8 ms·

You have to follow the recipe

77 points by danso 7y ago

smitty1e 7y ago
And how was the recipe followed prior to its existence?
- Smaug123 7y ago
  Before the existence of the recipe, skilled practitioners had their own folklore, built from decades or centuries of trial and error and experience. Now, anybody can simply copy a recipe and inherit that experience, no matter how skilled. It takes skill and/or time and effort to discover a recipe in a field like baking, where the desired chemical reactions are fragile and easy to disrupt. The message of the post is: don't try and discover recipes in difficult fields like baking, unless you know what you're doing.
  - phyzome 7y ago
    > don't try and discover recipes in difficult fields like baking, unless you know what you're doing. Or unless failure is an option! (And ideally, you're at least writing down what you did.)
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    My point is that there is a chicken/egg problem here, irrespective of the use of egg products in the recipe.
- goto11 7y ago
  You mean before it was written down? Old recipes were transmitted orally from generation to generation and from master to apprentice. If you mean how the the recipe was originally developed, this happened (and still happens) through trial and error. But if you know how the ingredients actually work and interact, you can experiment a lot safer. Of course trial and error is perfectly fine as long as you are prepared to accept "error" as a potential outcome.
MrGilbert 7y ago
Heavy imho: My girlfriend and I cannot cook together. She‘s more of the freestyle type, while I like to follow the recipe (programmer here). My reasoning is simple: Someday, someone tried the recipe and came up with a good way of achieving what we are trying to achieve. Which doesn‘t mean you should never alter it. But that‘s a task for another time, and shouldn‘t be performed while you are expecting guests. :)
- tchaffee 7y ago
  How then to explain the huge variations in recipes? Most recipes (there are exceptions like baking) are simply a suggestion to me and I improve upon them to great result. Although I will admit I am naturally gifted at it, and also have loads of experience. If a soup tastes bland and needs more salt, I am going to make the soup taste good and not worry about respecting the recipe.
  - technothrasher 7y ago
    When I want to make a dish I'm unsure of, I will usually read a handful of recipes to get the idea, and then just cook it how I'd like. It helps to have a base of knowledge and experience to understand what each ingredient and cooking technique will do to the dish. So instead of having to go line by line through a particular recipe, you understand how the dish is supposed to work and can execute how you are comfortable executing. It likely won't turn out how any of the recipe creators intended, but it'll usually turn out recognizable as the dish in question, with your own touch to it.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  We have a rule: make the recipe exactly like it’s written the first time. After that we can experiment.
  - wccrawford 7y ago
    I follow this rule when making new food, and when trying new food. I will typically order something from the menu directly when at a new restaurant, but if I come back I'll make changes.
Smaug123 7y ago
Much of the art of [non-professional] cooking, in my view, lies in knowing what must be rigid and what need not be. Baking is a science, relying on precise chemical reactions that must happen within pretty tightly defined windows. Making a curry is not a science, in that you can get a good curry by just making it up on the spot, tasting as you go, and fixing it if it needs fixing. (Maybe following a recipe precisely will get you the best results, but you can get most of the way there with just a few rough signposts; nothing will go disastrously wrong if you shake things up a bit.) One of the things I found most annoying about watching someone trying to teach someone else how to cook (while at uni) was that the teacher never pointed out when something didn't matter. Whether it was "now you put in 1.5tsp of salt to the sauce" or "now you put in 1.5tsp of yeast to the dough", the method was presented as unyielding. In fact the sauce can be made in infinite variety, while the dough must be made just so. Know when to yield to the expert, and know when not to bother.
- msla 7y ago
  > Baking is a science, relying on precise chemical reactions that must happen within pretty tightly defined windows. Making a curry is not a science, in that you can get a good curry by just making it up on the spot, tasting as you go, and fixing it if it needs fixing. Playing a fugue vs playing jazz: For one, you need a carefully-constructed score and you really do have to follow it for all the voices to come out right, and for the other all you need is a fakebook and a good ear. This is part of the stages of mastery, as well: You go from being a rigid rule-follower to someone with an intuition as you gain experience, but for some things, even the masters are quite rigid. http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/intro/preservice/stgmstry.html http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/intro/preservice/stg... > The third stage is competence, the point at which an individual is capable becomes qualified in their desired area. [snip] Towards the latter part of this stage, the individual begins to acquire the ability to problem solve. That is, the individual begins to say "I tried this, but the results are not what I wanted. What do I do now?" This is very different from the procedure-following approach that might be expected from someone in the advanced beginner stage.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I have made some loaves of bread and I don't think it needs as much precision as you imply. You still get a pretty good bread even if you use double the yeast or half the salt. There of course things that ruin the bread, but the again, there are ways to ruin curry too.
