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The programmer/engineer in me has been deeply unhappy with recipes (both online and in print). The recipes in this online book are no exception. Chief complai

The programmer/engineer in me has been deeply unhappy with recipes (both online and in print). The recipes in this online book are no exception. Chief complaint: the ambiguity of description means that ten different chefs could follow the recipe and have ten different results. To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion". Variables that might affect the outcome include the fine-ness of the dicing, the heat of the skillet (is my medium heat the same as yours?) and the extent of caramelization. The range of outcomes here can be anywhere from a crunchy, almost raw onion, to a nearly disintegrated brown paste. Take this and multiply with all the other steps involved in a typical recipe and try to tell me that the end result is predictable. Has anyone found any technique/recipe books that attempt to deal with this ambiguity? The only place I ever see clear instruction on such topics are cooking classes, but that's not convenient and it makes me wonder what the point of recipe books are at all.

mjparrott 7y ago
Very well articulated! I’ve thought about this before too. There is an assumption of having a “baseline knowledge and skill set” to be able to use most recipes. If you’re really starting from scratch (like I was a few years ago), the best thing you can do is to start trying and failing. I take meticulous notes on the things I cook to help me learn and improve. Take your example of heat on a pan. I’ve always wanted a stove where I can control the BTUs with a dial. You could test your own stove for it and calibrate yourself for example. There is a slightly more scientific blog here, but it won’t satisfy what you’re looking for I don’t think. I’ve never found that depth, but would appreciate it too! https://www.seriouseats.com/ https://www.seriouseats.com/ I like this book too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab
- bradford 7y ago
  Thanks, I'll check those out! I'd also like to mention cooks illustrated (they are online at https://www.cooksillustrated.com/ https://www.cooksillustrated.com/, but my primary experience is with the printed magazine form). I don't know if I'd call them 'scientific', but I like the detailed accounting of the authors expectations, along with failed attempts and adjustments. It's not completely what I'd like to see in a recipe book but I think it's the closest example that I can think of.
  - AlanYx 7y ago
    I agree that Cook's Illustrated and its two sister publications, America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country, are pretty good examples of what you want. They have a lot of standardized elements that they don't always make clear to casual readers. For example, 1 onion in CI is actually standardized to one cup of chopped onion, they use a standard brand of Kosher salt and provide conversion ratios for brands with different crystal structures, etc. I get recipes from a variety of sources, but I do find that this kind of precision helps with getting repeatable results.
Amygaz 7y ago
Oh you should try beating a white egg and then folding it with the other ingredients
blowski 7y ago
I imagine it also depends on the onion itself, which is why you can’t be more specific. My wife does an amazing job browning onions, but sometimes it goes wrong, and she can’t explain why. Also, when I try copying her precisely, mine never seem to turn out as good so even if I did have precise instructions I might still struggle.
Jasper_ 7y ago
You cannot escape environmental factors. As you cook more and more, you will understand your kitchen and environment more, and learn by feel what "medium heat" is, and how it affects food, and why you might use it. These things are always guidelines, and intentionally vague. The most famous example is how most baking recipes call for 2-5 cups of flour, since the humidity in the air, the season the flour was harvested, etc. all affect how much you might need in the end. So you just learn when you've added "enough". That might make the engineer in you upset, but that's the reality of it. There are no precise steps to "brown an onion", but you will know when you've done it correctly. And if you did it wrong, that just means it takes more practice and more learning about your skills.
mech1234 7y ago
You should get into baking if you want to see where precision matters and how it can be expressed in cooking. Generally, things you cook on the stovetop don't need strict quantitative controls. Exercise your own judgement and experience- you can understand how the onion will taste based on how it looks. Mix it, heat it, season it, eat it.
- bradford 7y ago
  So, my wife bakes a lot and I'm witness to the crazy precision that it involves. Perhaps that's what partially inspired my comment: I felt that the lack of verbosity in instruction was impacting my ability to get a recipe to taste the way I want it to. (It's the result that I'm pursuing, not necessarily the precision). Case in point: I love Malai Kofta when I get it from the restaurant. I have never been able to reproduce the taste at home, and I don't have the expertise/judgement to figure out why :|
BelleOfTheBall 7y ago
If you want recipes that are a bit more precise, check out baking ones. I've frequently heard people say that cooking is easy, just throwing ingredients together. The same people went on to note that baking, however, is like a precise science: add exactly X grams of that, cook at specifically Y degrees, mix by rotating counter-clockwise for Z seconds. It's all very delicate and precise. As for regular recipes, I really don't think this type of precise writing is popular because everybody's got different tastes and palates so it would be tough to say precisely how one should 'brown an onion', although I get where you're coming from. Personally, I've gotten in the habit of finding recipes, trying them out, and saving them with personalized tweaks. So when a recipe calls for a 'dash of salt', I replace it with 'exactly 1 tbsp of salt' or 'no salt necessary'.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  There's also the difference in the type of ingredients. My particular pound-sized piece of pork is substantially different than your particular pound-sized piece of pork, and my tomato is not the same as your tomato, so achieving the same result from will require different cooking time, different added moisture, and depending on the differences it might even be impossible at all to get the same result. However, my 100g of sugar is the same as your 100g of sugar, and we can ensure that my 100g of flour is the same as your 100g of flour if we explicitly try control for things like gluten, which bakers definitely do.
benjaminjackman 7y ago
> the ambiguity of description means that ten different chefs could follow the recipe and have ten different results. I wonder if a similar analog is sheet music. Ten different musicians could follow the sheet and produce 10 different sounding results.
crazygringo 7y ago
