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I don't think such precision is necessary for typical 'cooking' but baking is different -- it's just straight up chemistry and the ratios are not just useful gu

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• Someone 3y ago
  But chemistry requiring fairly strict ratios need not imply you can use the same amounts of ingredients every time. For example, recipes using fruit often require water that partly comes from the fruit. Use older, drier, fruit, and you’ll need to adjust amounts to keep the effective ratio the same. Maybe add a sip of water or milk, use less starch to bind stuff or heat things a while shorter. Temperature and humidity of the air also can affect what the ideal ratios are.
• YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  I don't agree. You're baking for humans, right? Well, humans can't tell the difference between e.g. bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration. It's just bread to them. You have to introduce a very big variance to get over human biases ("mmm that sourdough bread is delicious" - and it turns out it's sourfaux, so now what?). Cooking ingredients are mostly not standardised and you can't exactly measure taste anyway (or touch, or smell) which is the effect you're going for, so exact measurements are not going to have the same importance as, dunno, mixing exact proportions of ingredients for nitroglycerine.
  • bryanlarsen 3y ago
    You can easily tell the difference between bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration if they've been cooked for the exact same length of time. Only if you cook the 85% slightly longer will it be hard to tell.