toomanybeersies 7y ago
This implies you're using the same ingredients with the same attributes as what the recipe designer used. For instance, that your baking powder has the same "power" as what the original creator used, or that your flour has the same gluten content. Ingredients vary by brand, and if you're in a different country, can be quite different (for instance, the majority of cream in Australia has added gelatin).
- gyuserbti 7y ago
  I came here to say something similar. You're right to point out baking powder, because it's a mess. Think it's all the same chemically? Nope. Different brands use very different chemicals that can affect lift, and it can vary over time for the same brand. Just about everything is like that. Whole wheat flour? Different bran and gluten percentages create really different loaves. Pretending weights will solve everything is nonsense too. If humidity affects mass per volume, it's going to affect chemical identity per mass too. Finally, everyone has different tastes. You might like a finer crumb to your bread; your spouse might like it more holely. Recipes are like guidelines. Always. Experience matters because it reflects knowledge of how variations on the recipe matter. Finally, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that a lot of things in cooking get passed down as critical when they're not, or even worse, are detrimental. This goes for traditional knowledge handed down, as well as half-baked "scientific" approaches to recipe development that are bad science and driven by a desire to establish authority above all.
dqv 7y ago
Not following the recipe risks experiencing recipe anxiety: the fear that you are going to eat something gross. Ok, maybe it only applies to me, but I actually am scared about not following the recipe. My husband modified a recipe to make it easier to read, but in doing so had also corrected a "mistake". He's not a pastry chef. He changed the butter cream recipe from "until the syrup is at 238 degrees" to "until the syrup is at room temperature". It wasn't too bad, but it was off. I got upset when I realized the modified recipe differed from the original.
- phonypc 7y ago
  I'm surprised it turned out at all. Cooking syrup to a specific temperature serves to produce a syrup of specific concentration, i.e. ratio of sugar:water. So under-cooked syrup ends up containing a lot more water than desired, as well as not being hot enough to cook and stabilize the egg whites that are presumably in the buttercream recipe.
  - dqv 7y ago
    The texture was... lumpy
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Great post! Reading recipe reviews on sites like AllRecipes is both frustrating and annoying. Most times you will see something like “5 stars!!! I loved this recipe. I changed these four ingredients and it was amazing!” And I just think, you didn’t actually make the recipe!!!
flavor8 7y ago
That's a terrible article. Improvising is half of the fun of cooking. Once you learn some basic principles there's a lot of room for modification of what you're doing. Granted that baking is less forgiving than e.g. pan dishes (where you can sample and adjust), but even baking is not some unobtainable mystery.
- tchaffee 7y ago
  Two friends who are pro bakers will make small adjustments based on the outside humidity, how much gluten they can feel in the flour and so on. Baking to high levels of quality and consistency is actually very hard and requires precise measurement. The article rightly educates folks on some of the factors.
  - flavor8 7y ago
    OK great, that's pro bakers who are presumably selling what they're producing, and need 100% consistency. I make bread weekly, and it turns out great weekly (for our home consumption). I'm constantly experimenting with different balances of whole wheat and white, different brands of flour, different amounts of leaven, different percentages of hydration, etc. If I hadn't experimented I wouldn't understand bread as well as I do. Dough, like pan cooking, is very forgiving if you understand what you are looking for. "Follow the recipe" is an awful philosophy. Learn the recipe and then improvise is much better, because it helps you understand the domain much more significantly.
    - tchaffee 7y ago
      You're still missing the point that baking is far less forgiving about getting measurements wrong. No one is saying you shouldn't experiment and learn if you want to. The point is that you should be prepared to witness just how delicate some of the chemistry is. It's not pan cooking, where extra carrots won't matter at all.
      - flavor8 7y ago
        That's exactly what I said in my initial comment.
Syzygies 7y ago
