Scientists of Lemmy, how would you standardize or improve cooking recipes?

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.

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 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

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.

You should look for kitchen tested recipes.

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.

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.

I've been cooking at home, and occasionally in restaurants, since I was about ten or so. So, 40ish years.

No single standard is better than the others. It does suck that there isn't a single one that is used as a base, and then gets converted by the cook into their preferred units and structure, but even that has issues.

The good news is that most cooking, and even most baking, is very forgiving of the kind of discrepancies between sizes of lemons, onions, etc. You don't really run into trouble until you're dealing with things that react chemically based on the ratio of ingredients, which is still most common in baking, and not even all baking.

Even in those types of recipes, it's usually flour that's the problem, not leaveners, since flour compacts readily and to a high degree. But, then again, most modern recipes like that are going to be in weight measures, or in baker's ratios. You'd be using a scale for the fiddly recipes.

So, generally, just guesstimate your produce size the first time you make something. It's not going to be so far off that the results will suck if the dish itself doesn't. Then you tweak things until it fits what you prefer, which is what happens anyway as you build your recipe book/collection.

My old recipe book had scribbled notes in the margins from years of refinements. When I copied that into a digital recipe manager, I added them in directly. Now, I'm able to just enter the original recipe, then add my notes as parentheticals or whatever as I refine.

Even with those detailed notes, a given recipe won't always be reproducible as exactly the same. That's because you just can't standardize everything. You use good produce, there's going to be varying water content, slight differences in flavor compounds, more or less sugars, so to get the same results over time, the cook has to know how to adjust for those things on the fly.

Of equal import is that no matter how scientific your process of recipe development is, the table is never the same as the cook. My taste buds and brain aren't the same as my wife's, my kid's, my cousin's, etc. So there's limits to the benefits of standardized recipes on the plate.

Now, formatting? That's a huge help.

You want your ingredient list to include instructions about when an ingredient is used in multiple places. You want lists broken down in sections when a recipe calls for multiple procedures (like making the main dish, a sauce, and a crust).

In the instructions, make sure the ingredient quantities are included for redundancy.

If there's an instruction about duration that's variable explain what the variables change. As in: bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Okay, great. What's the difference? If my stove runs hot and I go for the short time, will I see golden brown, and will 15 be burnt or just really dark? Yeah, you can't expect identical results from one circumstance to the next, but at least drop an "until golden brown" at the very minimum.

That applies to any variable, imo, but it can get to be too much detail in complicated recipe.

Cooking and baking are chemistry, physics. But they're also an art. The more you try to strip a recipe of flexibility, the less successful it's going to be for the next cook.

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.

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

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.

OP right now

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

So you're basically telling chefs to research and write out for you all the variables?

Baking is a science, cooking is an art.

Every recipe handed down through generations has notes, changes, etc....that's what makes it beautiful.

I am lucky to have my grandmother's cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from....but I don't use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.

There is no exact science you're looking for, the garlic grown here won't be the same as the garlic grown there, your experience won't be the same as someone who has cooked for years saying 'fuck it, throw that in there and let's see what happens'.

....lol, amateur hour

Are your oven's thermometer and kitchen scale within their calibration due dates? Is that timer NIST traceable? The measuring cups ARE Class A glassware, aren't they? Please, at least tell me you're getting your ingredients from certified suppliers... No, the spices from the dollar store down the road are most definitely NOT on the approved list, no matter how cheap they were! Dear Lord, how are you going to blame the recipies when your kitchen is still operating in the Dark Ages?

American here: can we please have measurements by mass not by volume and metric units. It would make repeatability so much easier.

Dependencies chart!

Also, putting the amounts in the directions and not just at the beginning.

avoid rigid recipes and prefer cookouts

• examples from professional recipes – measurements are given as weights (in grams) – no worrying about how much brown sugar in a “packed cup” or if your cup of flour has been sifted enough or what exactly is meant by a “cup of spinach”
• examples from baking recipes – measurements are given as percentages – allows easy scaling up and down

Ratios.

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.

On thing that drives me nuts is weight measures for dry ingredients vs numerical egg measurements. Just give me ingredient ratios normalized to the egg mass.