Analyzing a Baking Recipe
cookingforengineers.com
cookingforengineers.com
Baking is both an art and a science. If you're a home baker you can ignore the science, if you are trying to make money you have to understand at least the basics of the science/physical behavior of your materials.
I take a more intuitive/heuristic approach to cooking, and the single best resource I've found for cooking confidently & authentically by the seat of one's pants is Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat". I've yet to find a similar guide for baking, and don't think one could exist given the narrow range of actually useful parameters.
https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/
Reading down in the comments - ratios can be useful conceptually, but for production baking the actual size of the batch vs. the mixer, oven and other tools make all the difference. Gravity plays a part in, say, how a moist dough behaves in a 5 lb. vs. a 250 lb. batch, same for how things bake/burn in a full vs. partially full oven, same for depositors, extruders, sheeters, etc.
I usually try to convert the recipe to proper measurements and adjust them as I make attempts and then stick to my version.
Speaking of reinventing, the article rediscovered the concept of bakers percentage, which is how bakers always describe recipes! Except baker’s percentage is unit agnostic and not susceptible to variations in volumetric measurement, ingredient density, and non-universal cup sizes.
The best approach is to watch a video that clearly demonstrates how the product should look and feel at every point along the process, and do what you can to imitate that - even if it means leaving your scales and cups in the cupboard.
The technique used for measuring "1 cup" affects how much weight you get in 1 cup. This is in addition to the type of flour, clumping, how densely it was packed in the bag, etc.
But I think treating cooking as any of the STEM subjects is wrong. Cooking is an art. It has to please your senses and senses are not scientific instruments, they're subjective and inaccurate. Recipes are only templates and you need to use the brain to fill in the blanks: if I tell you to add two onions in a stew, can't you use your noggin to decide whether your onions are too small, and so you need to add more than two, or too large and so you need to add fewer? Will it ruin the stew if you add three onions, or one and a half? How many traditional dishes are the result of cooking another dish with what ingredients were at hand, or the result of mixing two things that were previously not eaten together?
- a carrot - four cloves of garlic - an onion - yolk of one medium egg - salt to taste
because cooking isn't a science and precise measurements are generally worse than useless. If you spend more of your time trying to perfect the measurement instead of paying attention to the texture and flavor then you are cooking very well. People insist baking is different, but it really isn't; the margins for measurements are wide enough that with a bit of experience eying scoops of everything is an acceptable strategy. You build more experience by making a few mistakes or having someone shows you the behaviors outside the margins, but for a first time recipe, sure stick to the instructions.
I'm no great cook or baker, but I've learned through trial and lots of error how to bake bread and a few other things. Get a scale and always convert to grams.
Of course using a scale is a good way to keep the ratios from getting too out of wack, and I usually do it too when baking and almost never when cooking.
I accidentally dunked my scale in the sink the other day. Luckily it's working now but it wouldn't turn on for a few days. So I was doing pancakes and couldn't precisely measure stuff and they came out terrible, like before I dialed in the precise ratios I use by weight. Scale is working again, so today they came out perfect.
The example you gave isn't related to patisserie.
My best crêpe recipe I have gives eggs in grams - not in numbers of whole eggs. The remainder turns into a small portion of scrambled eggs or omelette.
https://www.lemonde.fr/les-recettes-du-monde/article/2018/07...
See also the "Bayesian cookies": https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
> - a carrot - four cloves of garlic - an onion - yolk of one medium egg - salt to taste
Cooking is very much more forgiving than baking.
Cooking and baking are both sciences, and have very different tolerances and methods for working with those tolerances.
As others have pointed out, baking tends to require far more precision, and the methods used are focused on precision as a result.
To your point, spending all of your time focused on precise measurements while cooking - especially with fresh ingredients - isn’t going to be as helpful as developing the underlying skills and intuitions to know how to adapt what you’re cooking to the ingredients you have on hand.
Those skills and intuitions are focused on getting a particular dish into a state that is hard to precisely measure because of the high degree of variation in ingredients (egg size, garlic freshness, how spicy are those peppers?). If we could precisely measure more aspects of the ingredients, cooking could become far more “scientific”, and indeed this is what happens in the mass production of foods in factories.
The point here is that the degree of “science” involved has more to do with the practical considerations and limits of our measuring apparatus across a diverse array of ingredients.
Baking tends to involve ingredients that can be precisely measured, and an end result that can’t be tested until the bake is done. Any baker who focuses on consistent and repeatable results knows that precision is part of the path to getting there.