With forty years experience cooking and some formal training, I'm much more comfortable experimenting with procedures and the technical aspects of a recipe, than with creative flavor combinations. To be honest, I don't believe that creative flavor combinations often work, even in a $100 restaurant. It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people. And actually believing one "needs" to do something different, to make one's mark? It's hard to be a good cook, but it takes the barest modicum of emotional control and self-awareness to avoid falling into this trap. Just don't. As in mathematical or scientific research, one is actually most creative and original when one is channeling with clarity what everyone else meant to say, wanted to say but didn't know it. In cooking, the hardest thing to do is to express a classical recipe using modern methods and ingredient sourcing, better than an entire people had managed before with conventional methods. Either this is too hard for elite restaurant chefs, so they instead play with their food, or there's no market, because one has to be on the same level to taste the difference? I don't believe that; perfecting the thoughts of others is the ultimate challenge. Baking is easy. I have a spreadsheet going back fifty versions for sourdough bread ground from whole grains. It's a careful search algorithm in a high dimensional space, not cooking. Corn tortillas from scratch, via nixtamalizing and grinding landrace Oaxacan corns from masienda.com, is an ultimate baking graduation exercise. There's much conflicting information out there, but no reference recipe that guarantees success at home. Within a month one is at the research frontier for home cooks in a modern setting. One needs to be comfortable with research, not with following direction. And the results can be as truly spectacular as anything one can produce in a home kitchen.
- bbatha 7y ago
  There’s plenty of room for flavor experimentation that crowd sourced wisdom hasn’t explored. For one there are simply too many combinations of ingredients, and preparation to make the assumption that everything has been tried. Secondly, with cheap air travel, refrigeration, and a more fully integrated global economy it’s possible get regional ingredients everywhere that were totally unheard of decades ago. Also cultural palates change: in the US fancy food was French and Italian until the late 90s. Period. Now days it’s not uncommon to see Asian dishes elevated to new levels. David Chang, et al have been enormously successful in melding Western flavors into Asian dishes. The US, at least knows very little about Latin American food (outside of a some well known Mexican imports, eg tacos), and African food is almost completely unheard of. Mark my words we’ll all be enjoying flavor combinations no one dreamed of in the coming decades.
phyzome 7y ago
> You can control what is going on in a pan on a stove in a way you cannot behind a closed oven door. To use a missile metaphor: Stir-fry is guided, bread is ballistic.
auggierose 7y ago
Some recipes are just substandard and don't work. Can somebody provide me with a WORKING recipe for making ORIGINAL injera bread? Preferrably working at Edinburgh altitude.
- CPLX 7y ago
  This may be the only reliable one I’ve seen: https://www.ethiopianairlines.com/gr/book/trip/flight-schedule https://www.ethiopianairlines.com/gr/book/trip/flight-schedu...
  - auggierose 7y ago
    hahaha
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  What has gone wrong with the recipes you’ve tried?
esotericn 7y ago
I always found it strange that in school our 'food technology' course focused on baking and not normal cooking. Baking, aside from maybe bread or pizza bases or something, is basically pure luxury, whereas cooking is actually useful. I can probably count the times I've baked in the last few years in the single digits. If you put too much flour in a cake it's going to ruin the consistency, potentially be too dry, whatever. If you put "too much" spice or oil or vegetables or whatever in a curry or casserole or soup it's just going to taste different. It's quite hard to make a meal that's not serviceable on the hob.
- wccrawford 7y ago
  On the other hand, if you can bake, you can cook. Cooking is the same thing, but a lot more relaxed on requirement to follow directions. If you're teaching something, you might as well teach something that tells the student they were wrong, instead of hiding their mistake.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Baking requires more precision overall (in general) but cooking involves a lot of techniques that you don't find in baking. I think of them as two overlapping set of skills. Cooking certainly isn't a subset of baking.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    This doesn’t ring true to me. As a bread baker I’ll just do the same recipe 1000 times, watching YouTube videos week after week, practicing different techniques, seeing if tiny variations in technique, weather, etc, affect the end product. That’s completely different from cooking, which is about learning to Google, evaluating whether to trust a recipe, menu planning, seasonal ingredient management, knowing the personalities of the people you’re cooking for, understanding a wide range of cuisines... it feels like a fully different activity. And being able to follow the recipe isn’t really the key to either. It’s the price of admission.
    - codyb 7y ago
TuringTest 7y ago
> the second best cooking movie after Big Night This pal hasn't watched "Babbete's Feast".
bitwize 7y ago
You gotta do your cooking by the book: https://youtu.be/ZD71JeX4Vk0 https://youtu.be/ZD71JeX4Vk0
starpilot 7y ago
The best thing that improved the consistency of my baking was better measurement. I started weighing my ingredients, as Cook's Illustrated found the mass of a cup of flour varied by as much as 15%. I bought a separate thermometer for my oven because I didn't trust its built-in thermocouple. After this, I never had bad batches of cookies.
- lanius 7y ago
  I wish more recipes specified ingredients by weight instead of volume.