> To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion". Variables that might affect the outcome include Hate to break it to you, but it's even worse. Further variables include the moisture content which varies per-onion, the type of onion, the size of onion, the thickness of your pan, and the material it's made out of. The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science. Even if your equipment stays the same, every chicken breast and every tomato you buy is different. Now it totally drives me nuts when people say "if you follow the recipe you can't go wrong!" There are usually 100 different ways you can go wrong. But it's just part of cooking. You learn to cook the same way you learned to walk or throw a ball or speak your language: through trial and error and careful observation and practice. The great resource now is YouTube videos, which have the huge advantage of letting you see exactly what it's supposed to look like when it's done (how brown is brown? how thick is thickened?), and just by seeing the types of pans they use and the sizes of flames, and the amount of bubbles or sizzling, you get actually get a feel for it pretty quick. Finally, the point of recipe books is to tell you which ingredients, rough quantities, and the steps. Just because recipes require interpretation (similar to a music score) doesn't mean they're useless.
- ebg13 7y ago
  > The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science. Cooking is a science. If you fail to evaluate your ingredients beforehand, then you're just not doing the science particularly well. Writing recipes and interpreting recipes are arts.
  - spurdoman77 7y ago
    Sounds like engineering to me.
    - qqn 7y ago
      I remember hearing once that baking is a science and cooking an art. If you mess a step up while baking, your product is generally destroyed. Do the same while cooking, and you're often left with something that just tastes a little different (and may even become an updated twist in the recipe).
anon_cow1111 7y ago
You're really not going to be happy with this site then. Even basic things with hard numbers for measuring can be wildly off. Here's an easy example https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Apple_Pie_I https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Apple_Pie_I This recipe calls for 2.5 cups of sugar for 1 pie. If you add that much sugar to a single 8" pie, it's going to be nearly inedible. You can easily find other recipes that only use 0.75 cups per pie(a little low in my opinion). With such a huge margin of error for just one ingredient it immediately makes me wonder if anyone actually cooked this before they wrote an article about it.
andrewzah 7y ago
Someone should make a wikimedia for various cooking techniques. That would actually be useful, unlike this random assortment of non-curated recipes.
leejoramo 7y ago
I am an avid cook. I agree with much of your assessment. Have you tried Julia Child’s first books “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”? Her books are very in depth and start with clearly written descriptions of techniques and what to look for. This does mean that recipes can be many times longer than most other books. Julia Child’s reputation is well earned. She may be one of the first celebrity chefs, but her status came directly from the quality of her research and writing.
0xff00ffee 7y ago
> Has anyone found any technique/recipe books that attempt to deal with this ambiguity? Absolutely! If you are looking for this kind of specificity, Cooks Illustrated is your source. The will discuss multiple variables of basic techniques. Like in your example, dice size vs. browning time vs. just what the hell does "browned" mean anyway? : : The other solution to this: practice. If you cook thoughtfully, you will eventually come to understand how these variables impact your dish. But you need to pay attention while you cook, like a good engineer! I'll give you a 3 examples, specifically about onions, that took me years of practice to understand. Indian gravy base (essentially all dark curries and masalas) A <1cm dice, cooked very slowly until dark brown with no spot of white and not burned. You literally want a uniform brown paste because that gives the gravy a solid base and has a very earthy taste to it. Hard to do without burning. Mire Poix (a base used in many, many dishes in Europe: 50%carrot, 50%celery, 100%onion by mass): A <1cm dice, cooked slolwy until translucent. You don't want a toasty flavor at ALL, you want the savory taste of the onion with no zing. (easy, can be done in ~8-10 minutes) Spanish Caponata: A <1cm dice, cooked until browned edges (higher heat), but still white center, meaning sweet with some zing but still a toasty part. (tricky to not burn and still get a brown edge) And all of this skill changes if you buy a new pan or move to a new house with a new range! Or if your yellow onions are dried and cured properly, or overly moist or greenish. But cooks Illustrated will cover a lot of this, you just need to buy a lot of books though because they spread this out across several volumes. :( Practice though. Read cookbooks. Literally read them, the intros are usually very thoughtful. Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffry, Alma Lach, OTTOLENGHI... just to name a few of the greats you should check out.
ajot 7y ago
You may like Cooking for Geeks, by Jeff Potter.I've read the original book and loved it. It includes the how and the why for classic and modern cuisine, each recipe has well measured ingredients (imperial AND metric) and also suggestions like "you could also try adding x, or replacing y, or doing z technique at the beginning". There's a second edition with some more techniques added.
NoImmatureAdHom 7y ago
cookingforengineers.com uses neat flow charts that remove a lot of the unnecessary difficulty in following recipes.
neilk 7y ago
The cookbooks and recipe formats that we have were never designed for someone in your situation. And if you have a background in a field with standardized parts and repeatable results, the kinds of instructions cookbooks give can be maddening. Totally understandable. One book that helped me was Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. You may not want to cook vegetarian, but many vegetarians are young people who are also building their own cooking styles from scratch. So VCfE goes through the basics - like what is cubing and what is dicing - with illustrations. While it has complex recipes, it also includes almost absurdly simple ones, like preparing beans with olive oil and salt. But think of them like "kata"; basic exercises, that you can build up to more complex forms. A recent book which I've recently found extremely useful is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It is a wonderfully readable introduction to the elements of cooking and how they combine, and it is great for complete newbies as well as experienced home cooks. It manages to be both accessible, practical and a little bit technical, perfect for the techie who wants to get better at cooking. It taught me things simple dishes like roasted chicken, which I had prepared like a hundred times before I read it, which have changed how I cook forever.

