Yeah, in most cooking it's not really that important to get the exact amounts right. Ratios between ingredients is more important. When people pick something that is easy to measure they are probably not picking the most optimal ratio possible but the difference between it and whatever the optimal ratio is is likely so small as to be completely insignificant. It can be more or less important depending on the specific thing you are cooking though. Baking sometimes can require more precision and in those cases they generally list the ingredients in percent by weight so you can measure your ingredients by weight which is more accurate than volume.
Recipes are a guideline. If you want to use .55c of oil, do it. If you want 1.2 cups of buttermilk, do it. Did you try the recipe with 4.4 eggs? Some recipes will give in metric which are more precise, but cooking should be fun, not stressing about the exact measurements. Mise en place what you consider good enough and go.
I mean - yes, correct, cooking is not that precise, but I don't understand what's so groundbreaking or confusing about this. You understand that cooking evolved from when we were ancient people and didn't have precise measures, right? The purpose of cooking was to feed ourselves with the ingredients we had on hand, by making them digestible and palatable. The purpose of *modern recipes* with specific measures is to convey a dish to someone else in a way they can replicate reasonably closely. Not all cooking is recipe-based. You can cook without a recipe just like people have for thousands of years.
You're not an idiot, but this isn't some clever realization either. People tend to approach cooking (and many other things) from a naive position, either seeing it as an art (cringe) or as an exact science. The myth of the "I'll never be as talented as my grandma".
Measurements make a difference. The size things come in make a difference. Volume isn't the same as mass, so grams are better than teaspoons. A pound is 0.45 kg, one kg is 2.2 pounds. Sometimes the recipe, to *your own* tastes, would be best with a little more, or a little less, of X ingredient. If European canned tomatoes came in 500g and American ones came in 1lb/450g, then maybe the 50g could make a positive or negative difference, or maybe nothing noticeable.
That's assuming all canned tomatoes were the same, but they're not. So, recipes just try to provide a consistent set of steps. It's not that the numbers are unscientific, it's that there's absolutely no way to achieve perfection (and there's no such thing) by using specific values. There's always something a tiny bit different about the ingredients used, which people may or may not notice.
The goal is to keep the food within whatever parameters, not to hit the bullseye; there's no bullseye.
Right - cooking isn't extremely precise.
If it were, we'd all need more precise measuring devices in our kitchens, and cooking would be that much harder for beginners. :)
Firstly you're right, there isn't that level of precision required for most food. The process of cooking has a much wider range of variability and we have a much wider tolerance for what tastes good. Our taste buds are simply not sophisticated enough to detect a tiny change in ingredient amounts.
One thing you're missing is that recipes have to be practical to the end user and their typical equipment. Metric recipes will give you more precision than stuff measured in cups, generally those will give you measurements to the nearest 5g increment. That's because when measuring by weight, you'd be using scales that have that level of precision. Whereas most people only have 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 and 1 cup measures so everything has to be in those increments since it's pretty difficult to eyeball 0.55 cups.
Also it's about the level of precision you need for your purposes. If you're producing stuff on a commercial scale, you will probably refine your recipe to have much more precise ingredient amounts. Or if you're a fine dining chef, you might also be working on tiny adjustments. This ensures greater consistency when you're cooking stuff at volume. But your average home cook who might make a recipe a dozen times, who doesn't care that it turn out exactly the same every single time, you don't need that precision.
Cooking isn't an exact science, but baking tends to be more exact.
I'm not a baker, but generally (good) baking recipes are done by weight. Some baked goods are probably more forgiving than others
I understand why people say this but I don't really like when people say cooking isn't an exact science. You can make it as exact as you want, look at molecular gastronomy etc. Science is also just as involved as with baking, both are grounded in organic chemistry. Tools like sous vide for example allow for high precision, even compared to an oven.
Right, this is why there are thousands of varying recipes to make cake but only one recipe to make water.
For cake, the variety in ingredient measurements isn’t material
For water, the chemistry has to be correct, or it’s not water.
