes don't actually need anything more than a vague outline of what you're trying to do. Tolerances on soup, for example, are extremely wide, and any measurement is picking an arbitrary point in flavor space and declaring it "correct" when much of anything will do. And the idea of a "correct" way to do it encourages home cooks to treat the process like a black box where any misstep will ruin things, rather than having levers to adjust things to taste.

Learning to “let go” has really helped out my mediocre cooking skills. We really need a Bob Ross for the cooking world; someone to help us embrace all of our tasty little accidents.

Sam Sifton (mentioned in the article) has a "No Recipe Recipes" book that I just received for Father's Day. Perfectly suited to how I like to cook.

I agree so much about “medium heat” or really any subjective measure of heat. When I was learning to cook I smoked up my apartment so many times before I learned that what recipe authors called “high heat” was really about 50% up my range’s dial, and anything above that was mostly suitable for boiling water.

Using a simple infrared thermometer changed how I cook so much for the better.

What would be interesting is if stove burners would be required to have their watt-equivaleng heat output as markers, instead of 1-2-3-4-5. That way would know that 3 on the middle burner is equal to 5 on the small burner, and recipe books can now mention you need ~800 watts of heat output, which is neatly usuable for induction and coil cooking as well.

Thank you! It's one of the things mildly infuriating about learning to cook, especially from recipes. They don't quantify everything. What's "high heat" exactly? What is a "pinch" of salt, and how does it differ from a "dash" of it? Are these volume measurements or weights? When it says "sprinkle some X" how much should you sprinkle? What's a spoonful? Are they referring to a US teaspoon (approx. 5mL), or somebody else's spoon? How much oil is in a "drizzle"? What about a "drop"? Are we talking about the metric drop (0.05mL)? How many grams is a "medium potato"? Or an onion? I can get onions in sizes that vary by 3X, but the recipe just says chop up an onion. Maddening!

The answer is that a recipe is a seed idea for a creative process, not a fixed set of steps that you have to follow exactly or ruin the magic.

> What's "high heat" exactly?

A suggestion that you want caramelization and/or browning

> What is a "pinch" of salt, and how does it differ from a "dash" of it?

Doesn't matter, you should salt to taste anyhow, this is merely a reminder to do so

> When it says "sprinkle some X" how much should you sprinkle?

Smell it or taste a little and guess

> How much oil is in a "drizzle"?

Enough to tell that it's there, not enough to soak it through

> How many grams is a "medium potato"? Or an onion?

Doesn't matter, you'll wind up with a range of vegetable quantities and they all roughly work, just end up in slightly different places.

> a recipe is a seed idea for a creative process, not a fixed set of steps that you have to follow exactly or ruin the magic.

No! It is not a creative[0] process! I am attempting to make food, to eat, not a bloody painting, and pretentions of artistry are, as ryandrake just said, infuriating[1].

0: I assume you mean "involving creativity", not "that has the effect of creating something", since the latter applies equally well to, for example, working in a assembly line.

Edit: 1: case in point, apparently.

It isn’t artistry. It is that there are too many variables for a recipe to hold your hand and tell you every tiny thing to do to get a desirable result. Just cooking a piece of meat will vary based on the power of your stove’s burners, the thickness and composition of the pan you are using, the thickness and surface area of the meat, internal variations in the meat like fat content, etc. So a recipe gives you general guidelines (med heat, about 6-8 mins) and a desired end state (until browned and cooked through). Cooking requires you to use your own senses and your own brain to evaluate your progress and outcome.

"Desirable result" isn't particularly well-defined due to the variability of personal taste. Like, one useful skill for a home cook is to read a recipe and think something along the lines of "I think I'd like that more if it had more garlic".

What I get from this whole discussion is that I would love a recipe book with measures in weights, temperatures specified such that you can use an IR thermometer, and a set of questions at the end of the recipe for assessing how I think the flavour could be improved.

I think what you should take away from this is that cooking is a skill that requires you to assess what is going on, and adjust as you go. There are too many variables for any sort of “exact” weights or temperatures. Baking can be exact because almost all your main ingredients are totally uniform (water, flour, salt, sugar, butter, milk, yeast) and even then, there is often a requirement for variability to account for things as basic as the water absorption rate for your flour. But with cooking, you are using primarily whole ingredients that are nothing but variable. It would be like trying to read a book about how to shoot a basketball. No amount of detail about newtons of force or velocity is going to help, but descriptions about how it should feel and how to stand will, and at the end of the day, you have to practice the technique and learn and improve by looking at your end state.

Most recipe books are not going to teach you how to cook in the way blueprints aren’t going to teach you how to build a house. Youtube videos that teach you techniques are going to be the fastest way, as you can see and hear what is happening with the meal as they describe what they are trying to do and hopefully why they are doing it.

