I’m sick of having to look up what country an author is from to know which variant of teaspoon they’re using or how big their lemons are compared to mine. It’s amateur hour out there, I want those homely family recipes up to standard!
What are some good lessons from scientific documentation which should be encouraged in cooking recipes? What are some issues with recipes you’ve seen which have tripped you up?
Recipes should be written with the quantities in the procedure. So instead of reading
Mix flour, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl
It should be
Mix flour (300g), salt (1/4 tsp), and sugar (20g) in a large mixing bowl
That way you don’t need to read/refer to ingredient list, read/refer to ingredient list, etc
I really appreciate the recent trend of some cooking websites to do this on mouseover. Best of both worlds for readability and convenience. Not great when you’re in the kitchen and not using a mouse, I’d hope a mobile or printable version just writes it out like you did there. Love Auto scaling recipes too where you can click to adjust number of servings, bonus points if they have some logic so they don’t tell you to use .71 eggs or something.
I was a professional chemist for around ~7 and love to cook. My suggestion is to stop expecting precision with an imprecise and natural product like cooking. Are your lemons larger? They also might be sweeter, tarter, juicer etc. than others. Same thing with teaspoons. The spices you are using may be more or less concentrated than who wrote it.
Lean into the uncertainty and be free. Double or even triple spices to see if you like it. Measure with your heart
This would only make sense, if all people were baking with the exact same ingredients, in the exact same environment, with the exact same equipment. You know, like in a factory.
For households and the like, it makes sense to have a bit of variation, until you find the way that makes it perfect for you.
People should try to think of recipes as performance notes, not as magical formulas. “This is how I made this, this time.”
This is pretty much how so many experienced home cooks eventually get to the point where they can eyeball the amount of each ingredient they need.
All solids should be listed by weight.
All liquids should be listed by volume.
SI units only. (Grams for solids, mL for liquids)
More graduated cylinders and volumetric flasks in the kitchen please.
Why would you want anything by volume? Mass is so much easier. 50 ml of honey is way more annoying to get into a recipe than dumping it right into whatever container the rest of the ingredients are in while it’s sat on a scale.
5ml of vanilla is a lot easier to measure than by weight would be
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever measured vanilla, it goes right in the bowl, lol. Small quantities are often easier by volume, though, for sure.
I agree. Mass all the way. It’s especially complicated when the liquids are viscous and stick to your measuring vessel.
The only time volume is permitted is if it’s too light for a typical kitchen scale to measure.
Sure, we could say viscous liquids can use mass. I’d say most liquids with a viscosity close to water will be easier to measure out by volume than risk over pouring when going right into weigh boat / mixing bowl.
I thought SI Unit for volume is m3
If you’re asking scientists about writing protocols, you clearly don’t know how scientific protocols work. If anything, scientists need to take lessons from recipe writers on how to write protocols. Scientific protocols are notoriously difficult to replicate.
Here’s a burger recipe written like a scientific methodology:
Raw beef patties (Carshire Butcher) were prepared on a grill (Grillman) according to manufacturer’s instructions. The burger was assembled with the prepared patties, burger bun (Lee Bakery), lettuce (Jordan Farms), American cheese (Cairn Dairy), and various toppings as necessary. Condiments were used where appropriate. Assembled burgers were served within 15 minutes of completion.
I don’t share this notion, as a scientist. Especially not in industry. SOPs are extremely detailed to the point of including lot numbers, etc. If done right it leaves no room for interpretation.
Methods sections are limited in word count, and if a lab is hoping to get a few more papers out of a paradigm, they may be intentionally terse. There’s a big difference between how we write protocols in-house and how we write limited-length methods sections.
Fair call, many fields tend to write just like you described haha.
Maybe chemistry scientists could be a better reference.
Chemistry might not be much better. It’s because scientists generally assume that readers already know how to do the techniques, and so the only information they would care to provide are the ones that wouldn’t be considered obvious. Such as equipment brand, the name of the technique if there’s multiple techniques that do the same thing, or experiment-specific modifications to the technique.
