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.

Yeah, that's pretty important. Cooking is an art, bakery is a science.

Like, for real, it's significantly more chemistry than most cooking, so the proportions do matter.

Cooking and baking are both sciences, and have very different tolerances and methods for working with those tolerances.

As others have pointed out, baking tends to require far more precision, and the methods used are focused on precision as a result.

To your point, spending all of your time focused on precise measurements while cooking - especially with fresh ingredients - isn’t going to be as helpful as developing the underlying skills and intuitions to know how to adapt what you’re cooking to the ingredients you have on hand.

Those skills and intuitions are focused on getting a particular dish into a state that is hard to precisely measure because of the high degree of variation in ingredients (egg size, garlic freshness, how spicy are those peppers?). If we could precisely measure more aspects of the ingredients, cooking could become far more “scientific”, and indeed this is what happens in the mass production of foods in factories.

The point here is that the degree of “science” involved has more to do with the practical considerations and limits of our measuring apparatus across a diverse array of ingredients.

Baking tends to involve ingredients that can be precisely measured, and an end result that can’t be tested until the bake is done. Any baker who focuses on consistent and repeatable results knows that precision is part of the path to getting there.

There is still value in knowing how to adapt to your circumstances while baking. Precise measurements just reduce the variables that you may need to adapt on the fly.

I make bread. Every time I make bread that is better than my standard it's because I accidentally deviated from my standard recipe. When that happens I will sometimes make a note of what exactly I did and then try to do it again, but I never got the same results that way. In fact I never get the same results with my standard recipe either. There is always variation, even when I use the same flour from the same sack.

I don't think baking is like you say at all.

Do home cooks not care about how the food tastes? This seems like a strange take. People started cooking by roasting or boiling things over an open flame or searing them on a hot rock. Most of the techniques learned and passed down are about how to ensure good results under contexts where the inputs are naturally inconsistent and hard to control.

I don't know why we'd have an assumption that people have or want to work with precise scientific instruments all the time.

As someone who admittedly loathes _and_ is bad at cooking - it sounds like you are describing a combination recipe book _and_ cooking-instruction/cooking-history book. I wonder if people are frustrated because the two are getting conflated - they _just_ want the recipe, but they are being given both recipes and background?

I'm not trying to pick a fight but I'm genuinely curious to see how you would disprove my statement. Like, a formal (counter) proof etc.

Just to clarify, I mean that a recipe might be written as if it was a precise set of instructions, but that's not the proper way to use it. And yes, to be honest, "grab ingredients in the quantities you desire and cook them" is how I cook all my meals. There are very few things I actually measure, for instance I have a little dosimetric spoon that I use for spices, mostly beause I like the spoon though, not because I really need it to figure out how much I need of each spice. Everything else I eyball, because I know what makes sense to cook. Everyone I know who knows how to cook more than basic stuff cooks that way.

That's cooking- not baking, btw. Apparently that requires precision, but I don't really bake.

You've proven it yourself:

> That's cooking- not baking, btw. Apparently that requires precision, but I don't really bake.

How is baking different from cooking that baking requires precision whereas cooking "does not"? It's the same process: raw ingredients are subjected to chemical and thermochemical reactions to achieve a result. Their recipes are in the same cookbooks. They have a significant overlap in ingredients.

Where do you draw a line?

Is Beef Wellington coking or baking? Or do you go by feeling? "Today I'm baking, so I'm going to do a precise beef Wellington recipe"?

What about Shepherd's Pie? Baking is defined as "to cook by dry heat especially in an oven" [1] Exactly what's being done to the shepherd's pie (as is done to any other pies). Precision or "it's not a proper way to use it, you have to wing it"?

Or mince pie? If you have meat in it, then "it's pointless to give such precise instructions", but if you remove meat, then "apparently that requires precision", is that how it works?

> And yes, to be honest, "grab ingredients in the quantities you desire and cook them" is how I cook all my meals. There are very few things I actually measure

I am not you. And many people are not you. I presume that you learned how to cook as a kid from your parents? It means that you did receive quite precise instructions at one point until you learned how things work. And I bet that for any new recipe that you've never tried before you will look for and work with precise instructions.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bake

Interpretation is also why many people are really bad at it (and art).

If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.

But other than that point regarding the main topic, I don't disagree.

I usually make most food I'm tangentially familiar with without a recipe. But when I'm encountering a new one from a region I'm less familiar with, I need to go through a few recipes before I get the framework for it.

It really isn't. Like any physical craft, it takes practice, patience, some failure, but a competent home cook should be able to recreate most of the classics from a recipe book.

I'd argue that recipes themselves are why a lot of people's cooking sucks. The recipes tell you what how much and how long but fail to account for the basics of seasoning, preparation and tool selection.

If people apply a formal or acquired training to recipes they'd usually vary a lot from person to person much less the original recipe

Hypothetical grandmother cooks well because she perfected the technique over a few decades.

That's great and all, but recipes are communication, and if they can't communicate _how_ to achieve grandmother results to a new person, then what in the hell is the point?

It'd be better off if the recipe just said "figure it out" then, instead of trying to imply certainty where none can exist due to stove differences.

> Of course stoves are different. But trying to normalize things as an a priori goal (in this case by dropping cold eggs into boiling water!) only makes things worse. Traditional recipes are traditional precisely because they're tolerant of situational slop and occasional misinterpretation.

Except this supposed recipe isn't tolerant of anything. Eggs are still over or under done based on a minute here or there, and which way is a guessing game without the context of which exact stove.

If that were the best possible, then fine, but there's other recipes that are actually repeatable in this comment page, so what's the benefit of the grandmother recipe again?

Indeed - in cooking, technique is supreme when it comes to to creating great food. So many new cooks get hung up on precise measurements but don't consider time and temperature and don't ask themselves why they're doing certain things at certain times. With time you begin to acquire a bit of an intuition about how much of whatever it is you might use and you learn quickly that you can always add more, but you can't often take something away.

You should also be able to answer why each ingredient is being added - what is it trying to add, complement or remove if it wasn't added. And also remember that you can season and spice as you cook. You should always taste while you're cooking - it's a simple thought but so many people don't and once you find discipline in tasting while you cook, you hit a new level.

Now baking - yeah you better get your measuring cups and scales out!

No, this is 100% false, and this is exactly why recipe collections are popular, because people think they can just follow a recipe to get a delicious meal. There is an immense difference in quality and properties of ingredients, difference in cookware, difference in appliances, etc. What's "medium heat" ? What's a "medium-sized potato" ?

You need to know basic cooking to work around these differences, you need to know what something feels like and looks like when it's done, otherwise you will forever fail.

I know you mean this as a joke, but many cooking books are like that, and I for one value knowing the history (and science, as in "The Food Lab", highly recommended) of what I'm cooking or eating

Or unless failure is an option! (And ideally, you're at least writing down what you did.)

I don't! Also, doing this would go against my belief that I already mentioned on HN several times - that the difference between process chemistry and cooking is that the former actually cares about the quality of outcome ;).