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Scientists of Lemmy, how would you standardize or improve cooking recipes?

I'm sick of having to look up what country an author is from to know which variant of teaspoon they're using or how big their lemons are compared to mine. It's amateur hour out there, I want those homely family recipes up to standard!

What are some good lessons from scientific documentation which should be encouraged in cooking recipes? What are some issues with recipes you've seen which have tripped you up?

89 comments

  • I think a major one is to try to avoid trusting in unfounded precision.

    If you want to make lemonade like a chemist, you don't just weigh out some lemon juice and add it to water and sugar. You measure sugar and citric acid content of the batch of lemon juice, then calculate how much water will dilute it to the right pH, and how much sugar will bring it to your desired osmolarity. In reality, no one is going to do that unless they run a business and need a completely repeatable. If you get lazy and just weigh out the same mass of stuff with a new batch of lemon juice, you could be way off. Better to just make it and taste it then adjust. Fruits, vegetables, and meats are not consistent products, so you can't treat them as such.

    If i were to be writing recipes for cooking, I would have fruits/vegetables/meats/eggs listed by quantity, not mass (e.g., 1 onion, 1 egg), but i would include a rough mass to account for regional variations in size (maybe your carrots are twice the size of mine). Spices i would not give amounts for because they are always to taste. At most, I would give ratios (e.g. 50% thyme, 25% oregano). Lots of people have old, preground spices, so they will need to use much more than someone using whole spices freshly ground. I think salt could be given as a percentage of total mass of other ingredients, but desired salinity is a wide range, so i would have to aim low and let people adjust upward.

    Baking is a little different, and I really like cookbooks that use bakers percentages, however, they don't work well for ingredients like egg that I would want to use in discrete increments. For anything with flour, I would specify brand and/or protein level. A European trying to follow an American bread recipe will likely end up disappointed because European flour usually has lower protein (growing conditions are different), which will result in different outcomes.

    I will say in defense of teaspoons, most home cooks have scales that have a 1 gram resolution, though accuracy is questionable if you are only measuring a few grams or less. Teaspoons (and their smaller fractions) are going to be more accurate for those ingredients. Personally, I just have a second, smaller scale with greater resolution.

  • Autist and scientist here: you're thinking of baking. Baking is the science one, cooking is infuriating because all of those really vague and inaccurate instructions are in fact as precise and accurate as they need to be. Seasoning is done with the heart, you do have to stir or knead u ntil it "looks right", "a handful" is the right amount to add. The only way to find the "right" amounts is to cook over and over until you instinctively know what enough looks like.

    Anyway the ingredient I really really hate is from Jamie Oliver's "working girl's" pasta, where he lists "2 big handfuls of really ripe tomatoes". I HAVE CANNED TOMATOES YOURE GETTING CANNED TOMATOES JAMIE, I DONT HAVE FUCKING TIME TO GO LOOKONG FOR REALKY RIPE TOMATOES

    Also standard teaspoon is 5ml. Just use that and taste to see if it needs more.

    • Even with baking, once you get good and learn what ingredients can be fanagled with, there's definitely wiggling room like with cooking.

      • There is wiggle room in baking, but it relies on a deeper understanding of the ingredients than cooking. If a recipe wants 250g of flour and you only have 200g, you have to adjust the amounts of sugars and fats as well, and while the flavourings have a lot more wiggle room, some of them still require swapping out base ingredients for them to maintain the correct ratios.
        With cooking if a recipe calls for 500g of potatoes and you only have 300g you can just put 300g in and keep cooking. Recipe calls for 300g tomatoes but you don't want to waste the last quarter of your 400g can? We're having an extra tomato-y sauce tonight. You have a lot more room to change ingredients around without it having a significant effect on the rest of the recipe.

    • That man fucks me right off. "Here's how you can feed your family for a fiver"

      Proceeds to use an entire fucking spice rack that'll cost about 80 quid to get set up properly.