My understanding is that it’s a holdover from older times, when scientists were charged per word, and so methodology would be cut down to remove anything considered “general enough” knowledge
I’m an American biochemist, I also never learned the english system because my school transitioned to metric too fast. The mental burden of trying to cook using english units after working all day in the lab using that same part of my brain leads me to just not want to cook 95% of the time. But when I do cook I have optimized processes for my few simple recipes. When I bake I usually use a metric recipe or convert a English one, and optimize it before making a large batch of something.
Peer review…
Too many cooking sites are let’s exchange your recipe and end up with either stuff missing or absurdly high amount of sugar (as a rule of thumb divide by 2 the amount of sugar) or a lack of salt/spice even when they’re notsimply forgotten.
Published books tends to be a bit better as in principle they’re revised.
Peer review is how scientists correct that. Often it’s as simple as on figure 2, the labels are too small and sometimes it’s I don’t get how you’ve built your experimental setup can you clarify this section? It’s rarely catching biq mystake but really improves overall quality
At the end of the second paragraph, you’re missing a space between “not” & “simply”.
In you third paragraph, you used the singular “tends” instead of the plural “tend”. In addition, though I believe the sentence to be grammatically correct even without them, adding commas before & after “as in principle” would make the sentence a bit clearer.
Finally, your last paragraph. The second sentence is quite long, it would be more readable if you added commas before the “and” & after the second “it’s”. A comma could be placed just after “Often”, but the sentence remains legible even without it. The sentence could use quotation marks to improve readability further, which would end the sentence on a question mark followed by an ending quote. This would be grammatically correct in American English, but as the sentence is not a question, a period should be added to the end. While it may have been intentional, for comedic effect, “biq” should be “big” & “mystake”, “mistake”. If I’ve understood the sentence correctly, the newly-corrected “mistake” should be in its plural form, “mistakes”, and be followed by a comma. The sentence should also end with a period.
Cooking is not a standardized or reproducible process at home, because the variables outside of anybody’s control. Modern mass recipes give only the illusion of being reproducible algorithms, but they will never achieve that.
Grappling with the complexity of different tooling, supply chains, seasonality and so on, all within a recipe, is a futile effort. That complexity must be handled outside the recipe.
I think a major one is to try to avoid trusting in unfounded precision.
If you want to make lemonade like a chemist, you don’t just weigh out some lemon juice and add it to water and sugar. You measure sugar and citric acid content of the batch of lemon juice, then calculate how much water will dilute it to the right pH, and how much sugar will bring it to your desired osmolarity. In reality, no one is going to do that unless they run a business and need a completely repeatable. If you get lazy and just weigh out the same mass of stuff with a new batch of lemon juice, you could be way off. Better to just make it and taste it then adjust. Fruits, vegetables, and meats are not consistent products, so you can’t treat them as such.
If i were to be writing recipes for cooking, I would have fruits/vegetables/meats/eggs listed by quantity, not mass (e.g., 1 onion, 1 egg), but i would include a rough mass to account for regional variations in size (maybe your carrots are twice the size of mine). Spices i would not give amounts for because they are always to taste. At most, I would give ratios (e.g. 50% thyme, 25% oregano). Lots of people have old, preground spices, so they will need to use much more than someone using whole spices freshly ground. I think salt could be given as a percentage of total mass of other ingredients, but desired salinity is a wide range, so i would have to aim low and let people adjust upward.
Baking is a little different, and I really like cookbooks that use bakers percentages, however, they don’t work well for ingredients like egg that I would want to use in discrete increments. For anything with flour, I would specify brand and/or protein level. A European trying to follow an American bread recipe will likely end up disappointed because European flour usually has lower protein (growing conditions are different), which will result in different outcomes.