There is still value in knowing how to adapt to your circumstances while baking. Precise measurements just reduce the variables that you may need to adapt on the fly.
Unfortunately a lot of the recipes in that book are not very good! When settling the ratios he prioritized small, clean numbers to make the relationships clear. But those aren't guaranteed to be an optimal recipe. It's simply more likely that the best custard for example is 28:15 or 11:5 or whatever than it is precisely 2:1. Ditto every single thing in the book.
It is a good starting point for learning how baked goods work, developing intuition for how changing ingredients influence the final product. Virtually none of them are excellent ratios though.
I make bread. Every time I make bread that is better than my standard it's because I accidentally deviated from my standard recipe. When that happens I will sometimes make a note of what exactly I did and then try to do it again, but I never got the same results that way. In fact I never get the same results with my standard recipe either. There is always variation, even when I use the same flour from the same sack.
I don't think baking is like you say at all.
A man in a balloon realises he's lost and, spotting another man walking his dog in a field, descends to ask the dog walker for directions.
"Do you know where I am?" asks the balloon man.
"Yes" answers the dog walker. "You are in the basket of a hot air balloon, hovering a few feet over an empty field, talking to a man walking his dog".
"Ah", says the balloon man. "You must be a mathematician".
"That's right" says the dog walker. "How did you know?"
"Because" says the balloon man "you gave me an answer that is at once entirely correct and completely useless".
So I could flow with his attitude.
What I've decided for myself is that the mass versus volume measurement really matters when the ingredient "measurable unit" size is very large compared to the amount needed for the recipe. So for something like granulated cane sugar in a muffin recipe, using mass versus volume probably won't matter very much, because the individual sugar crystals you are "counting" are very tiny compared to the amount you'd use in a recipe. There's probably going to be a bigger difference due to your impatience or the scale accuracy or whatnot than using volume versus mass. However, for something like whole walnuts, mass is going to be a lot more precise because there's potentially a lot of change between adding another 1 or 2 walnuts given the 1/3 cup you might need, they can shift around, etc.
At least that's where I've come down on it for myself.
When engineering is applied to cooking, it usually looks a lot more like Kenji Alt-Lopez and his peers when they refactor a recipe to produce a classic dish without any superstitious steps.
All that to say, the moisture/volume analysis is interesting from a theory point of view and would perhaps help achieve a deeper understanding of the fundamentals, but at least for me baking is largely driven by instinct and that seems to have served me well.
It's like a longer feedback loop. A lot of cooking is like a really tight repl - maybe even with unit tests (tasting midway through). You can see results and modify on the fly. Baking is like hardware - you might not know where the bugs are until the thing comes back from the pcb print (comes out of the oven).
Sometimes I think people just lack experience with a good scale. Once you understand what the tare button is for, there really aren't any problems. Also, with a good scale, after you press tare, it can count into the negative. So, if I need 10 grams of something and don't want to dirty another small bowl, I can place the jar with the item on the scale, press tare, and remove stuff until it reads -10 grams.
And if I ever need to measure honey (usually you can eyeball it), it's gotta be by weight. A tablespoon of honey is 21g, but you're not going to it back out of the tablespoon.
> About the name: Cooking For Engineers Michael selected the name "Cooking For Engineers" on a whim. He has no idea if it means "To cook for the purposes of providing engineers with food" or "To instruct engineers in the science and art of cooking". He likes the ambiguity, and other people seem to find the name intriguing and even interesting. He regrets that the name can be misread (when in a rush) to be "Cooking Foreigners".
This is just some food for thought, but I think taking a scientific approach to home cooking can make it more accessible to men. By that I mean: making home cooking seem less like caregiving and more like "rational science" legitimizes it as a masculine activity. Thus allowing men to enjoy it, judgment-free.
https://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/...
and always has been. Nearly every serious chef has this on their shelf.
To boot, he's a super-nice guy and I talked to him a couple times when he came to Google.
Secondly, there's a fundamental difference in goals between home cooking and professional cooking. If you're doing it over and over in a restaurant, you really want it to be the same every time. If you're doing it for yourself, you need to accept and revel in the differences. If it really sucks, you just throw it out and order a pizza. Maybe next time you can do it better.
I tried to get at that in my fave recipe: no measurements.
> Some grids are empty because it would not make sense for them to exist. For example, a very moist bread (0.60) with a low butter content would be airy and tasteless.
Eh? A simple baguette recipe - water, flour, starter and salt - has no fat and more moisture than this. And is very tasty. Wholemeal sourdough recipes are wetter still.
(They're not using baker's percentages)