mjparrott 7y ago

Very well articulated! I’ve thought about this before too. There is an assumption of having a “baseline knowledge and skill set” to be able to use most recipes. If you’re really starting from scratch (like I was a few years ago), the best thing you can do is to start trying and failing. I take meticulous notes on the things I cook to help me learn and improve. Take your example of heat on a pan. I’ve always wanted a stove where I can control the BTUs with a dial. You could test your own stove for it and calibrate yourself for example. There is a slightly more scientific blog here, but it won’t satisfy what you’re looking for I don’t think. I’ve never found that depth, but would appreciate it too! https://www.seriouseats.com/ https://www.seriouseats.com/ I like this book too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab

bradford 7y ago
Thanks, I'll check those out! I'd also like to mention cooks illustrated (they are online at https://www.cooksillustrated.com/ https://www.cooksillustrated.com/, but my primary experience is with the printed magazine form). I don't know if I'd call them 'scientific', but I like the detailed accounting of the authors expectations, along with failed attempts and adjustments. It's not completely what I'd like to see in a recipe book but I think it's the closest example that I can think of.
- AlanYx 7y ago
  I agree that Cook's Illustrated and its two sister publications, America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country, are pretty good examples of what you want. They have a lot of standardized elements that they don't always make clear to casual readers. For example, 1 onion in CI is actually standardized to one cup of chopped onion, they use a standard brand of Kosher salt and provide conversion ratios for brands with different crystal structures, etc. I get recipes from a variety of sources, but I do find that this kind of precision helps with getting repeatable results.

