It wouldn't hurt for all recipes to convert over to grams except perhaps for very small measures. "Four cups of flour" can have a substantial swing by weight, making a real difference in something like a loaf of bread. If you aren't an experienced baker or never made a particular loaf before, it is really hard to know by feel if the hydration is right or wrong. Every kitchen should have a scale so cookbook authors can count on this. And please please please don't use ounces instead: they are too coarse, and they are inexcusably used for both weight and volume.
I'd also like the phrase "medium heat" outlawed but I know that is a bridge too far. My stove has four burners in a ridiculous range of heat output. Each has a "medium" setting. My pancakes are much better off now that I've got an IR thermometer and can keep the pan around 350 - 375F.
Bread sure, bust out the scales, but most recipes don't actually need anything more than a vague outline of what you're trying to do. Tolerances on soup, for example, are extremely wide, and any measurement is picking an arbitrary point in flavor space and declaring it "correct" when much of anything will do. And the idea of a "correct" way to do it encourages home cooks to treat the process like a black box where any misstep will ruin things, rather than having levers to adjust things to taste.
Learning to “let go” has really helped out my mediocre cooking skills. We really need a Bob Ross for the cooking world; someone to help us embrace all of our tasty little accidents.
I agree so much about “medium heat” or really any subjective measure of heat. When I was learning to cook I smoked up my apartment so many times before I learned that what recipe authors called “high heat” was really about 50% up my range’s dial, and anything above that was mostly suitable for boiling water.
What would be interesting is if stove burners would be required to have their watt-equivaleng heat output as markers, instead of 1-2-3-4-5. That way would know that 3 on the middle burner is equal to 5 on the small burner, and recipe books can now mention you need ~800 watts of heat output, which is neatly usuable for induction and coil cooking as well.
Thank you! It's one of the things mildly infuriating about learning to cook, especially from recipes. They don't quantify everything. What's "high heat" exactly? What is a "pinch" of salt, and how does it differ from a "dash" of it? Are these volume measurements or weights? When it says "sprinkle some X" how much should you sprinkle? What's a spoonful? Are they referring to a US teaspoon (approx. 5mL), or somebody else's spoon? How much oil is in a "drizzle"? What about a "drop"? Are we talking about the metric drop (0.05mL)? How many grams is a "medium potato"? Or an onion? I can get onions in sizes that vary by 3X, but the recipe just says chop up an onion. Maddening!
> a recipe is a seed idea for a creative process, not a fixed set of steps that you have to follow exactly or ruin the magic.
No! It is not a creative[0] process! I am attempting to make food, to eat, not a bloody painting, and pretentions of artistry are, as ryandrake just said, infuriating[1].
0: I assume you mean "involving creativity", not "that has the effect of creating something", since the latter applies equally well to, for example, working in a assembly line.
I think you're right to be infuriated and the OP should not have complicated
things that much. If you are simply attempting to make food to eat, then you can
very easily do so. If what you want to eat can be eaten raw, eat it raw. If not,
boil it.
Boiling may need a bit of experimentation to get right for some foods, but in
general you need to have a pot big enough to take the full amnount of food, a
sufficient quantity of clean, potable water to fill the pot until it's two cm
over the food once the food is in the pot, and a sufficiently powerful source of
heat to bring the water and the food to a temperarture of 100 degrees Celsius
within a period of time of no more than 10 minutes. Once you have those things,
the pot, the water, and the source of heat, put the food in the pot, add water
to fill the pot to two cm over the food, put the pot on the heat source and turn
the heat source on. At this point it would probably be useful to have a
thermometer so you can directly measure the temperature of the water, but you
can usually observe that the water in the pot is vaporising and confirm that it
is at boiling point. Leave the food to cook until all the water in the pot has
evaporated, but not more than that or the food will burn. Then eat the food.
Remember to turn the heat source off before eating! You may also want to consult
a set of instructions concerning how to clean the pot once it's used.
There may be variations of the procedure, for example if you have a very big
amount of food you may want to adjust the levels of water, but that is something
you can experiment with. In any case, if you can master this technique (but
don't be discouraged if you can't) then you will always have a way to make food
to eat that is, indeed, not a bloody painting.
It isn’t artistry. It is that there are too many variables for a recipe to hold your hand and tell you every tiny thing to do to get a desirable result. Just cooking a piece of meat will vary based on the power of your stove’s burners, the thickness and composition of the pan you are using, the thickness and surface area of the meat, internal variations in the meat like fat content, etc. So a recipe gives you general guidelines (med heat, about 6-8 mins) and a desired end state (until browned and cooked through). Cooking requires you to use your own senses and your own brain to evaluate your progress and outcome.
"Desirable result" isn't particularly well-defined due to the variability of personal taste. Like, one useful skill for a home cook is to read a recipe and think something along the lines of "I think I'd like that more if it had more garlic".
What I get from this whole discussion is that I would love a recipe book with measures in weights, temperatures specified such that you can use an IR thermometer, and a set of questions at the end of the recipe for assessing how I think the flavour could be improved.
