As a former professional baker for 2 decades, from corner bakeshops to a hippie co-op to a large scale dessert manufacturer with worldwide distribution - as soon as I saw the recommendation to use volume instead of mass I closed the tab, nothing of value could be there.
Baking is both an art and a science. If you're a home baker you can ignore the science, if you are trying to make money you have to understand at least the basics of the science/physical behavior of your materials.
I take a more intuitive/heuristic approach to cooking, and the single best resource I've found for cooking confidently & authentically by the seat of one's pants is Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat". I've yet to find a similar guide for baking, and don't think one could exist given the narrow range of actually useful parameters.
Reading down in the comments - ratios can be useful conceptually, but for production baking the actual size of the batch vs. the mixer, oven and other tools make all the difference. Gravity plays a part in, say, how a moist dough behaves in a 5 lb. vs. a 250 lb. batch, same for how things bake/burn in a full vs. partially full oven, same for depositors, extruders, sheeters, etc.
Totally agree here, we're in 2024 and still see recipes with "cups" and teaspoons where anyone who has done even half an hour of cooking class will know that they can vary wildly.
I usually try to convert the recipe to proper measurements and adjust them as I make attempts and then stick to my version.
Seems to completely disregard basic physics and chemistry which determine whether baked goods work. The conclusions at the bottom underscore this, in things like casually mentioning acidity, or the idea that you can't knead a high-hydration dough, or mentioning a "leavening ratio" of dry good without considering the other ingredients that will be modifying pH, mechanical action (mixing/kneading changing the result), cook time.... I'm a little shocked that people in the comments are calling this science.
Absolutely cringe worthy. The painful thing is it’s just a simple conversation factor but I couldn’t take the article seriously after that.
Speaking of reinventing, the article rediscovered the concept of bakers percentage, which is how bakers always describe recipes! Except baker’s percentage is unit agnostic and not susceptible to variations in volumetric measurement, ingredient density, and non-universal cup sizes.
Heh, engineering is being about as precise and accurate as needed. Knowing that your taking a shortcut and shrugging and saying "this is easier and still works" is the peak of engineering.
Right? There's some misunderstanding that engineering is about precise measurements and reproducible results. That's a scientist, not an engineer. An engineer is the person who gets the job done and the thing built, and if it doesn't kill someone or explode and start a fire, then that's all good.
But I think treating cooking as any of the STEM subjects is wrong. Cooking is an art. It has to please your senses and senses are not scientific instruments, they're subjective and inaccurate. Recipes are only templates and you need to use the brain to fill in the blanks: if I tell you to add two onions in a stew, can't you use your noggin to decide whether your onions are too small, and so you need to add more than two, or too large and so you need to add fewer? Will it ruin the stew if you add three onions, or one and a half? How many traditional dishes are the result of cooking another dish with what ingredients were at hand, or the result of mixing two things that were previously not eaten together?
But it isn't just a conversion factor exactly for the reasons you state: a cup of flour will be different weight based on brand, how much it settled in the bag etc. Always have to deal with weights.
You also don't get consistent results if you assume the type of flour, atmospheric humidity, baking conditions, etc etc. etc. will be the exact same as the recipe author's and simply blindly follow the exact measurements because "precision!".
The best approach is to watch a video that clearly demonstrates how the product should look and feel at every point along the process, and do what you can to imitate that - even if it means leaving your scales and cups in the cupboard.
Right, but you can successfully course correct if you have a reproducible measurement, instead of one that varies by 20% each time you make it (source: Cooks Illustrated magazine on angel food cake, did experiments on how much variation cup measurements of the same flour had - given their audience, probably preaching to the choir, but it was at least a decade ago...)
If you know how the right amount feels, it really does not matter one bit how far off your initial measurement is. You start with an amount too low, and you add more until it feels right. If the amount you start with is 24% too low vs 20% too low bears no significance. Obviously you shouldn't start with an amount so far off as to be too high, but again that would never happen if you are going by feel.
You want the correct amount by weight. Since volume (for the same weight) varies depending on several factors, it follows that those factors affect how much volume you need.
The technique used for measuring "1 cup" affects how much weight you get in 1 cup. This is in addition to the type of flour, clumping, how densely it was packed in the bag, etc.
- a carrot
- four cloves of garlic
- an onion
- yolk of one medium egg
- salt to taste
because cooking isn't a science and precise measurements are generally worse than useless. If you spend more of your time trying to perfect the measurement instead of paying attention to the texture and flavor then you are cooking very well. People insist baking is different, but it really isn't; the margins for measurements are wide enough that with a bit of experience eying scoops of everything is an acceptable strategy. You build more experience by making a few mistakes or having someone shows you the behaviors outside the margins, but for a first time recipe, sure stick to the instructions.
> because cooking isn't a science and precise measurements are generally worse than useless
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 agree with your points, but your conclusion is equivalent to suggesting that painting is a science because perspective is geometry. I am not denying that ingredients work in a deterministic fashion, I am suggesting that subjective aspects of the person eating the dish are the most important thing once you have a basic skill level.