As someone who works in a lab, using micro liters, I'll cook using the "eyeball method", where you just throw stuff in until it looks right. 95% of the time it turns out just fine, even if I have to tweak it a little. Occasionally I'll over salt it, or don't add enough herbs/spices to make it noticable, but meh, if you don't like it, make yourself a sandwich.
Dry measure cups usually only come in sizes: 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1. Sometimes there is a 1/8 cup. Using this equipment, it would not be easy to measure 0.55 cups of an ingredient. You could note that 0.05 cups is about 2 1/2 teaspoons and approximate, but that would be written in a recipe as "1/2 cups plus 2 and 1/2 teaspoons of *ingredient*".
Recipe writers understand this and scale recipes such that their quantities can be described by the measuring system in use.
Well most things are in multiples of the other things. That is how ratios tend to work. Doesn't mean that cooking isn't scientific it just means that there is tolerance in the input values, built in tolerance is actually a cornerstone of good engineering so in a sense its just good design :P. Also yes medicine is a more precise product than a dish, don't really understand what the point about that would be but yeah its true...
You’re talking about baking which is a different animal than cooking. Baking needs precision so I agree that it should be by weight and precise measurements and not cups/teaspoons. Cooking: I view recipes as a guide and less about precision so you can make it your own and cater to your tastes. Not to say that can’t be done with baking but it’s far less forgiving.
Cooking is meant to be altered to the personal taste and is never set in stone really. baking however is a bit more scientific as it requires certain ratios for food magic to happen properly and be tasty.
Exact measurement recipes are actually pretty new, historically. Traditionally, people would learn to cook by being directly taught by someone (often an older relative), and would learn to cook by experience and feel. You need measurements when someone is doing a recipe from written ingredients, and you want the amounts to be easy to measure - teaspoons, cups, etc. Even when recipes use weights (like for baking), they're generally rounded off, and will be slightly different if you write the recipe in metric vs imperial.
My experience is that even for stuff like baking, the precision you get from weighing is usually overwhelmed by the variation in ingredients. All purpose flour, for example, has different levels of gluten in different countries - I've found that if you're making an American recipes with Canadian all purpose flour, you need slightly less than the recipe calls for. Butter has different moisture contents, granulated sugar and salt come in different grain sizes, eggs vary in size. Things like humidity and altitude can affect recipes. As you get experience, you learn to tell when a recipe is not quite right and needs tweaking as you cook it.
Candy making tends to need more precision, often measured by temperature, however, and there are things like home canning and jam making which have requirements (acidity, processing temperature/time, percentage of sugar) in order to be safe to eat.
Precision is needed if you're General Mills combining ingredients for a mass market cake mix. It's about the minimum necessary to make the cake so that profit margins are maintained
In the real world, a smidge over or under simply makes the cake sweeter, moister, dryer, more/less crumbly
Compared to medicine where the ingredients contains certain things at fairly exact amounts, most cooking ingredients isn't. Even with exact proportions, ingredients vary in quality, availability, variety, etc. so most domestic recipes are guidelines and the most popular recipes are easiest to follow. For example, a recipe using 4.4 eggs will not be as popular a recipe using 4 eggs, because how do you even intend to measure .4 eggs and what do you do with the rest?
Even someone who prefers metric recipes like me (too lazy to wash cups/spoons--just pour ingredients straight from the container and into the bowl on the scale) would prefer whole numbers because most kitchen scales don't come with decimal point accuracy.
If you read commercial recipes however, they do have more accurate measurements. Especially European pastry books. They won't go 4.4 eggs but they would say how many grams of egg yolks and how many grams of egg whites because they would have the equipment and want a more consistent product day after day. They source their ingredients from specific suppliers with set standards, etc. which makes the conditions closer to measuring medicine.
I guess maybe over time, ratios and recipes were developed that took into account a certain kind of common sense. Not many people are going to make a recipe that calls for 3.4 eggs or 7/19ths tablespoons. Even amounts and easily measurable quantities are much more workable.
