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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.

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Volume-based measurements, too. One person's "half a cup" is not another's.

I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.

Baking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.

Cooking is art. Baking is science.

They are both art and both science.

The baking is a science meme needs to die.

When your baking you need to learn to react to the dough that's in front of you.

As someone who was a professional baker for years, agree. Baking very much has intuition and art like qualities. It's just less forgiving of loose measurements until you know what you are doing.

It's less for giving but not as unforgiving as some people make it out to be. Even less so when you don't demand commercial level consistent results that can be sold fungible products.

Though people have been baking in poor conditions for a long time. If peasants could bake bread without even a cast iron dutch oven maybe you can. Sure each batch is different but it works.

Getting a new oven has invalidated every single time written down in a recipe here. (usually not too hard to adjust, but still)

That's why you measure result wherever possibly - poke the cake with a toothpick and see how much sticks to it, measure internal temperature for large meats, bake until the outside reaches the desired appearance, etc.

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