I think what you should take away from this is that cooking is a skill that requires you to assess what is going on, and adjust as you go. There are too many variables for any sort of “exact” weights or temperatures. Baking can be exact because almost all your main ingredients are totally uniform (water, flour, salt, sugar, butter, milk, yeast) and even then, there is often a requirement for variability to account for things as basic as the water absorption rate for your flour. But with cooking, you are using primarily whole ingredients that are nothing but variable. It would be like trying to read a book about how to shoot a basketball. No amount of detail about newtons of force or velocity is going to help, but descriptions about how it should feel and how to stand will, and at the end of the day, you have to practice the technique and learn and improve by looking at your end state.
Most recipe books are not going to teach you how to cook in the way blueprints aren’t going to teach you how to build a house. Youtube videos that teach you techniques are going to be the fastest way, as you can see and hear what is happening with the meal as they describe what they are trying to do and hopefully why they are doing it.
Cooking is as creative a process as writing code. Now, most of the time, we have a well-defined end goal ("something edible", "implement feature F") and a starting point )(raw ingredients; the existing code base). But, how we get from the starting to the end point is not wholly prescribed and what goes in the middle is creative. And most of the time, the actual level of creativity is pretty low.
Now, in one of those cases, you probably have sufficient experience that the lack of exact roadmap doesn't faze you. And apparently in the other, it does.
There are more detailed and less "leave this out" recipes there. I don't, genuinely, know where to find them, but that's what I used to use when I learned to cook. It MAY be worth investigating recipe collections designed for home ec classes, as presumably they are designed for the less experienced food maker.
I meant "creative" way less pretentiously than you read it - perhaps more accurate is more like "personalization". People like different things in different amounts, so recipes paint a broad target and let home cooks hit whatever particular point in it that they want.
Like, making a peanut butter sandwich has this factor - different people like different breads and peanut butters in different amounts, so it's up to you to pick something and make it a food. The underspecified quantities and characteristics in a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe" are just a hint that you have wide latitude to make choices.
> perhaps more accurate is more like "personalization".
I agree that seems much more reasonable, but the vagueness doesn't help here: I can't personalize something if I can't even reliably reproduce it in the first place.
> a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe"
That's kind of the point - there is no peanut butter sandwich recipe, because you don't need a recipe to make one. If something is fiddly enough to need a recipe, you need the recipe to be at least precise enough that you can actually get the fiddly parts right, and any 'problems' stemming from excess precision can be obviated by an * or ±8grams.
*: increase this to make it fluffier, decrease for chewier.
But a peanut butter does need a recipe if you want to make the same sandwich again and again. And want someone else to be able to make that same sandwich on the other side of the country. I had to deal with this with a friend who had anxiety about cooking. Choosing between 2 and 3 on the stove was an ordeal, what if the 1" cubes of beef are 0.75" instead? I am in the camp where recipes are a guide for an idea or a special occasion. Most of the time I cook whatever vegetables look good at the store and fit a rough sense of what sounds good to me.
What kind of bread? (Whole wheat, sourdough, white, shokupan, raisin, olive, berry) Presliced or do you cut your own slices and select your own the thickness? Toasted, fresh, or days old bread?
Then you have your peanut butter. Chunky, smooth, really chunky? Pure peanut butter or is a swipe of almond butter good.
And do you use jam, jelly, preserves, marmalade? What kind of fruit? Or do you prefer fresh fruit, maybe with some honey on top?
There are many options, if you want to reliably reproduce a dish you need to cook a lot and track what you cook in detail. A home cook likely doesn't have the opportunity to get to the point where they can crank out a number of dishes repeatably the way someone in a restaurant can. The scales are just wrong.
For my friend, they decided to record exactly what they did while cooking for a while. To me it seemed crazy detailed, I cook by smell and taste and feel. For them it was confirmation they'd rather pay for or otherwise eat food prepared for them.
Quantifying any of those values would be completely pointless.
If you really want to know, "officially" a pinch of salt is ~0.35g and a dash is ~0.7g. Accurately measuring quantities that small is a trained skill using specialized equipment. Anything you can buy on Amazon for under $1,000 would get you +-100mg when used correctly at best - used in a kitchen with a 50g measuring spoon for 0.5g of salt you'd be lucky to get +- 1000 mg.
A cheap precision scale will accurately measure up to 0.01g precision, with the caveat that most will only measure things weighing less than 100g or 200g. I currently use one like that (0.01g precision, 200g limit) for coffee beans, I was originally looking for a 0.1g precision scale, but there was no price difference.
Although, I fully agree that it is overkill for the kitchen - I have never used it for cooking.
I’d be happy with flour measurements being given in ounces or grams, my scale has both. I don’t care as long as it is by some unit of weight instead of volume.
I'd also like the phrase "medium heat" outlawed but I know that is a bridge too far. My stove has four burners in a ridiculous range of heat output. Each has a "medium" setting. My pancakes are much better off now that I've got an IR thermometer and can keep the pan around 350 - 375F.