I think you're right to be infuriated and the OP should not have complicated things that much. If you are simply attempting to make food to eat, then you can very easily do so. If what you want to eat can be eaten raw, eat it raw. If not, boil it.

Boiling may need a bit of experimentation to get right for some foods, but in general you need to have a pot big enough to take the full amnount of food, a sufficient quantity of clean, potable water to fill the pot until it's two cm over the food once the food is in the pot, and a sufficiently powerful source of heat to bring the water and the food to a temperarture of 100 degrees Celsius within a period of time of no more than 10 minutes. Once you have those things, the pot, the water, and the source of heat, put the food in the pot, add water to fill the pot to two cm over the food, put the pot on the heat source and turn the heat source on. At this point it would probably be useful to have a thermometer so you can directly measure the temperature of the water, but you can usually observe that the water in the pot is vaporising and confirm that it is at boiling point. Leave the food to cook until all the water in the pot has evaporated, but not more than that or the food will burn. Then eat the food. Remember to turn the heat source off before eating! You may also want to consult a set of instructions concerning how to clean the pot once it's used.

There may be variations of the procedure, for example if you have a very big amount of food you may want to adjust the levels of water, but that is something you can experiment with. In any case, if you can master this technique (but don't be discouraged if you can't) then you will always have a way to make food to eat that is, indeed, not a bloody painting.

Cooking is as creative a process as writing code. Now, most of the time, we have a well-defined end goal ("something edible", "implement feature F") and a starting point )(raw ingredients; the existing code base). But, how we get from the starting to the end point is not wholly prescribed and what goes in the middle is creative. And most of the time, the actual level of creativity is pretty low.

Now, in one of those cases, you probably have sufficient experience that the lack of exact roadmap doesn't faze you. And apparently in the other, it does.

There are more detailed and less "leave this out" recipes there. I don't, genuinely, know where to find them, but that's what I used to use when I learned to cook. It MAY be worth investigating recipe collections designed for home ec classes, as presumably they are designed for the less experienced food maker.

I meant "creative" way less pretentiously than you read it - perhaps more accurate is more like "personalization". People like different things in different amounts, so recipes paint a broad target and let home cooks hit whatever particular point in it that they want.

Like, making a peanut butter sandwich has this factor - different people like different breads and peanut butters in different amounts, so it's up to you to pick something and make it a food. The underspecified quantities and characteristics in a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe" are just a hint that you have wide latitude to make choices.

> perhaps more accurate is more like "personalization".

I agree that seems much more reasonable, but the vagueness doesn't help here: I can't personalize something if I can't even reliably reproduce it in the first place.

> a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe"

That's kind of the point - there is no peanut butter sandwich recipe, because you don't need a recipe to make one. If something is fiddly enough to need a recipe, you need the recipe to be at least precise enough that you can actually get the fiddly parts right, and any 'problems' stemming from excess precision can be obviated by an * or ±8grams.

*: increase this to make it fluffier, decrease for chewier.

But a peanut butter does need a recipe if you want to make the same sandwich again and again. And want someone else to be able to make that same sandwich on the other side of the country. I had to deal with this with a friend who had anxiety about cooking. Choosing between 2 and 3 on the stove was an ordeal, what if the 1" cubes of beef are 0.75" instead? I am in the camp where recipes are a guide for an idea or a special occasion. Most of the time I cook whatever vegetables look good at the store and fit a rough sense of what sounds good to me.

What kind of bread? (Whole wheat, sourdough, white, shokupan, raisin, olive, berry) Presliced or do you cut your own slices and select your own the thickness? Toasted, fresh, or days old bread? Then you have your peanut butter. Chunky, smooth, really chunky? Pure peanut butter or is a swipe of almond butter good. And do you use jam, jelly, preserves, marmalade? What kind of fruit? Or do you prefer fresh fruit, maybe with some honey on top?

There are many options, if you want to reliably reproduce a dish you need to cook a lot and track what you cook in detail. A home cook likely doesn't have the opportunity to get to the point where they can crank out a number of dishes repeatably the way someone in a restaurant can. The scales are just wrong.

For my friend, they decided to record exactly what they did while cooking for a while. To me it seemed crazy detailed, I cook by smell and taste and feel. For them it was confirmation they'd rather pay for or otherwise eat food prepared for them.

Quantifying any of those values would be completely pointless.

If you really want to know, "officially" a pinch of salt is ~0.35g and a dash is ~0.7g. Accurately measuring quantities that small is a trained skill using specialized equipment. Anything you can buy on Amazon for under $1,000 would get you +-100mg when used correctly at best - used in a kitchen with a 50g measuring spoon for 0.5g of salt you'd be lucky to get +- 1000 mg.