Amygaz 7y ago

Oh you should try beating a white egg and then folding it with the other ingredients

blowski 7y ago

I imagine it also depends on the onion itself, which is why you can’t be more specific. My wife does an amazing job browning onions, but sometimes it goes wrong, and she can’t explain why. Also, when I try copying her precisely, mine never seem to turn out as good so even if I did have precise instructions I might still struggle.

Jasper_ 7y ago

You cannot escape environmental factors. As you cook more and more, you will understand your kitchen and environment more, and learn by feel what "medium heat" is, and how it affects food, and why you might use it. These things are always guidelines, and intentionally vague. The most famous example is how most baking recipes call for 2-5 cups of flour, since the humidity in the air, the season the flour was harvested, etc. all affect how much you might need in the end. So you just learn when you've added "enough". That might make the engineer in you upset, but that's the reality of it. There are no precise steps to "brown an onion", but you will know when you've done it correctly. And if you did it wrong, that just means it takes more practice and more learning about your skills.

mech1234 7y ago

You should get into baking if you want to see where precision matters and how it can be expressed in cooking. Generally, things you cook on the stovetop don't need strict quantitative controls. Exercise your own judgement and experience- you can understand how the onion will taste based on how it looks. Mix it, heat it, season it, eat it.

bradford 7y ago
So, my wife bakes a lot and I'm witness to the crazy precision that it involves. Perhaps that's what partially inspired my comment: I felt that the lack of verbosity in instruction was impacting my ability to get a recipe to taste the way I want it to. (It's the result that I'm pursuing, not necessarily the precision). Case in point: I love Malai Kofta when I get it from the restaurant. I have never been able to reproduce the taste at home, and I don't have the expertise/judgement to figure out why :|

BelleOfTheBall 7y ago

If you want recipes that are a bit more precise, check out baking ones. I've frequently heard people say that cooking is easy, just throwing ingredients together. The same people went on to note that baking, however, is like a precise science: add exactly X grams of that, cook at specifically Y degrees, mix by rotating counter-clockwise for Z seconds. It's all very delicate and precise. As for regular recipes, I really don't think this type of precise writing is popular because everybody's got different tastes and palates so it would be tough to say precisely how one should 'brown an onion', although I get where you're coming from. Personally, I've gotten in the habit of finding recipes, trying them out, and saving them with personalized tweaks. So when a recipe calls for a 'dash of salt', I replace it with 'exactly 1 tbsp of salt' or 'no salt necessary'.

PeterisP 7y ago
There's also the difference in the type of ingredients. My particular pound-sized piece of pork is substantially different than your particular pound-sized piece of pork, and my tomato is not the same as your tomato, so achieving the same result from will require different cooking time, different added moisture, and depending on the differences it might even be impossible at all to get the same result. However, my 100g of sugar is the same as your 100g of sugar, and we can ensure that my 100g of flour is the same as your 100g of flour if we explicitly try control for things like gluten, which bakers definitely do.

benjaminjackman 7y ago

> the ambiguity of description means that ten different chefs could follow the recipe and have ten different results. I wonder if a similar analog is sheet music. Ten different musicians could follow the sheet and produce 10 different sounding results.

crazygringo 7y ago

> To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion". Variables that might affect the outcome include Hate to break it to you, but it's even worse. Further variables include the moisture content which varies per-onion, the type of onion, the size of onion, the thickness of your pan, and the material it's made out of. The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science. Even if your equipment stays the same, every chicken breast and every tomato you buy is different. Now it totally drives me nuts when people say "if you follow the recipe you can't go wrong!" There are usually 100 different ways you can go wrong. But it's just part of cooking. You learn to cook the same way you learned to walk or throw a ball or speak your language: through trial and error and careful observation and practice. The great resource now is YouTube videos, which have the huge advantage of letting you see exactly what it's supposed to look like when it's done (how brown is brown? how thick is thickened?), and just by seeing the types of pans they use and the sizes of flames, and the amount of bubbles or sizzling, you get actually get a feel for it pretty quick. Finally, the point of recipe books is to tell you which ingredients, rough quantities, and the steps. Just because recipes require interpretation (similar to a music score) doesn't mean they're useless.

ebg13 7y ago
> The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science. Cooking is a science. If you fail to evaluate your ingredients beforehand, then you're just not doing the science particularly well. Writing recipes and interpreting recipes are arts.
- spurdoman77 7y ago
  Sounds like engineering to me.
  - qqn 7y ago
    I remember hearing once that baking is a science and cooking an art. If you mess a step up while baking, your product is generally destroyed. Do the same while cooking, and you're often left with something that just tastes a little different (and may even become an updated twist in the recipe).

