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Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the
by hardwaregeek 6y ago
Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe:
- There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it.
- Pound with what? A lot of people will come up with very bad answers to this question.
- How much flour? How much egg? I'll bet that plenty of beginners will use a tablespoon of flour or a singular egg
- Ditto with oil. Beginners do not know how much oil is necessary to fry stuff
- How high heat? You probably want to turn down the heat after the oil starts smoking.
- Is there a single mention of adding salt? Sounds like a pretty bland recipe
I don't mean to be too harsh but recipes are hard. There's a reason why professional recipe developers have developed certain standards like measurements, terms (folding batter, shimmering oil, etc.), and development procedures (cross testing).
- reedjosh 6y agoNo website can fully replace life experience. Either way, the simplicity of presentation here transcends any such criticism which misses the point entirely.
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- spaetzleesser 6y agoI think of myself as a pretty decent cook but without some rough measurements I don’t find the recipes very useful. When I look at the gnocchi recipe I have no idea how much flour to take for an amount of potatoes for example . It is a little like watching my mom who just seems to throw things together until it’s right. Every time it’s perfect but she can’t explain what she does. You need a lot of experience for this.
- reedjosh 6y agoI don't disagree. I believe my point was slightly missed by most. Any other recipe site you visit today will have you scrolling for days just to find the ingredients amid ads and filler backstory. I just love that this bucks that trend. As for the quality of recipe, well, the site invites you to contribute.
- vineyardmike 6y agoSure it’s nice that it bucks the trend.... but it also bucks the usefulness!
- flal_ 6y agoThe thing is that cooking, as it's (usually) based on products that have some intrinsic variability in them ( plants, dead animals... ) hence the recipe cannot be made fully deterministic. I know for gnocchis for example, the amouny of flour needed depends on the moisture content of the potatoes which depend on the variety uses, and how long they've been stored... Also depends on the flour you use. Until you get the dough texture "just right". Agree with many comments here that this makes a cooking an art.
- ziml77 6y agoSure but amounts give you something to work from and help you when shopping so you don't buy way too much or far too little of any ingredient.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoIt’s pretty much a given that in most recipes the quantities are a rough estimate. But at least you have starting point. With gnocchi I have no idea where to start and I have never seen them made so I simply don’t know what’s “just right”.
- cjak 6y agoAgreed. I find the tabular format of Cooking for Engineers excellent for this (for example, at the bottom of this brownies recipe: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/158/Dark-Chocolate-Brownies http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/158/Dark-Chocolate...). Julia Child's classic (https://archive.org/details/JuliaChildMasteringTheArtOfFrenchCooking/ https://archive.org/details/JuliaChildMasteringTheArtOfFrenc...) does something similar in free-form.
- hnick 6y agoI get most of my recipes from YouTube these days. I can see the technique and result, which is valuable, but I make my own notes in a format that suits me, sometimes like Cooking for Engineers (group ingredients, do process, add next group, etc) but usually with a lot of bullet points and terse sentences. Writing my own notes is great for understanding and retention. They get printed out, then tested to earn the right to a plastic sleeve and a place in the folder! Analogue with a digital backup.
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- eyelidlessness 6y agoThe simplicity of the presentation isn’t all that simple. I thought I had clicked an entirely different recipe. I know this crowd loves minimalist design but I’ve had to correct a zillion mistakes on here because text is tiny on my phone.
- dpcan 6y agoI learned to cook a lot from the 3x5 cards my mom has in a cupboard. They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter. Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway. I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.
- hardwaregeek 6y agoEh sure, but I could see a newbie making this recipe, putting too little oil, having it start smoking, then burning the cutlets and undercooking the chicken. That's not interpretation, that's just poor instruction. Take the Serious Eats version. Yes, it's 10x more complicated, but it has photos and careful descriptions and measurements: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/09/the-best-chicken-parmesan-recipe.html https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/09/the-best-chicken...
- reedjosh 6y ago> Take the Serious Eats version. Ad ad ad... some irrelevant random video trying to play when I clearly don't want it to. The site is really not about the quality of recipe, though they could be made better via your contribution.
- akjssdk 6y agoYes it is a shame, because their recipes (especially from Kenji López-Alt) are really good. But if you keep one open to read from during cooking, you will see every video they have available playing in the little box.
- curtainsforus 6y agoThe obvious move is to ctrl-c ctrl-v the recipes to the ad-free site ;)
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- bourgoin 6y agoLikewise, the stroganoff recipe simply says to cook 'strips of beef' in a skillet. There are some cuts which you are not going to be very happy with the result if you do this with. I don't see how REMOVING information benefits either a beginner or an experienced cook.
- nextlevelwizard 6y agoYou can submit pull requests if you feel like this information is important.