It's an interesting book and definitely trains you to keep an eye on the relationships between different ingredients. And especially the continua between different foods made of the same things in different ratios.
Unfortunately a lot of the recipes in that book are not very good! When settling the ratios he prioritized small, clean numbers to make the relationships clear. But those aren't guaranteed to be an optimal recipe. It's simply more likely that the best custard for example is 28:15 or 11:5 or whatever than it is precisely 2:1. Ditto every single thing in the book.
It is a good starting point for learning how baked goods work, developing intuition for how changing ingredients influence the final product. Virtually none of them are excellent ratios though.
>> Any baker who focuses on consistent and repeatable results knows that precision is part of the path to getting there.
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.
It absolutely is different. It may not seem so to a non baker, but regular cooking has a lot more leeway. Baking consistently requires a much finer degree of control over the variables. The difference between "a pinch of baking powder" vs "5 grams of baking powder" is entirely different. In the first case, you're left wondering why pancakes came out good last time and why are they inedible this time.
I'm no great cook or baker, but I've learned through trial and lots of error how to bake bread and a few other things. Get a scale and always convert to grams.
I disagree, as long as we're talking in ratios instead of absolute amounts. The difference between "a pinch of baking powder" vs "5 grams of baking powder" is about a factor of 20. I think the main differences between baking and other cooking are that: 1) There are often very large ratios of certain ingredients in baking which -- except for spices -- is not generally the case in other cooking; 2) You can often taste the food in an intermediate stage when cooking, and adjust the ratios -- e.g. for spices -- which is not generally as useful when baking.
Of course using a scale is a good way to keep the ratios from getting too out of wack, and I usually do it too when baking and almost never when cooking.
I bought a scale a number of years back and, yes, I pretty much universally use it for baking--it's just easier as well as being more repeatable/accurate--and rarely for other types of cooking.
scales are wonderful for measuring oil/liquid though. Putting a bowl on a scale and pouring 54 grams of olive oil is so much easier and accurate then measuring out 3 table spoons of oil
I find those sorts of measurements are less likely to be given in recipes though. I do agree that weight is generally better than volume when it's given in a recipe.
It is a matter of scale, it is essential to measure accurately for commercial products that do not tolerate loss of bread/pizza etc. For home baking you have many challenges, from the oven temperature (less than ideal and the dutch oven is meant to simulate commercial oven conditions and temperatures at home) to protein content of flour. I do not measure anything for baking bread or pizza because I use it as therapy not as a chore.I bake pizza with love, by taking my time and adding the best ingredients I can get, from wheat germ to best quality flour and fresh Mozzarella. The family has voted, my pizza is better than any delivery they have ordered.
This is the different kinds of cooking. I have recipes I have to follow very precisely. If I dont it basically breaks the thing being made. Other things I can vary it wildly on how I feel and the dish will come out pretty good. Confectionaries (such as cookies, pancakes, breads, etc) I have to stick very close or it will be a bad time. But something like a beef stew where I am basically blending it together I can vary a lot of items and still come out good. Now if I want exactly the same thing I had the previous time then I have to follow it closely. Some ingredients lend themselves to being measured precisely. Others like say a pound of hamburger can vary in what was in the original meat. Like a lean cut will want more oil/butter. Whereas a fatty cut probably will want less oil/butter.
Precisely. Exactly the same experience over here. I make a chili by experience and it never goes wrong, except for that one time a decade back.
I accidentally dunked my scale in the sink the other day. Luckily it's working now but it wouldn't turn on for a few days. So I was doing pancakes and couldn't precisely measure stuff and they came out terrible, like before I dialed in the precise ratios I use by weight. Scale is working again, so today they came out perfect.
My best crêpe recipe I have gives eggs in grams - not in numbers of whole eggs. The remainder turns into a small portion of scrambled eggs or omelette.
I think measuring by mass is almost certainly more precise in theory, but in practice sometimes measuring by volume is easier to do, and therefore can be more accurate in practice sometimes. Most of the arguments about actual composition of ingredients (hydration of flour for example) and so forth can be extended to volume as well. Baking is also precise but it's not complex chemical synthesis.
So I could flow with his attitude.
What I've decided for myself is that the mass versus volume measurement really matters when the ingredient "measurable unit" size is very large compared to the amount needed for the recipe. So for something like granulated cane sugar in a muffin recipe, using mass versus volume probably won't matter very much, because the individual sugar crystals you are "counting" are very tiny compared to the amount you'd use in a recipe. There's probably going to be a bigger difference due to your impatience or the scale accuracy or whatnot than using volume versus mass. However, for something like whole walnuts, mass is going to be a lot more precise because there's potentially a lot of change between adding another 1 or 2 walnuts given the 1/3 cup you might need, they can shift around, etc.
At least that's where I've come down on it for myself.
This strikes me as a pointless refactoring of baking because it mostly serves to make the engineer feel smart.
When engineering is applied to cooking, it usually looks a lot more like Kenji Alt-Lopez and his peers when they refactor a recipe to produce a classic dish without any superstitious steps.
I'm always amazed at how fiercely some defend measuring by volume instead of by mass. I've had tougher discussions on Reddit about "cups" than about nuclear energy.