anon_cow1111 7y ago

You're really not going to be happy with this site then. Even basic things with hard numbers for measuring can be wildly off. Here's an easy example https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Apple_Pie_I https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Apple_Pie_I This recipe calls for 2.5 cups of sugar for 1 pie. If you add that much sugar to a single 8" pie, it's going to be nearly inedible. You can easily find other recipes that only use 0.75 cups per pie(a little low in my opinion). With such a huge margin of error for just one ingredient it immediately makes me wonder if anyone actually cooked this before they wrote an article about it.

andrewzah 7y ago

Someone should make a wikimedia for various cooking techniques. That would actually be useful, unlike this random assortment of non-curated recipes.

leejoramo 7y ago

I am an avid cook. I agree with much of your assessment. Have you tried Julia Child’s first books “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”? Her books are very in depth and start with clearly written descriptions of techniques and what to look for. This does mean that recipes can be many times longer than most other books. Julia Child’s reputation is well earned. She may be one of the first celebrity chefs, but her status came directly from the quality of her research and writing.

0xff00ffee 7y ago

> Has anyone found any technique/recipe books that attempt to deal with this ambiguity? Absolutely! If you are looking for this kind of specificity, Cooks Illustrated is your source. The will discuss multiple variables of basic techniques. Like in your example, dice size vs. browning time vs. just what the hell does "browned" mean anyway? : : The other solution to this: practice. If you cook thoughtfully, you will eventually come to understand how these variables impact your dish. But you need to pay attention while you cook, like a good engineer! I'll give you a 3 examples, specifically about onions, that took me years of practice to understand. Indian gravy base (essentially all dark curries and masalas) A <1cm dice, cooked very slowly until dark brown with no spot of white and not burned. You literally want a uniform brown paste because that gives the gravy a solid base and has a very earthy taste to it. Hard to do without burning. Mire Poix (a base used in many, many dishes in Europe: 50%carrot, 50%celery, 100%onion by mass): A <1cm dice, cooked slolwy until translucent. You don't want a toasty flavor at ALL, you want the savory taste of the onion with no zing. (easy, can be done in ~8-10 minutes) Spanish Caponata: A <1cm dice, cooked until browned edges (higher heat), but still white center, meaning sweet with some zing but still a toasty part. (tricky to not burn and still get a brown edge) And all of this skill changes if you buy a new pan or move to a new house with a new range! Or if your yellow onions are dried and cured properly, or overly moist or greenish. But cooks Illustrated will cover a lot of this, you just need to buy a lot of books though because they spread this out across several volumes. :( Practice though. Read cookbooks. Literally read them, the intros are usually very thoughtful. Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffry, Alma Lach, OTTOLENGHI... just to name a few of the greats you should check out.

ajot 7y ago

You may like Cooking for Geeks, by Jeff Potter.I've read the original book and loved it. It includes the how and the why for classic and modern cuisine, each recipe has well measured ingredients (imperial AND metric) and also suggestions like "you could also try adding x, or replacing y, or doing z technique at the beginning". There's a second edition with some more techniques added.

NoImmatureAdHom 7y ago

cookingforengineers.com uses neat flow charts that remove a lot of the unnecessary difficulty in following recipes.

neilk 7y ago

The cookbooks and recipe formats that we have were never designed for someone in your situation. And if you have a background in a field with standardized parts and repeatable results, the kinds of instructions cookbooks give can be maddening. Totally understandable. One book that helped me was Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. You may not want to cook vegetarian, but many vegetarians are young people who are also building their own cooking styles from scratch. So VCfE goes through the basics - like what is cubing and what is dicing - with illustrations. While it has complex recipes, it also includes almost absurdly simple ones, like preparing beans with olive oil and salt. But think of them like "kata"; basic exercises, that you can build up to more complex forms. A recent book which I've recently found extremely useful is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It is a wonderfully readable introduction to the elements of cooking and how they combine, and it is great for complete newbies as well as experienced home cooks. It manages to be both accessible, practical and a little bit technical, perfect for the techie who wants to get better at cooking. It taught me things simple dishes like roasted chicken, which I had prepared like a hundred times before I read it, which have changed how I cook forever.