      • That's not totally disingenuous. If you're cooking for yourself rather than eating out or buying ready made things and you plan to do that a lot of it, some outlay on things that get used across multiple recipes over long periods (can be years with spices) is reasonable to expect and also not to be costed in recipe estimates. What exactly is reasonable to expect someone to have in their pantry already for a recipe is very subjective so what to me seems fair to assume won't seem so to others, but there are assumptions you can make. You wouldn't for example criticise a recipe for failing to incorporate the cost of a pan if it tells you to pan fry something or a spoon to stir it or the cost of the water out of the tap. Most of those examples are equipment but I think there's an extent to which you can write recipes with similar givens for ingredients as well, otherwise it becomes untenable to estimate costs. You don't typically have to use the same spices as recommended by a recipe either. For some it's essential but for many it's just what you like or what you have so, don't buy 80 quid of spices for one recipe, but if you can figure out which are most important for that recipe and which you also really like the taste of, buy just those and use them in that recipe and many others going forward. You gradually add to your collection as you try new things and when you have some spices and a recipe calls for you to get more, it's not such a stretch because you're not buying a ton of them at once just the few you don't have and consider it worth trying. It takes a long time to get through spices and eventually you get to a point where you have most of the spices referenced in a given recipe or decent substitutes or you only need like 1 extra one that will help you cook more things in future. If you're sure you won't use a spice outside of the one recipe you're looking at, just skip it.

      • Sorry sib, but you gotta buy the spices. They're like salt and oil, or pots and pans - you are almost always going to be using some of them, no matter what you're cooking. It helps a lot to find an Indian supermarket, because you can get big packets of spices for much cheaper than the bottles in regular supermarkets.

        Also too many spices has never been an issue I've had with Jamie, if anything I feel he overrelies on access to good quality ingredients. Yotam Ottolenghi is the spice dickhead, most of his recipes require a specific overpriced spice blend only he sells.

    • This may be true for experienced cooks but beginners need more precise instructions that are not "Until it tastes good".

      • Thinking back on being a beginner, my problem wasn't that instructions were imprecise, but more that I didn't interpret "to taste" as a real instruction. It means I should fucking taste my food as I go, when at the time I would just taste it at the end.

        So many bad meals can be avoided by sampling them over time and adjusting. I should know, having made too many.

        I would classify this as an example of cooking logic (my own phrase) that needs to be learned. A lot of good recipes will assume the cook understands fundamental concepts like this, but it's not necessarily the recipe's job to teach you. Same as how IKEA assembly instructions might seem cryptic at first, but really boil down to using 3-4 different techniques to screw wood panels together. I do think there's a general lack of awareness that cooking has a separate logic, and this means a lot of people never teach it to others.

      • Yes, and I'm explaining that a significant part of being an experienced cook is just the understanding that cooking isn't precise. You do not need to work out what sized teaspoons the author was using, just get any of the teaspoons out of your drawer, fill it up, mix it in, and then taste to see if it seems ok. The final result will depend on factors you can't control for - the conditions ingredients were grown in, the age of spices when they were ground, the specific cultivar you're using - and the author doesn't have your personal tastes, so while they can tell you the ingredients to use they can't give you the precise amounts that you'll enjoy. To find that out you need to make the dish repeatedly with small adjustments until you hone in on your tastes.

  • I've been cooking at home, and occasionally in restaurants, since I was about ten or so. So, 40ish years.

    No single standard is better than the others. It does suck that there isn't a single one that is used as a base, and then gets converted by the cook into their preferred units and structure, but even that has issues.

    The good news is that most cooking, and even most baking, is very forgiving of the kind of discrepancies between sizes of lemons, onions, etc. You don't really run into trouble until you're dealing with things that react chemically based on the ratio of ingredients, which is still most common in baking, and not even all baking.

    Even in those types of recipes, it's usually flour that's the problem, not leaveners, since flour compacts readily and to a high degree. But, then again, most modern recipes like that are going to be in weight measures, or in baker's ratios. You'd be using a scale for the fiddly recipes.

    So, generally, just guesstimate your produce size the first time you make something. It's not going to be so far off that the results will suck if the dish itself doesn't. Then you tweak things until it fits what you prefer, which is what happens anyway as you build your recipe book/collection.