- AussieWog93 6y agoTo many people, myself included, the point of cooking isn't about producing a particular end result as consistently as possible. It's a unique form of expression, like painting or writing. Of course, it's useful to see what other people are doing so you can expand your own skillset and create your own twist on what they were doing, and this is where recipes come in handy. But I don't _want_ to be told exactly how to create my next meal. I just want some pointers in the right direction. Too much information destroys my creative input and just makes the recipe not fun to follow. I'm not sure if it made sense - it's difficult to explain why you enjoy something. But please understand that there are people who neither need nor want a perfectly reproducible "food production algorithm".
- DiggyJohnson 6y agoThis was really well said. I think a big reason that our perspective is not widely-voiced is that it is very difficult to put into words. It seems obvious.
- bourgoin 6y agoI understand your perspective. I love cooking as well and I like to tweak recipes and try to never make a dish exactly the same way twice. There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will. I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence. Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.
- deanclatworthy 6y agoOn this subject, can an American please tell me what a spoonful is? There is a great video series on youtube, with his recipes online, but all measurements are spoonful: https://www.ethanchlebowski.com/cooking-techniques-recipes/pakistani-chicken-karahi https://www.ethanchlebowski.com/cooking-techniques-recipes/p... Spoons can vary in size, so is it a tablespoon or a teaspoon? When dealing with spices you'll be adding 3 times the amount if you go with tablespoon interpretation so it'd be a pretty big difference in flavour and intensity.
- penetraitor69 6y agoAs an American, I have no idea. I actually don't think I've ever seen a recipe that didn't have explicit tea/tablespoons before, that's really weird.
- Jetrel 6y agoIf I had to hazard a guess, our table cutlery (i.e. the stuff people eat meals with) has somehow managed to get really bizarrely standardized. There are basically only two sizes of spoon in the normal set - a regular spoon, which has a fairly consistent size, and then a "soup spoon", which is a bit inconsistent (sometimes it's a larger size, sometimes it's round rather than teardrop-shaped, etc). So most likely they're relying on the "incidental standardizing" of normal silverware, and making a guess that most people's regular eating spoons are bizarrely similar in size. Since we're on HN, there's probably a really interesting philosophical rabbit hole one could go down, concerning the idea of things that aren't officially standardized (by some standard-setting body), but end up gravitating towards almost being so, due to industrial pressures and consumer expectations.
- dbspin 6y agoDo you not have 'tea spoons' in the US? Or is that what you're referring to as a 'regular spoon'?
- ydant 6y agoWe most definitely do - the standard utensil set comes with 5 items per person: 1 table/butter knife 1 regular fork 1 small ("salad") fork 1 regular ("table" large?) spoon - approx equiv to 1tbsp 1 small ("tea") spoon - approx equiv to 1tsp I grew up referring to those spoons as "spoon" or "table spoon" (the default assumed desired spoon) and "tea spoon". Since the spoons are so flat, they can't really compare to a proper measuring spoon. We didn't talk about the small forks much. The smaller variants get substantially less frequently, at least in my households.
- nextlevelwizard 6y agoa complete beginner will fuck up the recipe no matter how much you explain and that is part of cooking. it is a skill like any other that you develop as you do. recipes are just a framework not something you follow exactly. this being said. I much rather follow these simple recipes than try to decipher the actual recipe from a bloated site with ads and thousand word blog post by the author how a sausage reminds them of their grandparents.
- gambiting 6y agoThere are certainly recipes which are better than others for beginners. I believe I learnt how to cook and developed an intuition for it because for 2 years I cooked every day using one of the meal boxes subscription service, and the recipes were written for people who have no idea what they are doing. Exact recipes with plenty of pictures, and there was tonnes of variety too. Compared to some cookbooks that I have which will simply say "season to taste". Like.....what do you mean? Season with what? Etc etc etc. And yes, blog recipes are the worst, but there are still excellent cookbooks out there, or even BBC Good food website has pretty good recipes without the bloat of people telling you their entire life story first
- Draken93 6y agoThe real question is: What happened with the tomatoes?
- kuschku 6y agoIf you can read German, I recommend the Dr Oetker Schulkochbuch (1952 edition), the reprint is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/Schulkochbuch-Reprint-von-1952-Oetker/dp/3767017334/ https://www.amazon.de/Schulkochbuch-Reprint-von-1952-Oetker/... It explains all these things, even what a pinch is, how to use a stove, everything you could ever need in the kitchen.
- jarboot 6y agoI cook a lot and follow these recipes with joy. The website is probably not intended for people that cannot estimate ingredients and personally I like it that way.
- m3kw9 6y agoEven with the exact amounts, often the taste is very subjective to each. Often I need to adjust many of the main ingredients like salt sugar by more than halves. Baking would be one that need to be more exact.
- zwkrt 6y agoYou could contribute on GitHub!
- pampa 6y agoI have been cooking for 20+ years, and i had to read that chicken parm recipe several times to make sense of it. I have been entertaining the idea of writing a cookbook, that is not based on recipes, but defines some king of framework, describes the main criteria that you will use to judge the result and gives a definition and parameter range to the usual vague "cook until done", "salt, pepper to taste". Kind of Good Eats meets Naked Chef, but describes it all in OO, FP, C2 Wiki and Agile metaphors.
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