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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

As a hobbyist cook, this article starts with a false (or at least misleading) premise:

maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g

The amount of fat is rarely critical, pie crusts and puff pastry the exceptions. Unless the situation is puff pastry, make the full recipe. There are also recipes, like Better Homes and Gardens cookbook "baked rice pudding", that you can fudge ingredients to an extent, but can't double. The heat transfer of a double sized batch of custard prevents the whole thing from cooking.

The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.

I own 2 slide rules. I don't use either one in the kitchen.

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Truth. To be blunt, while some aspects of some recipes can be scaled linearly, others can not.

Bakers percentages (measuring by-weight as a percentage of the largest mass ingredient (usually flour or water)) only work for lean dough and only for the non-fermenting components of that dough.

Put more concretely, one does not linearly scale the yeast in a lean dough. It results in far too rapid a fermentation, over-proofed dough, and less flavor complexity.

This. Belief in linear scaling of recipes is such a quick tell for someone who hasn't done even the most basic home cooking (or someone who has no sense of taste / texture at all).

FWIW, in theory this makes slide rules even better for this, as they've been specifically designed to allow you to lock in non-linear relationships.

Cooking is stacking exponents with whole range of parameters, so linear scaling indeed happens only sometimes, if you squint hard :). Unfortunately, the error bars on everything are huge - purity and quantity of ingredients, accuracy of measuring devices, accuracy and reliability of equipment, and people's care about the process - they're all so bad that cooking simply cannot be anything better than an art.

(The non-art variant is called process engineering.)

Heh, true, good point.

But yeah, it is the messiness and art of it that keeps it fun for me (especially after a day of math and coding)!

> The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.

It differs from chemical process engineering in that the latter actually cares about consistency and quality of outcome.

Kitchens are rarely even equipped properly for cooking to be anything other than art. Fortunately, humans aren't particularly discerning about taste either :).

I think I own three. My grandfathers, my father's, and a cheap one I picked up at a garage sale as a kid.

I'd never put them near my kitchen - too precious. Also, not necessary? Today I readjusted the measurements for a chemistry experiment by 50% without a calculation aid and it's really not that hard.

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