77 points by danso 7y ago

smitty1e 7y ago

And how was the recipe followed prior to its existence?

Smaug123 7y ago
Before the existence of the recipe, skilled practitioners had their own folklore, built from decades or centuries of trial and error and experience. Now, anybody can simply copy a recipe and inherit that experience, no matter how skilled. It takes skill and/or time and effort to discover a recipe in a field like baking, where the desired chemical reactions are fragile and easy to disrupt. The message of the post is: don't try and discover recipes in difficult fields like baking, unless you know what you're doing.
- phyzome 7y ago
  > don't try and discover recipes in difficult fields like baking, unless you know what you're doing. Or unless failure is an option! (And ideally, you're at least writing down what you did.)
- smitty1e 7y ago
  My point is that there is a chicken/egg problem here, irrespective of the use of egg products in the recipe.
goto11 7y ago
You mean before it was written down? Old recipes were transmitted orally from generation to generation and from master to apprentice. If you mean how the the recipe was originally developed, this happened (and still happens) through trial and error. But if you know how the ingredients actually work and interact, you can experiment a lot safer. Of course trial and error is perfectly fine as long as you are prepared to accept "error" as a potential outcome.

MrGilbert 7y ago

Heavy imho: My girlfriend and I cannot cook together. She‘s more of the freestyle type, while I like to follow the recipe (programmer here). My reasoning is simple: Someday, someone tried the recipe and came up with a good way of achieving what we are trying to achieve. Which doesn‘t mean you should never alter it. But that‘s a task for another time, and shouldn‘t be performed while you are expecting guests. :)

tchaffee 7y ago
How then to explain the huge variations in recipes? Most recipes (there are exceptions like baking) are simply a suggestion to me and I improve upon them to great result. Although I will admit I am naturally gifted at it, and also have loads of experience. If a soup tastes bland and needs more salt, I am going to make the soup taste good and not worry about respecting the recipe.
- technothrasher 7y ago
  When I want to make a dish I'm unsure of, I will usually read a handful of recipes to get the idea, and then just cook it how I'd like. It helps to have a base of knowledge and experience to understand what each ingredient and cooking technique will do to the dish. So instead of having to go line by line through a particular recipe, you understand how the dish is supposed to work and can execute how you are comfortable executing. It likely won't turn out how any of the recipe creators intended, but it'll usually turn out recognizable as the dish in question, with your own touch to it.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
We have a rule: make the recipe exactly like it’s written the first time. After that we can experiment.
- wccrawford 7y ago
  I follow this rule when making new food, and when trying new food. I will typically order something from the menu directly when at a new restaurant, but if I come back I'll make changes.

Smaug123 7y ago

Much of the art of [non-professional] cooking, in my view, lies in knowing what must be rigid and what need not be. Baking is a science, relying on precise chemical reactions that must happen within pretty tightly defined windows. Making a curry is not a science, in that you can get a good curry by just making it up on the spot, tasting as you go, and fixing it if it needs fixing. (Maybe following a recipe precisely will get you the best results, but you can get most of the way there with just a few rough signposts; nothing will go disastrously wrong if you shake things up a bit.) One of the things I found most annoying about watching someone trying to teach someone else how to cook (while at uni) was that the teacher never pointed out when something didn't matter. Whether it was "now you put in 1.5tsp of salt to the sauce" or "now you put in 1.5tsp of yeast to the dough", the method was presented as unyielding. In fact the sauce can be made in infinite variety, while the dough must be made just so. Know when to yield to the expert, and know when not to bother.

msla 7y ago
> Baking is a science, relying on precise chemical reactions that must happen within pretty tightly defined windows. Making a curry is not a science, in that you can get a good curry by just making it up on the spot, tasting as you go, and fixing it if it needs fixing. Playing a fugue vs playing jazz: For one, you need a carefully-constructed score and you really do have to follow it for all the voices to come out right, and for the other all you need is a fakebook and a good ear. This is part of the stages of mastery, as well: You go from being a rigid rule-follower to someone with an intuition as you gain experience, but for some things, even the masters are quite rigid. http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/intro/preservice/stgmstry.html http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/intro/preservice/stg... > The third stage is competence, the point at which an individual is capable becomes qualified in their desired area. [snip] Towards the latter part of this stage, the individual begins to acquire the ability to problem solve. That is, the individual begins to say "I tried this, but the results are not what I wanted. What do I do now?" This is very different from the procedure-following approach that might be expected from someone in the advanced beginner stage.
adrianN 7y ago
I have made some loaves of bread and I don't think it needs as much precision as you imply. You still get a pretty good bread even if you use double the yeast or half the salt. There of course things that ruin the bread, but the again, there are ways to ruin curry too.