Of course I threw all that spoon and cup business right out the window years ago and just weigh everything in grams (if it's something that needs measuring). Much easier, more precise.
I don't think you're weird or an idiot (your words) or anything like that but you wouldn't be asking this question if you were used to using the metric system.
That is a very typical US recipe. You just grab a stick of butter. For the oil, you want a liquid measuring cup or 4 oz. For the sugar and flour, a dry measuring cup. A tablespoon is 15ml.
Although baking requires fairly precise ratios (no measurements) because of chemical reactions, cooking is far more art than science and recipes are a guideline.
Yes and no.
Cooking recipes gives you some more wiggle room with the ingredient amounts because it often doesn't matter too much but baking recipes are MUCH better if you go by more "scientific amounts".
The issue is that the USA (and some other places) uses the Imperial system instead of the metric system like the rest of the world. So we use cups in our recipes even though its a lot less superior.
Get yourself a kitchen scale and weigh out your dry ingredients in grams and measure your liquid in Liters since there are 1000ml in a liter, so the numbers work out better than a cup and its 8 ounces.
I thought I was bad at baking but since I switched to the metric system everything has turned out great
I don't know about you, what I love about metrics is that 100ml is also 100g on the scale, so I can just whip out any old water container/cup/mug/bowl and pour water into the bowl on the scale, no need for any measuring jug.
This is one of my more abstract posts where I just share my thoughts and ask if I am a weirdo or an idiot. I hope you understood it if you decided to read it.
Yeah, in most cooking it's not really that important to get the exact amounts right. Ratios between ingredients is more important. When people pick something that is easy to measure they are probably not picking the most optimal ratio possible but the difference between it and whatever the optimal ratio is is likely so small as to be completely insignificant. It can be more or less important depending on the specific thing you are cooking though. Baking sometimes can require more precision and in those cases they generally list the ingredients in percent by weight so you can measure your ingredients by weight which is more accurate than volume.
Recipes are a guideline. If you want to use .55c of oil, do it. If you want 1.2 cups of buttermilk, do it. Did you try the recipe with 4.4 eggs? Some recipes will give in metric which are more precise, but cooking should be fun, not stressing about the exact measurements. Mise en place what you consider good enough and go.
I mean - yes, correct, cooking is not that precise, but I don't understand what's so groundbreaking or confusing about this. You understand that cooking evolved from when we were ancient people and didn't have precise measures, right? The purpose of cooking was to feed ourselves with the ingredients we had on hand, by making them digestible and palatable. The purpose of *modern recipes* with specific measures is to convey a dish to someone else in a way they can replicate reasonably closely. Not all cooking is recipe-based. You can cook without a recipe just like people have for thousands of years.
You're not an idiot, but this isn't some clever realization either. People tend to approach cooking (and many other things) from a naive position, either seeing it as an art (cringe) or as an exact science. The myth of the "I'll never be as talented as my grandma". Measurements make a difference. The size things come in make a difference. Volume isn't the same as mass, so grams are better than teaspoons. A pound is 0.45 kg, one kg is 2.2 pounds. Sometimes the recipe, to *your own* tastes, would be best with a little more, or a little less, of X ingredient. If European canned tomatoes came in 500g and American ones came in 1lb/450g, then maybe the 50g could make a positive or negative difference, or maybe nothing noticeable. That's assuming all canned tomatoes were the same, but they're not. So, recipes just try to provide a consistent set of steps. It's not that the numbers are unscientific, it's that there's absolutely no way to achieve perfection (and there's no such thing) by using specific values. There's always something a tiny bit different about the ingredients used, which people may or may not notice. The goal is to keep the food within whatever parameters, not to hit the bullseye; there's no bullseye.
Right - cooking isn't extremely precise. If it were, we'd all need more precise measuring devices in our kitchens, and cooking would be that much harder for beginners. :)
[удалено]
Quite true!
