Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

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What this, and US exceptionalism seems to miss, is that it is not a 50/50 divide, 50% US customary units and 50% metric units.

It is every country in the world (including the US, officially, in 1975) discarding their entire history of traditional units, in favour of globally standardised weights and measures. Don't you think French chefs miss their chopines and boisseaux ?

It's every country in the world, vs the holdouts of the USA, Liberia and Burma.

There are plenty of other troubles with making universal recipes! They often rely on ingredients that one country takes for granted while they're an expensive specialty in your country; sometimes they're the key ingredient that make the recipe work, other times it's just what they had to hand, and you should substitute with local equivalent. Or when a chef says "435g of beans" that's because their country customarily sells tins with 435g of beans in them, and they just use one customary tin and base the rest of the ingredients around that volume. If your tins are 400g or 500g, what you really need is the recipe localised to match your customary supplies.

We'll never get away from the customary practises of every country, but we could at least be precise when writing them down?

>we could at least be precise

The biggest lesson I've ever had in cooking is that literally nothing is precise.

Measurements like "a pinch" (a pinch of salt) are the epitome, but even the ingredients themselves aren't precise and uniform.

Cooking becomes a lot easier and the food better when you throw out any and all notion of precision. The proper way to cook is grab some pot or pan, grab ingredients, throw them in, and cook.

Trying to make cooking precise is a fool's errand.

I do commend you for your views, but I'd say the nuance is (I guess like in programming or carpentry or other tasks as well), to know when precision matters, and when it doesn't matter.

It really does matter when making bread that you get the yeast, water, flour, salt concentration exactly right, and you get the temperatures exactly within range.

It really matters when boiling sugar. You're not going to make toffee correctly without a working thermometer.

On the other hand, other doughs, cakes, etc are much more forgiving, and for the majority of home cooking that anyone is doing, you're quite right that it really calls for a reactive chef who is making things _to taste_, actively keeping track of their cooking, rather than someone hoping that if they follow instructions _precisely_, they'll achieve the outcome they're hoping for.

But if you're writing a recipe book for others, not just for yourself... readers would still like to know how _you_ make it, and that calls for at least a bit of precision in the measurements and times. Perhaps we should write recipes with margins of error?

even more concrete instructions like "a teaspoon" or "4g of X" are often best guesses by the creators or recipe testers.

sugar & salt is especially tricky because different vendors ship different concentrations in the crystals. morton's may have a different level of salty compared to whatever the store brand is, and that'll come through the food.

age of ingredients and quality also is yuge. the Bon Appetit crowd is using good stuff they bought fairly recently, not garlic powder that's old enough to graduate 5th grade. obvious concept, but it makes a serious difference.

source: ex did recipe development & food science for a major fast-packaged goods company.

> The biggest lesson I've ever had in cooking is that literally nothing is precise

Ah, I remember coming home from school one day when I was 16, and finding the kitchen filled with smoke. On the stove was a pan with a breaded piece of meat, burned to blackness. When I called out, my dad emerged from his office. Seeing me turning off the stove, he erupted: "Don't turn off the stove, the package said place frozen in pan and let it fry for 13 minutes!!!".

He had read the instructions, put the meat into the pan, turned to stove to full heat, set a timer to 13 minutes, and then returned to his office.

Except baking. Baking is more chemistry than cooking.

I'd even say that baking is science

I'd say it's at best engineering, not science, otherwise everybody would be making the exact same bread. Which is demonstrably not the case.

Yeah, I think the best advice one can give to a new cook is : "don't measure anything". You have to learn what makes sense; the hard way, but that's the best way. You can't measure taste and that's the only thing that really counts. So you learn what tastes good and then you don't need cups and scales.

Well mostly. I weigh stuff when I make bread or emulsions (roux or mayonnaise e.g.). But even there, the variability between ingredients makes it all a hazy approximation.

Also:

* Some ingredients have different names in different countries

* We should probably specify the animal, rather than just writing 'milk' and 'eggs'

it makes the Liberian Burman American fusion cuisine chefs happy and thats all that matters

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