toomanybeersies 7y ago

This implies you're using the same ingredients with the same attributes as what the recipe designer used. For instance, that your baking powder has the same "power" as what the original creator used, or that your flour has the same gluten content. Ingredients vary by brand, and if you're in a different country, can be quite different (for instance, the majority of cream in Australia has added gelatin).

gyuserbti 7y ago
I came here to say something similar. You're right to point out baking powder, because it's a mess. Think it's all the same chemically? Nope. Different brands use very different chemicals that can affect lift, and it can vary over time for the same brand. Just about everything is like that. Whole wheat flour? Different bran and gluten percentages create really different loaves. Pretending weights will solve everything is nonsense too. If humidity affects mass per volume, it's going to affect chemical identity per mass too. Finally, everyone has different tastes. You might like a finer crumb to your bread; your spouse might like it more holely. Recipes are like guidelines. Always. Experience matters because it reflects knowledge of how variations on the recipe matter. Finally, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that a lot of things in cooking get passed down as critical when they're not, or even worse, are detrimental. This goes for traditional knowledge handed down, as well as half-baked "scientific" approaches to recipe development that are bad science and driven by a desire to establish authority above all.

dqv 7y ago

Not following the recipe risks experiencing recipe anxiety: the fear that you are going to eat something gross. Ok, maybe it only applies to me, but I actually am scared about not following the recipe. My husband modified a recipe to make it easier to read, but in doing so had also corrected a "mistake". He's not a pastry chef. He changed the butter cream recipe from "until the syrup is at 238 degrees" to "until the syrup is at room temperature". It wasn't too bad, but it was off. I got upset when I realized the modified recipe differed from the original.

phonypc 7y ago
I'm surprised it turned out at all. Cooking syrup to a specific temperature serves to produce a syrup of specific concentration, i.e. ratio of sugar:water. So under-cooked syrup ends up containing a lot more water than desired, as well as not being hot enough to cook and stabilize the egg whites that are presumably in the buttercream recipe.
- dqv 7y ago
  The texture was... lumpy

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

Great post! Reading recipe reviews on sites like AllRecipes is both frustrating and annoying. Most times you will see something like “5 stars!!! I loved this recipe. I changed these four ingredients and it was amazing!” And I just think, you didn’t actually make the recipe!!!

flavor8 7y ago

That's a terrible article. Improvising is half of the fun of cooking. Once you learn some basic principles there's a lot of room for modification of what you're doing. Granted that baking is less forgiving than e.g. pan dishes (where you can sample and adjust), but even baking is not some unobtainable mystery.

tchaffee 7y ago
Two friends who are pro bakers will make small adjustments based on the outside humidity, how much gluten they can feel in the flour and so on. Baking to high levels of quality and consistency is actually very hard and requires precise measurement. The article rightly educates folks on some of the factors.
- flavor8 7y ago
  OK great, that's pro bakers who are presumably selling what they're producing, and need 100% consistency. I make bread weekly, and it turns out great weekly (for our home consumption). I'm constantly experimenting with different balances of whole wheat and white, different brands of flour, different amounts of leaven, different percentages of hydration, etc. If I hadn't experimented I wouldn't understand bread as well as I do. Dough, like pan cooking, is very forgiving if you understand what you are looking for. "Follow the recipe" is an awful philosophy. Learn the recipe and then improvise is much better, because it helps you understand the domain much more significantly.
  - tchaffee 7y ago
    You're still missing the point that baking is far less forgiving about getting measurements wrong. No one is saying you shouldn't experiment and learn if you want to. The point is that you should be prepared to witness just how delicate some of the chemistry is. It's not pan cooking, where extra carrots won't matter at all.
    - flavor8 7y ago
      That's exactly what I said in my initial comment.