Sometimes I think people just lack experience with a good scale. Once you understand what the tare button is for, there really aren't any problems. Also, with a good scale, after you press tare, it can count into the negative. So, if I need 10 grams of something and don't want to dirty another small bowl, I can place the jar with the item on the scale, press tare, and remove stuff until it reads -10 grams.
It is also frustrating that there are differences between US American, Canadian, British and Australian cups. And the pure irony that „Because actual drinking cups may differ greatly from the size of this unit, standard measuring cups may be used, with a metric cup being 250 millilitres.“
Yeah, my mom watched me cook the other day and decided she needed to use her scale more. So much easier. Dump stuff in bowl, tare, dump next thing in bowl.
And if I ever need to measure honey (usually you can eyeball it), it's gotta be by weight. A tablespoon of honey is 21g, but you're not going to it back out of the tablespoon.
This blog was created in 2004 which coincides with the peak of Alton Brown's show "Good Eats" and the introduction of more "scientific cooking". Perhaps the name was inspired by that? Though the "about" section on the webpage claims the name was chosen without too much consideration.
> About the name: Cooking For Engineers
Michael selected the name "Cooking For Engineers" on a whim. He has no idea if it means "To cook for the purposes of providing engineers with food" or "To instruct engineers in the science and art of cooking". He likes the ambiguity, and other people seem to find the name intriguing and even interesting. He regrets that the name can be misread (when in a rush) to be "Cooking Foreigners".
This is just some food for thought, but I think taking a scientific approach to home cooking can make it more accessible to men. By that I mean: making home cooking seem less like caregiving and more like "rational science" legitimizes it as a masculine activity. Thus allowing men to enjoy it, judgment-free.
I agree. Baking is for me increasingly like the rest of cooking— based on feel and adaptation, particularly where variable ingredients like eggs and fruit are involved that can vary in size/composition and necessitate corresponding adjustments to the amounts of flour and sugar.
All that to say, the moisture/volume analysis is interesting from a theory point of view and would perhaps help achieve a deeper understanding of the fundamentals, but at least for me baking is largely driven by instinct and that seems to have served me well.
The thing about baking though is that much greater precision is needed. I can usually just eyeball stuff for stovetop cooking, but doing the same with baking can give wildly bad results.
It's like a longer feedback loop. A lot of cooking is like a really tight repl - maybe even with unit tests (tasting midway through). You can see results and modify on the fly. Baking is like hardware - you might not know where the bugs are until the thing comes back from the pcb print (comes out of the oven).
People say this, but there's a lot of feedback you can still get along the way when baking— this batter is too runny or lumpy or stiff or tastes not sweet enough, or whatever else.
and always has been. Nearly every serious chef has this on their shelf.
To boot, he's a super-nice guy and I talked to him a couple times when he came to Google.
Secondly, there's a fundamental difference in goals between home cooking and professional cooking. If you're doing it over and over in a restaurant, you really want it to be the same every time. If you're doing it for yourself, you need to accept and revel in the differences. If it really sucks, you just throw it out and order a pizza. Maybe next time you can do it better.
I tried to get at that in my fave recipe: no measurements.
> Some grids are empty because it would not make sense for them to exist. For example, a very moist bread (0.60) with a low butter content would be airy and tasteless.
Eh? A simple baguette recipe - water, flour, starter and salt - has no fat and more moisture than this. And is very tasty. Wholemeal sourdough recipes are wetter still.
I don't think a baguette recipe is 0.6 by their definition? Their "0.60" would mean 3C of water to 5C flour. I'd expect a baguette to be around 0.50 (1C of water to 2C of flour).
I think we're both wrong! I was forgetting they were measuring in volume not mass. A cup of flour weighs about half of what a cup of water weighs. So 1C water to 2C flour is roughly equal masses, or a baker's percentage of 100%. That's too wet for a loaf. 0.6 on their scale is more water than flour, so it would probably resemble a batter. They are right that it wouldn't make a good loaf.
That's interesting. I do bake but I'm no expert. My wettest doughs are 75%. That recipe is a bit more than 100%. I didn't think such a wet dough would hold its shape. I'm wrong again!
It looks like Reinhart has it at 65% for both the pâte fermentée and the bread itself in "Bread Baker's Apprentice" and the simple recipe in "Every Day" is about 67%. I consider him an expert, but some of his stuff is fussier than I want to deal with at the moment.
Baking is both an art and a science. If you're a home baker you can ignore the science, if you are trying to make money you have to understand at least the basics of the science/physical behavior of your materials.
I take a more intuitive/heuristic approach to cooking, and the single best resource I've found for cooking confidently & authentically by the seat of one's pants is Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat". I've yet to find a similar guide for baking, and don't think one could exist given the narrow range of actually useful parameters.
https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/
Reading down in the comments - ratios can be useful conceptually, but for production baking the actual size of the batch vs. the mixer, oven and other tools make all the difference. Gravity plays a part in, say, how a moist dough behaves in a 5 lb. vs. a 250 lb. batch, same for how things bake/burn in a full vs. partially full oven, same for depositors, extruders, sheeters, etc.
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