A cheap precision scale will accurately measure up to 0.01g precision, with the caveat that most will only measure things weighing less than 100g or 200g. I currently use one like that (0.01g precision, 200g limit) for coffee beans, I was originally looking for a 0.1g precision scale, but there was no price difference. Although, I fully agree that it is overkill for the kitchen - I have never used it for cooking.

Under no circumstances should you buy anything by Elisabeth David (which is a pity, they're great).

Medium heat is the worst - and having at least some references for what temperature you’re looking for would help tremendously.

I’m surprised oven manufacturers don’t sell cookbooks designed and tested on their actual ovens.

Ovens used to come with pamphlets of recipes. Microwave ovens, too.

The original ones are amazing - put the venison in the microwave on high for 40 minutes.

What does that do to the venison?!

I think it brings it back to life!

Turns it into a useful material for making tires.

>350 - 375F want gram, still use freedom units instead of celsius :)

I’d be happy with flour measurements being given in ounces or grams, my scale has both. I don’t care as long as it is by some unit of weight instead of volume.

Actual units are less important than the mass vs volume distinction.

That did (from the UK) strike me as odd the way cups are used in us recipes.

I use a conical cooks measure for speed now - for things like rice flour etc

You have eloquently elaborated on a truth I came to realize many years ago:

Cooking well (from a recipe) is the art of having enough experience to know what unwritten assumptions the recipe author has made.

That is true for any concise set of directions.

I mean if I give a developer some instructions, or read some from stackoverflow , they only work the best if I already somewhat familiar or expert knowledge to understand it.

Cooking shouldn't be any different.

Writing small user apps doesn't translate to building apps for millions of users, the same way cooking for your family doesn't translate to cooking in a restaurant or wedding, or to how McDonald's ( google of the cooking world ?) should cook.

> McDonald's ( google of the cooking world ?) should cook

Having worked at a cook at McDonald's, I don't know if I would call it "google of the cooking world". From my experience, McDonald's cooking is highly streamlined and focused on reproducing the same experience at some level (for example French McDonald's is not the same as American McDonald's but the fries and Big mac are still relatively the same).

Sounds like programming. :)

...having enough experience to know what unwritten assumptions the O/S author, language author, spec writer has made.

To add to that excellent point, I’ve personally found while I’m learning it’s easier to stick to a small number of authors for recipes. Since the same author will tend to make the same assumptions, you kind of perfect their style (or your take on it at least). Like all things cooking, ymmv of course.

I find Felicity Cloake in the guardian a useful resource.

She takes a recipe and try's out various different recipes to work out the best version eg CTM (Chiken Tika Masala)

Cloake suits my way of cooking!

Her "How to cook the perfect..." series is my go-to for classic dishes. She takes advice from multiple cooks and books, and distils her "perfect" recipe from there. That is how I cook; I read multiple recipes, and take the advice I like best. Cloake makes that easy.

She had a recipe for croque monsieur up recently; it's spot-on.

Cooks Illustrated is good for this too. They try a bunch of recipe permutations and them explain why they designed the recipe to function in a certain way.

And having the knowledge to correct when something isn't as expected. Example would be vegetables leech more water and you need to reduce or increase heat to dry it out. Maybe the tomatoes aren't as acidic as usual in the soup and you need to add more acid.

I'd add. Its also the art of understanding how to cook a recipe to your own palate.

Or in other words; those assumptions are often very personal and therefore you need to develop and refine them for you as well.

You have put it very well. I am stealing this one:)

Yup.

Shows like "good eats" are also super useful for cooking IMO. Treating cooking like the chemistry experiments it is gives you excellent results without a lot of the faff.

Didn't mean there aren't legitimate techniques, but rather it helps to know what those techniques are accomplishing so you know if you've messed up.

Onion browning is a good example. In most recipes I've dealt with, onions are browned as a near first step and then further cooked in later steps. That strongly suggested the author isn't going for "fully brown" onions and rather just browned onions. Why? Because those onions don't stop cooking just because they are added to additional ingredients.

Good Eats is perfect for telling you how it’s supposed to be done and if possible a home cook friendly way to do it.

Kenji Lopez’s POV cooking vids are fantastic as well. Perfect for the home cook and he’ll tell you how a restaurant does it and how a home cook should do it.

> some missing technique that the author very likely did not think important enough to mention

That reminds me a funny story I've read: A scientist failed to reproduce a paper which says "room temperature". They later successfully reproduced it in the freezer. The paper was from Russia.

AFAIR in physics and chemistry, room temperature is a short hand for 27°C in 1 atm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_conditions_for_temper...

After checking the reference, I feel like this was probably an assumption in all the textbooks that I had to follow in school. I suppose if each standards body had their own definition, it can get frustrating.