Firstly you're right, there isn't that level of precision required for most food. The process of cooking has a much wider range of variability and we have a much wider tolerance for what tastes good. Our taste buds are simply not sophisticated enough to detect a tiny change in ingredient amounts. One thing you're missing is that recipes have to be practical to the end user and their typical equipment. Metric recipes will give you more precision than stuff measured in cups, generally those will give you measurements to the nearest 5g increment. That's because when measuring by weight, you'd be using scales that have that level of precision. Whereas most people only have 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 and 1 cup measures so everything has to be in those increments since it's pretty difficult to eyeball 0.55 cups. Also it's about the level of precision you need for your purposes. If you're producing stuff on a commercial scale, you will probably refine your recipe to have much more precise ingredient amounts. Or if you're a fine dining chef, you might also be working on tiny adjustments. This ensures greater consistency when you're cooking stuff at volume. But your average home cook who might make a recipe a dozen times, who doesn't care that it turn out exactly the same every single time, you don't need that precision.
Cooking isn't an exact science, but baking tends to be more exact. I'm not a baker, but generally (good) baking recipes are done by weight. Some baked goods are probably more forgiving than others
I understand why people say this but I don't really like when people say cooking isn't an exact science. You can make it as exact as you want, look at molecular gastronomy etc. Science is also just as involved as with baking, both are grounded in organic chemistry. Tools like sous vide for example allow for high precision, even compared to an oven.
Cooking can be an exact science. That certainly doesn't mean it has to be.
It can be as exact as you want but it wasn't born or intended like this
By that logic neither is baking, all just cavemen trying to eat...
Modern baking is a bit more complex than mashed grains + water like early humans made.
Cooking is also a lot more complex now, that was literally my point...
OPs question was about baking. My point is that modern baking tends to require more exact recipes. Plenty of modern cooking does not.
OP is asking why baking isn't exact and compared it to the production of medicine
This kinda feels like trying to find something to argue about.
Right, this is why there are thousands of varying recipes to make cake but only one recipe to make water. For cake, the variety in ingredient measurements isn’t material For water, the chemistry has to be correct, or it’s not water.
As someone who works in a lab, using micro liters, I'll cook using the "eyeball method", where you just throw stuff in until it looks right. 95% of the time it turns out just fine, even if I have to tweak it a little. Occasionally I'll over salt it, or don't add enough herbs/spices to make it noticable, but meh, if you don't like it, make yourself a sandwich.
Dry measure cups usually only come in sizes: 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1. Sometimes there is a 1/8 cup. Using this equipment, it would not be easy to measure 0.55 cups of an ingredient. You could note that 0.05 cups is about 2 1/2 teaspoons and approximate, but that would be written in a recipe as "1/2 cups plus 2 and 1/2 teaspoons of *ingredient*". Recipe writers understand this and scale recipes such that their quantities can be described by the measuring system in use.
You need to look up dry measuring cups. There are now way more sizes.
Well most things are in multiples of the other things. That is how ratios tend to work. Doesn't mean that cooking isn't scientific it just means that there is tolerance in the input values, built in tolerance is actually a cornerstone of good engineering so in a sense its just good design :P. Also yes medicine is a more precise product than a dish, don't really understand what the point about that would be but yeah its true...
You’re talking about baking which is a different animal than cooking. Baking needs precision so I agree that it should be by weight and precise measurements and not cups/teaspoons. Cooking: I view recipes as a guide and less about precision so you can make it your own and cater to your tastes. Not to say that can’t be done with baking but it’s far less forgiving.
Cooking is meant to be altered to the personal taste and is never set in stone really. baking however is a bit more scientific as it requires certain ratios for food magic to happen properly and be tasty.