Syzygies 7y ago

With forty years experience cooking and some formal training, I'm much more comfortable experimenting with procedures and the technical aspects of a recipe, than with creative flavor combinations. To be honest, I don't believe that creative flavor combinations often work, even in a $100 restaurant. It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people. And actually believing one "needs" to do something different, to make one's mark? It's hard to be a good cook, but it takes the barest modicum of emotional control and self-awareness to avoid falling into this trap. Just don't. As in mathematical or scientific research, one is actually most creative and original when one is channeling with clarity what everyone else meant to say, wanted to say but didn't know it. In cooking, the hardest thing to do is to express a classical recipe using modern methods and ingredient sourcing, better than an entire people had managed before with conventional methods. Either this is too hard for elite restaurant chefs, so they instead play with their food, or there's no market, because one has to be on the same level to taste the difference? I don't believe that; perfecting the thoughts of others is the ultimate challenge. Baking is easy. I have a spreadsheet going back fifty versions for sourdough bread ground from whole grains. It's a careful search algorithm in a high dimensional space, not cooking. Corn tortillas from scratch, via nixtamalizing and grinding landrace Oaxacan corns from masienda.com, is an ultimate baking graduation exercise. There's much conflicting information out there, but no reference recipe that guarantees success at home. Within a month one is at the research frontier for home cooks in a modern setting. One needs to be comfortable with research, not with following direction. And the results can be as truly spectacular as anything one can produce in a home kitchen.

bbatha 7y ago
There’s plenty of room for flavor experimentation that crowd sourced wisdom hasn’t explored. For one there are simply too many combinations of ingredients, and preparation to make the assumption that everything has been tried. Secondly, with cheap air travel, refrigeration, and a more fully integrated global economy it’s possible get regional ingredients everywhere that were totally unheard of decades ago. Also cultural palates change: in the US fancy food was French and Italian until the late 90s. Period. Now days it’s not uncommon to see Asian dishes elevated to new levels. David Chang, et al have been enormously successful in melding Western flavors into Asian dishes. The US, at least knows very little about Latin American food (outside of a some well known Mexican imports, eg tacos), and African food is almost completely unheard of. Mark my words we’ll all be enjoying flavor combinations no one dreamed of in the coming decades.

phyzome 7y ago

> You can control what is going on in a pan on a stove in a way you cannot behind a closed oven door. To use a missile metaphor: Stir-fry is guided, bread is ballistic.

auggierose 7y ago

Some recipes are just substandard and don't work. Can somebody provide me with a WORKING recipe for making ORIGINAL injera bread? Preferrably working at Edinburgh altitude.

CPLX 7y ago
This may be the only reliable one I’ve seen: https://www.ethiopianairlines.com/gr/book/trip/flight-schedule https://www.ethiopianairlines.com/gr/book/trip/flight-schedu...
- auggierose 7y ago
  hahaha
erikpukinskis 7y ago
What has gone wrong with the recipes you’ve tried?

esotericn 7y ago

I always found it strange that in school our 'food technology' course focused on baking and not normal cooking. Baking, aside from maybe bread or pizza bases or something, is basically pure luxury, whereas cooking is actually useful. I can probably count the times I've baked in the last few years in the single digits. If you put too much flour in a cake it's going to ruin the consistency, potentially be too dry, whatever. If you put "too much" spice or oil or vegetables or whatever in a curry or casserole or soup it's just going to taste different. It's quite hard to make a meal that's not serviceable on the hob.

wccrawford 7y ago
On the other hand, if you can bake, you can cook. Cooking is the same thing, but a lot more relaxed on requirement to follow directions. If you're teaching something, you might as well teach something that tells the student they were wrong, instead of hiding their mistake.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Baking requires more precision overall (in general) but cooking involves a lot of techniques that you don't find in baking. I think of them as two overlapping set of skills. Cooking certainly isn't a subset of baking.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  This doesn’t ring true to me. As a bread baker I’ll just do the same recipe 1000 times, watching YouTube videos week after week, practicing different techniques, seeing if tiny variations in technique, weather, etc, affect the end product. That’s completely different from cooking, which is about learning to Google, evaluating whether to trust a recipe, menu planning, seasonal ingredient management, knowing the personalities of the people you’re cooking for, understanding a wide range of cuisines... it feels like a fully different activity. And being able to follow the recipe isn’t really the key to either. It’s the price of admission.
  - codyb 7y ago

TuringTest 7y ago

> the second best cooking movie after Big Night This pal hasn't watched "Babbete's Feast".

bitwize 7y ago

You gotta do your cooking by the book: https://youtu.be/ZD71JeX4Vk0 https://youtu.be/ZD71JeX4Vk0

starpilot 7y ago

The best thing that improved the consistency of my baking was better measurement. I started weighing my ingredients, as Cook's Illustrated found the mass of a cup of flour varied by as much as 15%. I bought a separate thermometer for my oven because I didn't trust its built-in thermocouple. After this, I never had bad batches of cookies.

lanius 7y ago
I wish more recipes specified ingredients by weight instead of volume.