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.

I just want cups gone for solids (and viscous stuff). It’s such an idiotic system. 1 cup of diced carrot … wtf how should I go about measuring that in the grocery store? Just tell me 1 large carrot or by weight.

I know it doesn’t need to be exact but it just doesn’t make sense to do it this way. Even with imperial units, you have ounces, why not use that?

Food science is truly complex, so in order to accurately replicate a recipe, you need to standardize pretty much everything. Currently, there’s plenty of variation and you just compensate by winging it and keeping an eye on the pot a little longer.

In order to reduce variation, we need to standardize the following:

• ingredients: The composition of meat and carrots varies a lot.
• heating methods: An oven set to 200 °C is not exactly 200 ° at every location and all the time.
• weigh everything: Volumes are complicated and messy.
• use a timer: This applies to all actions like stirring, heating etc.

All materials and methods should be accurately documented, because things like the coating or weight of your pan can introduce unwanted variability.

You should check out the super old website called “cooking for engineers”.

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.

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.

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

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.

Autist and scientist here: you’re thinking of baking. Baking is the science one, cooking is infuriating because all of those really vague and inaccurate instructions are in fact as precise and accurate as they need to be. Seasoning is done with the heart, you do have to stir or knead u ntil it “looks right”, “a handful” is the right amount to add. The only way to find the “right” amounts is to cook over and over until you instinctively know what enough looks like.

Anyway the ingredient I really really hate is from Jamie Oliver’s “working girl’s” pasta, where he lists “2 big handfuls of really ripe tomatoes”. I HAVE CANNED TOMATOES YOURE GETTING CANNED TOMATOES JAMIE, I DONT HAVE FUCKING TIME TO GO LOOKONG FOR REALKY RIPE TOMATOES

Also standard teaspoon is 5ml. Just use that and taste to see if it needs more.

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.

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

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.

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