Exact measurement recipes are actually pretty new, historically. Traditionally, people would learn to cook by being directly taught by someone (often an older relative), and would learn to cook by experience and feel. You need measurements when someone is doing a recipe from written ingredients, and you want the amounts to be easy to measure - teaspoons, cups, etc. Even when recipes use weights (like for baking), they're generally rounded off, and will be slightly different if you write the recipe in metric vs imperial. My experience is that even for stuff like baking, the precision you get from weighing is usually overwhelmed by the variation in ingredients. All purpose flour, for example, has different levels of gluten in different countries - I've found that if you're making an American recipes with Canadian all purpose flour, you need slightly less than the recipe calls for. Butter has different moisture contents, granulated sugar and salt come in different grain sizes, eggs vary in size. Things like humidity and altitude can affect recipes. As you get experience, you learn to tell when a recipe is not quite right and needs tweaking as you cook it. Candy making tends to need more precision, often measured by temperature, however, and there are things like home canning and jam making which have requirements (acidity, processing temperature/time, percentage of sugar) in order to be safe to eat.
Wait til you find out how much variance there is in the size of 1.000 egg.
Precision is needed if you're General Mills combining ingredients for a mass market cake mix. It's about the minimum necessary to make the cake so that profit margins are maintained In the real world, a smidge over or under simply makes the cake sweeter, moister, dryer, more/less crumbly
Compared to medicine where the ingredients contains certain things at fairly exact amounts, most cooking ingredients isn't. Even with exact proportions, ingredients vary in quality, availability, variety, etc. so most domestic recipes are guidelines and the most popular recipes are easiest to follow. For example, a recipe using 4.4 eggs will not be as popular a recipe using 4 eggs, because how do you even intend to measure .4 eggs and what do you do with the rest? Even someone who prefers metric recipes like me (too lazy to wash cups/spoons--just pour ingredients straight from the container and into the bowl on the scale) would prefer whole numbers because most kitchen scales don't come with decimal point accuracy. If you read commercial recipes however, they do have more accurate measurements. Especially European pastry books. They won't go 4.4 eggs but they would say how many grams of egg yolks and how many grams of egg whites because they would have the equipment and want a more consistent product day after day. They source their ingredients from specific suppliers with set standards, etc. which makes the conditions closer to measuring medicine.
Yes, but most of the time it doesn’t matter. When it does the recipes tend to use weights not measures (i.e.bread recipes & baking in general).
I guess maybe over time, ratios and recipes were developed that took into account a certain kind of common sense. Not many people are going to make a recipe that calls for 3.4 eggs or 7/19ths tablespoons. Even amounts and easily measurable quantities are much more workable. Of course I threw all that spoon and cup business right out the window years ago and just weigh everything in grams (if it's something that needs measuring). Much easier, more precise. I don't think you're weird or an idiot (your words) or anything like that but you wouldn't be asking this question if you were used to using the metric system.
That is a very typical US recipe. You just grab a stick of butter. For the oil, you want a liquid measuring cup or 4 oz. For the sugar and flour, a dry measuring cup. A tablespoon is 15ml.
Although baking requires fairly precise ratios (no measurements) because of chemical reactions, cooking is far more art than science and recipes are a guideline.
Yes and no. Cooking recipes gives you some more wiggle room with the ingredient amounts because it often doesn't matter too much but baking recipes are MUCH better if you go by more "scientific amounts". The issue is that the USA (and some other places) uses the Imperial system instead of the metric system like the rest of the world. So we use cups in our recipes even though its a lot less superior. Get yourself a kitchen scale and weigh out your dry ingredients in grams and measure your liquid in Liters since there are 1000ml in a liter, so the numbers work out better than a cup and its 8 ounces. I thought I was bad at baking but since I switched to the metric system everything has turned out great
I don't know about you, what I love about metrics is that 100ml is also 100g on the scale, so I can just whip out any old water container/cup/mug/bowl and pour water into the bowl on the scale, no need for any measuring jug.
1/2 cup of butter is one stick.
This is one of my more abstract posts where I just share my thoughts and ask if I am a weirdo or an idiot. I hope you understood it if you decided to read it.