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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

This topic was made for HN lol

(some) Programmers can't do anything without knowing everything about it

I swear. There's this implication that the idea of having cooking recipes are unscientific in that post... "Without understanding why one sautes the onions, why should I saute the onions??? Where's the peer reviewed article proving that this results in statistically significantly improved taste?"

I tend to think it's a side effect of having a curious mind. Anyone can saute onions. It's the curious that stop to ask, "Why does this taste so good and how can I do it again?" I think the best chef's are the one's that are curious in the same way.

edit: auto correct did me dirty

That's an aspect but the best chefs have mastered sauteeing onions before exploring and being curious is what I was trying to get at.

It’s time for the America’s Test Kitchen book on Coffee.

The purpose of knowing why your doing things is so that you can tweak things and understand the implications. Sauteing onions is partially good because it caramelizing some of the sugars. What other sugary things could I saute?

I rarely exactly follow a recipe so it's important to understand what effects the steps have so you can experiment with them. I've been trying to perfect cookies for years.

I can absolutely tell when onions are sauteed or not sauteed though

Otoh it reminds me of training networks. You may spend a week tuning the params and end up with no conclusion due to (1) constantly evolving training modus, (2) the inherent randomness of the process. You can’t even know if the recipes out there help you or just add to the noise. It creates a feeling that you know, but it never verbalizes into something meaningful, apart from a few fortunate coincidences.

I wonder if that’s a part our (everyone’s) inevitable future that we didn’t conceptualize yet playing on “default settings”.

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