My previous blog post, The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision, has been getting a (minor) amount of attention over on Hackernews and Metafilter, and I wanted to take a moment to go through some of the comments, share my thoughts, and revisit the main thesis.
The professional reality
One of the most common assumptions we make as home cooks is that professional kitchens are bastions of rigid, uncompromising formula. But as one reader pointed out, the professionals are usually taught the exact opposite:
I worked at a culinary school for a while. In the bread kitchen they taught you the formula stuff, but also, to recognize what the dough would feel like, look like, even taste like, when it was right. They taught you how to adapt if the flour was a little drier today than yesterday, if the kitchen was a little more humid.
As an amateur baker who required a lot of time (and a fair bit of confidence building!) to realize that a recipe is just a starting point, it is incredibly validating to see that baking by feel is explicitly taught in culinary school. We often assume professional kitchens are bastions of rigid formula, but at the end of the day, a good baker has to know how to read the room (or at least, the humidity).
We are even starting to see this philosophy formally documented through cookbooks. Garrick van Buren shared a post from 2023 that delves into cookbooks that embrace intuitive cooking. Some quotes I love are
“If you follow the recipes to the dot as printed in the book, sometimes it’s not going to work anyhow… The way ingredients behave in one part of the world might not be the same as how they behave where you are, for natural reasons…Are you getting discouraged? Well don’t… Recipes are there to give you a base to start from, inspiration… and also to explain the technical base on which you can then build….You will have to use common sense.” — Magnus Neilsson‘s Nordic Cookbook
“A recipe can’t tell you exactly how much liquid to add because of the fat content of the milk, the amount of protein in the flour, even the weather can affect the moistness of the dough.” — Belinda Ellis’s Biscuits
On a similar note, The Sourdough Framework by Hendrik Kleinwächter was shared, an open-source sourdough guide that shares frameworks and flowcharts, rather than rigid recipes.
The flowcharts within are surprisingly close to the intuition I use when making sourdough!
Cause and effect
If intuitive cooking is so natural, why did we become so obsessed with the scale in the first place? Some readers shared their thoughts and experiences here.
The fear of bad baking and “imprecise” measurements is a legacy of 19th century chemical leavening. Sure, a cake will be weird if the soda / baking powder ratio is really off. Before that, people knew how to work with yeast. They knew how to beat eggs enough to make a cake rise.
Another element that I didn’t touch on in the previous post, but the rise of chemical leavening in the 19th century, and innovations such as pre-packaged cake mixes, surely also contributed to the ‘sciencification’ of baking.
A force toward quantization that TFA omits mentioning, or didn’t notice, was the availability of measurements as an option. My grandmother, born ca 1900, grew up in a house where the measuring cup did duty as a coffee cup and the teaspoons were the ones people stirred their coffees (nobody in the sticks of Iowa drank tea in those days). And that was how she cooked until she got moved into assisted living and no longer had a kitchen. As for deep-fry thermometers and accurate scales, forget that.
Her daughter, by the 1960s, had complete sets of Tupperware measuring cups and spoons, and she mostly used them (though she cooked for weeks or months on end without looking at a recipe and without bothering too much about exactitude of ingredients). So when I learned to cook, the tools were there, except Mom never really got into weighing things and we had no scale.
This is also a great point. It brings to mind another comparison — deep frying techniques in Chinese vs. Western cuisine. If you have made homemade donuts or fried chicken, you might be familiar with recipes providing very specific (although surprisingly quite varied!) fry temperatures.
On recipes that use deep-frying techniques in Chinese cuisine, however, you often won’t see temperatures listed at all — simply a direction to fry once small bubbles immediately form around chopsticks placed in the hot oil.
Finding the Framework
Of course, letting go of the scale entirely isn’t always practical. As one commenter noted:
At first I was like, but bread! You need a recipe! But by the end I was like, oh, this is exactly what I do. Although I do measure with a gram scale before adjusting.
This is still the exact instinct I have whenever I approach something new or unfamiliar. Recipes absolutely have their place. When a framework is undocumented, a recipe is how you reverse-engineer it.
For example, reading through a half-dozen different pastéis de nata recipes is incredibly helpful for identifying the baseline ratio of butter, water, and flour in the puff pastry dough. Once you see the consensus, you can start to recognize which recipes are outliers, and eventually build your own framework.
Love and nourishment
Perhaps the most beautiful connection made in the comments was by a Hackernews user who pointed out that this culinary philosophy mirrors a similar concept in Japanese aesthetics:
Interesting. The Japanese have something similar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) centers on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.[2] It is often described as the appreciation of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”.[3] It is prevalent in many forms of Japanese art.[4][5]
I wonder how explicitly this translates into traditional Japanese cuisine, which is so often viewed in the West as a highly formalized practice, yet fundamentally revolves around celebrating simple, seasonal ingredients.
Another commenter summarized this perfectly when discussing ratatouille:
The point of a ratatouille is not that it has precisely bell pepper, eggplant, tomato, and zucchini. It’s that it’s a stew of summer vegetables, and the point should be to figure out what the summer vegetables are for you.
We live in a world where we can buy summer vegetables in January (imported from across the world), so we don’t have to deal with those limitations.
But if you cook at home, the point is to make delicious things for the people you love.
We get so caught up in the engineering of a dish that we forget its primary function: to nourish the people we love, using whatever produce happens to be available.
Finally, an email from a reader that reminded me why I wrote that blog post in the first place — to reflect on the joys of baking with mum:
it is a brilliant article. A reminder, if you like, of what baking means and why intuition and bread and love all tied together. Sounds like I would’ve liked your mum.
(P.S.— to the readers who noted that the Syne Mono font on my site is a bit hard to read on mobile: apologies! I have a soft spot for its grungy, typewriter-y look. I had originally aimed to make the recipe pages look like index cards, and this font fits the theme very well. But I do agree it is a bit difficult to read, and may make some changes here.)