Comment by defanor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defanor | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry for being grumpy, but over time it becomes rather frustrating to see projects like that. The problem I encounter with recipes is that sometimes it's hard to find properly written (and preferably overall nice) ones: not just that units of measurements tend to be odd, but they often use volumes where you'd expect weights (particularly for baking), or don't mention important parameters (like vinegar solution for pickling, where it's commonly recommended to follow recipes exactly, precisely to get the acidity right), or would sometimes include odd/unexpected steps/proportions without an explanation. Yet the "solutions" I keep seeing are just some overengineered languages/formats/databases/websites, and I'm unsure what they are even supposed to achieve (except maybe for some monetization for its authors, or being a fun or educational project, which is good, but still not useful for potential users). This one just lists regular startup buzzwords, and the website seems to be quite broken in FF even after allowing JS. If we had one properly written Wikimedia Cookbook recipe instead of each one of those custom cooking/recipe projects, I guess there would be a rather comprehensive cookbook by now.

Frankly I think the real problem is that most home cooks or even pro recipe writers are actually pretty clueless about these things. They don't have any formal education and they just fluked into something that works for them but they don't know why. So you end up with a majority of recipes online being overly specific in places that don't matter and really unspecific in those that do. Then you follow these recipes and some work and some don't and you develop your own intuition, which is very specific to your own setup and your ingredients.

I have been watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, the UK one, which is not very dramatic like the US one, and instead actually really focussed on the restaurant and the kitchen. One thing that amazes me is the clear, laser focussed simplicity of the dishes that he suggests. He and the other chefs (at least those ones who have been to catering school) simply have an education that allows them to cook a basic pasta dish that will blow away any intricate home cooking recipe. Not only are home cooking recipes generally worse in outcome, they are actually more complicated, more difficult, and more expensive to make. Uneducated cooks don't seem to trust the basic flavours and textures of what they are cooking.

This, so much. In my opinion cooking is equal parts mindful practice, science, and art.

Probably my favorite cooking book is one that doesn't have more than maybe 5-10 recipes in about 900+ pages : Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking

Seeing yet another site claim to make it more enjoyable / "build communities" by ... presenting more recipes ... it just feels like mis-clicking on one of those Facebook feed "news" articles from some clickbait outlet.

Why does the recipe call for 47 grams of eggs... must it be exactly 47 grams, or did they just mean one medium egg? How am I to know?

Stuff like that drives me up the wall when reading recipes.

If you've ever actually seen '47g eggs' it's surely almost certainly because it's been scaled down from a much larger (i.e. commercial) recipe where that would make more sense.

You can buy (in the UK anyway) cartons of egg whites/yolks (separately) - which I think makes a tonne of sense for non-egg-whole cooking, and would love for it to be more common (i.e. cheaper, came out considerably more expensive when I did some 'napkin math' on it a while ago; separating eggs isn't hard/annoying enough to warrant it, I concluded) - but even then you'd surely measure it by volume, not mass.

Eggs by mass is surely whole, shell included; so yeah it's pretty much inherently approximate - as close as you can easily get to 47 (or more likely 470 or 4700) grams with whole eggs.

I have Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook. Which is probably at the far end of how recipes are done. And their recipes generally make lot of sense. Everything has scaling percentages from certain base ingredient. And recipes are divided to sections with steps inside with ingredients for each listed in section.

Nice approach when you at times don't want to make full recipe. And makes instructions much clearer.

Modernist cuisine has their own recipes. The problem is converting already existing recipes to the new format.

Let's assume that we make MC standard - you can get Hesston and Alton Brown on board. The bakers too. The egullet guys and gallals. But how many of the already existing food chefs, blogs will be willing to convert especially the one that have a bit more romantic connection to cooking.

You might enjoy The Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman [1]. It focuses on the ratios of ingredients.

It is centered on baking, although. Still you might enjoy it.

[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman...

>but they often use volumes where you'd expect weights (particularly for baking)

Baking recipes in the US traditionally use volume measurements. It's actually quite useful when you don't have scales available.

Home baking recipes do.

Anything aimed at professionals---or even serious amateurs---will be written as bakers' percentages, which lists the ingredients as a percentage of the flour weight.

Scales are great though. You just keep adding stuff to the same bowl: it's faster and there are way fewer utensils to clean.

It's not for flour or yeast. Everything else that is not compactable you can get away with volume. But flour is different beast. Best to look at dough consistency if you know how it should look.

I use a service for recipes. they have free service which works just fine, but the paid one always works for me. it is called cookpad

I learned baking bread and pizzas dough with it and the price is almost free... from time to time they offer it for 1usd/month but usually it is 2/usd

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