That is a convention mostly used in school problems, because manual computations with a temperature of 300 kelvin are easier.

In most technical contexts, room temperature means either 25 Celsius degrees or 20 Celsius degrees or more seldom various other temperatures between 15 Celsius degrees and 25 Celsius degrees.

Have you heard of room temperature? Welcome to the room. The room temperature room.

Now I’m imagining a “standard room” in France held at the reference temperature (and which the meter long rod and the kilogram weight would be stored, of course).

I'm pretty sure that was a pop culture reference that nobody should be expected to get.

Protip for GP: not all nerds watch shows about nerds. Standalone humor comments don't play well here to begin with.

Of course, they haven't measured it since the 1960s because the body heat of a scientist going in to measure it changes it a little bit.

However or whenever they measure the prototype kilogram, it weighs[0] exactly 1kg by definition.

[0] Well, not any more as the kilogram was redefined in 2019

This was a joke on the TV show Community, but it was exactly what you picture.

Does the length of the metre long rod not vary with temperature?

It does. If you are using that rod to measure something else, or calibrate another rod, you are supposed to keep it at a given fixed temperature.

Also, the standard of length was changed quite a while ago to one based on the definition of the second, and the speed of light.

Edit: here are the latest standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...

That’s why they put the meter in the room.

That's probably true of most things that require working in the physical world. While I generally hate videos that take 5 minutes to explain something that could be described in a paragraph, if you're a complete noob at something, a video that actually shows how to do something can be much more useful than descriptive text. (Sometimes if only to show some "tricky" step that you're likely going to have to practice a lot before you'll have a chance of getting it right.)

Jump cuts can make a video quicker to watch but for things like recipes you often want to see exactly what’s being done, so you can find out what went wrong if it didn’t work.

Wholeheartedly agree about process vs. color-by-number recipes... For those who do like to read offline, I do recommend Ruhlman's "Twenty" [0]. It is well written and illustrated and provides a lens into process via carefully selected recipes.

[0] Full title being ``Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook's Manifesto (The Science of Cooking, Culinary Books, Chef Cookbooks, Cooking Techniques Book)``

Also I think it hugely depends on your equipment.

I have an induction stove and pans heat up almost instantly. I can easily get onions browned to the effect of the picture within 10 minutes on high heat.

Here's the thing -- onions won't brown until a certain amount of their water content is evaporated. And what matters to evaporate water content is the amount of actual heat energy going into the food. Induction stoves are particularly excellent at shoving watts straight into your pan.

I imagine many of the pros writing these recipes are using either a professional gas stoves (which are inefficient, but also very powerful) OR induction.

If you use a household gas or electric stove, it's going to be a LOT slower, these just can't get that many watts into your pan.

What books have you liked that met your criteria?

Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is great.

It can’t be your only cookbook—-the amount of butter will literally kill you—-and some of the recipes area bit dated (so many aspics!). However, the first part of the book focuses on techniques: chop an onion, roll an omelet, etc. The other part I like is how it demonstrates that you can “fork” a master recipe into many different dishes by swapping out sets of ingredients.

A lot of other cookbooks disguise the fact that most recipes are variations on a theme, and understanding that makes it easier to improvise with whatever you have left in the fridge.

"the amount of butter will literally kill you"

Abuse of the term "literally".

Many recipes, especially classic french recipes, benefit from butter. It may be bad for your health, but it sure makes for nice sauces.

Julia Child is fun, because of all the background she gives for her recipes. She's an engaging writer.

My mother had a copy of Le Guide Culinaire by Escoffier (in english translation). It's a recipe book for pro chefs; many of the recipes are just one paragraph - you're supposed to know what "make a roux" means.

My mum was not a great cook - I have no idea what she was doing with a book on Cordon Bleu cooking on her kitchen shelf.

Half a dozen bookshelves filled with just cookbooks, so apparently I am not too strict.

I think that cooking from recipes is kind of catch-22. Recipes seem to be most useful to people who already are adept at cooking (in particular cuisine and in general) but when you don't know how to cook recipes seem to be practically only source of information.

I think if you are already adept at cooking, know techniques, cuisine etc. then you will be able to judge the book on your own.

For example, if you are just starting up with Italian cuisine, you will be thoroughly disappointed by The Silver Spoon.

It is huge compendium of recipes, but it is very light on any kind of explanation of technique -- assuming the reader is already steeped in the Italian culture.

On the other hand it is very useful to me as one of the books to look for a little bit of inspiration when I just want to throw in something new. Just going through the list of ingredients is usually enough for me to imagine the process and reading the description is more of a confirmation that I actually understand what is going on.

Mark Bittman's books How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian

I love "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian". It's a fantastic cookbook, especially if you don't have a lot of cooking experience.