    My old recipe book had scribbled notes in the margins from years of refinements. When I copied that into a digital recipe manager, I added them in directly. Now, I'm able to just enter the original recipe, then add my notes as parentheticals or whatever as I refine.

    Even with those detailed notes, a given recipe won't always be reproducible as exactly the same. That's because you just can't standardize everything. You use good produce, there's going to be varying water content, slight differences in flavor compounds, more or less sugars, so to get the same results over time, the cook has to know how to adjust for those things on the fly.

    Of equal import is that no matter how scientific your process of recipe development is, the table is never the same as the cook. My taste buds and brain aren't the same as my wife's, my kid's, my cousin's, etc. So there's limits to the benefits of standardized recipes on the plate.

    Now, formatting? That's a huge help.

    You want your ingredient list to include instructions about when an ingredient is used in multiple places. You want lists broken down in sections when a recipe calls for multiple procedures (like making the main dish, a sauce, and a crust).

    In the instructions, make sure the ingredient quantities are included for redundancy.

    If there's an instruction about duration that's variable explain what the variables change. As in: bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Okay, great. What's the difference? If my stove runs hot and I go for the short time, will I see golden brown, and will 15 be burnt or just really dark? Yeah, you can't expect identical results from one circumstance to the next, but at least drop an "until golden brown" at the very minimum.

    That applies to any variable, imo, but it can get to be too much detail in complicated recipe.

    Cooking and baking are chemistry, physics. But they're also an art. The more you try to strip a recipe of flexibility, the less successful it's going to be for the next cook.

  • At some point, food blogs stopped being about food and became personal memoirs with a side of seasoning. It probably started innocently enough—people sharing family recipes, adding a little background, a photo or two. But then came the SEO optimization, the Google gods demanding 1,500 words per post, and suddenly, every recipe for scrambled eggs begins with a story about someone’s childhood summer in Tuscany and how their Nonna taught them the sacred art of cracking an egg with one hand.

    Now it’s standard: you search “how to make pancakes” and end up reading about a foggy morning in 2003, a breakup, a golden retriever named Milo, and how cooking became therapy. You scroll and scroll, dodging ads, autoplaying videos, and a pop-up asking you to “join the culinary journey.” Somewhere, buried like treasure, is the actual recipe—five steps long, could’ve fit on a Post-it note.

    And yes, this is exactly that. This is the bloated preamble you didn’t ask for. You came here for temperatures and timings, and instead, you got this paragraph complaining about the very thing it’s doing. You’re now part of the cycle—scrolling, sighing, wondering when we collectively decided that roasting vegetables required a narrative arc.

    Anyway, here’s the recipe. Probably. Keep scrolling.

    • examples from professional recipes – measurements are given as weights (in grams) – no worrying about how much brown sugar in a “packed cup” or if your cup of flour has been sifted enough or what exactly is meant by a “cup of spinach”
    • examples from baking recipes – measurements are given as percentages – allows easy scaling up and down

  • So you're basically telling chefs to research and write out for you all the variables?

    Baking is a science, cooking is an art.

    Every recipe handed down through generations has notes, changes, etc....that's what makes it beautiful.

    I am lucky to have my grandmother's cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from....but I don't use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.

    There is no exact science you're looking for, the garlic grown here won't be the same as the garlic grown there, your experience won't be the same as someone who has cooked for years saying 'fuck it, throw that in there and let's see what happens'.

    ....lol, amateur hour

    • (to be clear, I was saying 'amateur hour' tongue-in-cheek ;)

      I am lucky to have my grandmother’s cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from…but I don’t use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.

      That's wonderful! All I got was a disintegrating notebook of delights. I do like deciphering it but not when I'm hungry!

      • I get it!

        Now to really boil your noodle I used to work with a lot of (French) chefs who when they wrote out recipes for magazines and such (pre internet) they DGAF if it was accurate or not... "if zey screw eet up, zey sink it is zere fault"

89 comments