[HN Gopher] Analyzing a Baking Recipe
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Analyzing a Baking Recipe
Author : Frotag
Score : 56 points
Date : 2024-04-17 08:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cookingforengineers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cookingforengineers.com)
| mock-possum wrote:
| Do you ever just... turn off your adblocker, for a moment, to
| appreciate how genuinely bad some sites are?
| https://ibb.co/HThtg3g
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Good grief! How do people live like that? I wonder if they make
| any money from all those advertisements, surely no one would
| visit twice.
| ghnws wrote:
| Reader mode saves the day
| progbits wrote:
| "for engineers", proceeds to measure baking ingredients by
| volume...
| fps-hero wrote:
| 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.
| progbits wrote:
| 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.
| blowski wrote:
| Do those factors also affect how much volume you need?
| currency wrote:
| Baking is literally chemistry. You don't get consistent
| results if you measure a powder of quite variable density
| by volume instead of mass.
| explaininjs wrote:
| 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.
| eichin wrote:
| 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...)
| chihuahua wrote:
| 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.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| 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.
| BlackFly wrote:
| As opposed to cooks, who love measurements like
|
| - 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.
| geuis wrote:
| 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.
| z2h-a6n wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| janetmissed wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| tomgp wrote:
| The best cake baker I know weighs her eggs and scales all
| other ingredients accordingly.
| erie wrote:
| 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.
| geuis wrote:
| Ooh I've thought about doing that. Totally makes sense
| since egg sizes range a bit.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| 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.
| geuis wrote:
| 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.
| aredox wrote:
| Patisserie requires exact proportions.
|
| The example you gave isn't related to patisserie.
|
| My best crepe 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.
|
| https://www.lemonde.fr/les-recettes-du-
| monde/article/2018/07...
|
| See also the "Bayesian cookies": https://static.googleusercon
| tent.com/media/research.google.c...
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > As opposed to cooks, who love measurements like
|
| > - a carrot - four cloves of garlic - an onion - yolk of one
| medium egg - salt to taste
|
| Cooking is very much more forgiving than baking.
| haswell wrote:
| > _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.
| vlan0 wrote:
| For sure! If anyone is looking to expand on this, the book
| Ratio by Michael Ruhlman is a must.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| 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.
| someone7x wrote:
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| dmoy wrote:
| I agree, baking is way more difficult.
|
| 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).
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| Ringz wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's especially frustrating when the packing density of
| whatever you're measuring is vague, like "2 cups of chopped
| leaves."
| Ringz wrote:
| 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."
| dunham wrote:
| 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.
| littlelady wrote:
| 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.
| masfuerte wrote:
| [This is wrong; see below]
|
| > 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| 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).
|
| (They're not using baker's percentages)
| masfuerte wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| Thanks! I don't cook baguettes; my ratio came from the
| first recipe I found looking online:
| https://lechefswife.com/baking-baguettes-for-beginners/
| masfuerte wrote:
| 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!
| dunham wrote:
| It looks like Reinhart has it at 65% for both the pate
| fermentee 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.
| tantalor wrote:
| Glad to see this classic website again, and that it's still
| online! I learned a lot from this approach to cooking and baking.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| This is what happens when people think they're smart just
| because they were good at school.
| wackget wrote:
| This is absolute nonsense.
| juliefrench wrote:
| Baking is not science, it is art. Don't over engineer it.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Disagree. Baking is science. Cooking is art.
| whutsurnaym wrote:
| Why are we treating science and art as a dichotomy here?
| Baking and cooking can be both scientific and artistic.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The master of scientific cooking is Harold McGee ( _On Food and
| Cooking_ )
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/...
|
| 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.
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/chicken-fried-rice
| Optimal_Persona wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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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(page generated 2024-04-18 23:02 UTC)