I will say in defense of teaspoons, most home cooks have scales that have a 1 gram resolution, though accuracy is questionable if you are only measuring a few grams or less. Teaspoons (and their smaller fractions) are going to be more accurate for those ingredients. Personally, I just have a second, smaller scale with greater resolution.
At some point, food blogs stopped being about food and became personal memoirs with a side of seasoning. It probably started innocently enough—people sharing family recipes, adding a little background, a photo or two. But then came the SEO optimization, the Google gods demanding 1,500 words per post, and suddenly, every recipe for scrambled eggs begins with a story about someone’s childhood summer in Tuscany and how their Nonna taught them the sacred art of cracking an egg with one hand.
Now it’s standard: you search “how to make pancakes” and end up reading about a foggy morning in 2003, a breakup, a golden retriever named Milo, and how cooking became therapy. You scroll and scroll, dodging ads, autoplaying videos, and a pop-up asking you to “join the culinary journey.” Somewhere, buried like treasure, is the actual recipe—five steps long, could’ve fit on a Post-it note.
And yes, this is exactly that. This is the bloated preamble you didn’t ask for. You came here for temperatures and timings, and instead, you got this paragraph complaining about the very thing it’s doing. You’re now part of the cycle—scrolling, sighing, wondering when we collectively decided that roasting vegetables required a narrative arc.
Anyway, here’s the recipe. Probably. Keep scrolling.
A German cookbook that I have first introduced me to the hub and spoke method of recipes. As in, it provided a base recipe at its most simplistic fashion, and then after that recipe, it listed ways you could modify that recipe for different kinds of dishes. Essentially listing points in the original where you could modify it in specific ways.
And this was no modern cookbook. It was printed back in the 60s.
Parametric recipes are great. The central ingredient is quantity 1 and everything else is a ratio by weight. You then scale it to your needs. So an equilibrium brine would be.
1 meat 1 water 0.03 salt Brine for 1 day per 2 inch of thickest section.
They don’t work for everything. So when baking a loaf of bread time and temp are spefic to loaf size. It still works for a batch of bread dough however.
This also helps you think in ratios which help general recipe construction. Once you know what flour to egg radio you like for your bread you can alter recipes to your preference.
not exactly an answer to what you ask but I wanted to share this knowledge: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/recipe
its a standard(ish) schema that many popular recipe websites use, so you can very easily parse them and do unit conversions
Cool stuff, thanks for sharing!
Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook
I’d really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.
I’ve recently been experimenting with curing meats, I’ve done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.
And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.
And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren’t dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.
I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it’s a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and…
When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I’ll ever work with, and also doesn’t scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I’m not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.
And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.
I have a similar experience with some basic fermenting (e.g. kombucha, pickling). I’m growing cultures of microbes like yeast and bacteria and while I’ve been able to spot some obvious unwanted cultures on failed batches, there’s a surprising absence of reputable info and unfortunately I’ve had to get by on the brewing equivalent of gym broscience, mostly on reddit, some of which I’ve spotted is misinformation. The SEO AI-generated articles plaguing search results don’t help either.
Seconding the national center for home food preservation document.
One thing that I like experimenting with that i have to search for every time is the time/temperature curves for pasteurization of different foods. Every “knows” you are supposed to cook chicken (and most “prepared foods”) to 165 °F according to the FDA/USDA. What most people don’t know is that that temperature is what your food needs to hit for 1 second to have the proper reduction of bacteria (e.g., 7-log for chicken, which is a really high bar). You get the same reduction with 15 seconds at 160 °F or an hour at a little over 135 °F. You can easily do that with a sous vide bath.
It’s really cool for people who are immunocomprimised or pregnant because you can cook a steak to medium rare, but hold temp for a couple hours, and it’s just as safe as if you cooked it to way hotter and ruined the meat. You can also do runny egg yolks.
Here’s the first link that came up when I looked for it, but I’m sure you could find the actual government publication.
https://blog.thermoworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf
American here: can we please have measurements by mass not by volume and metric units. It would make repeatability so much easier.
