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> I use salt to season my food but I have no idea how salt is mined. Culinary counterpoint: I recently came across a very entertaining subreddit [0] which coll

> I use salt to season my food but I have no idea how salt is mined. Culinary counterpoint: I recently came across a very entertaining subreddit [0] which collects screenshots of scathing reviews of online recipes in which the reviewer admits having made changes in the recipe which are often clearly the reason for their bad results. What I'm getting at is that you may not know how salt is mined, but you are certainly aware that sugar and flour are never substitutes for salt, however white and powdery they all may be. You also know that skipping the salt will completely ruin the recipe, but skipping the nutmeg will not. You probably safely assume that you can replace table salt with kosher salt, or table salt with coarse rock salt (provided it will dissolve in cooking). However, you hopefully know that if the recipe calls for kosher salt you may not be able to use iodised table salt instead (if doing a fermentation), and that table salt is not a happy substitute for coarse salt for finishing. You absolutely do need some sort of basic understanding of a process to carry it out successfully, even when you have the full instructions available or a helper tool, because reality is never fully reflected in theoretical descriptions. That's why you must know the very basics of cooking before following a recipe, the basics of arithmetic before using a calculator, and yes, the basics of critical thinking and background knowledge before productively using an LLM. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/top/?sort=top&t=all https://old.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/top/?sort=top&t=all

unhammer 3y ago
also https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-why-recipe-writers-lie-and-lie-about-how-long-they-take-to-caramelize.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-... (onions take more than 10 minutes to caramelize, but people filter for short cooking time, so the lie propagates)
account42 3y ago
> You probably safely assume that you can replace table salt with kosher salt, or table salt with coarse rock salt (provided it will dissolve in cooking). However, you hopefully know that if the recipe calls for kosher salt you may not be able to use iodised table salt instead (if doing a fermentation), and that table salt is not a happy substitute for coarse salt for finishing. Hopefully he'd also know that 99% of recipes that use kosher salt (presumably because it sounds fancier) will work just fine with with table salt (iodised or not). For most uses the grain size will not make any difference at all and for the remaining ones it is still not essential.

unhammer 3y ago

also https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-why-recipe-writers-lie-and-lie-about-how-long-they-take-to-caramelize.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-... (onions take more than 10 minutes to caramelize, but people filter for short cooking time, so the lie propagates)

account42 3y ago

> You probably safely assume that you can replace table salt with kosher salt, or table salt with coarse rock salt (provided it will dissolve in cooking). However, you hopefully know that if the recipe calls for kosher salt you may not be able to use iodised table salt instead (if doing a fermentation), and that table salt is not a happy substitute for coarse salt for finishing. Hopefully he'd also know that 99% of recipes that use kosher salt (presumably because it sounds fancier) will work just fine with with table salt (iodised or not). For most uses the grain size will not make any difference at all and for the remaining ones it is still not essential.