During the previous round of shirkflation I warned people about knowing what year a recipe was from because “a can” means something different in 2004 than in 2010. And now it means something different again in 2025.
Now boxes are getting the shrink treatment too.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/618032
Recipes that don’t specify things in grams and millilitres can go screw.
“Now add a traditional american furlong of bushel sauce to the 25 ounce pot until it bubbles up by five and a smidge horse hands” … yeah, no 😅
I didn’t learn to measure anything until I was 30. I just cooked by vibes. My girlfriend started getting really irritated that I would make something and she would never have it again. Something like it? Sure. But it? No. So I started actually learning how to cook and know how much was going in .
That’s the way I cook, just have made enough mistakes and so many different dishes I can put things together and make magic. On baking, my family doesn’t like fancy cakes, more like snacking cakes, those are pretty forgiving. I don’t measure rice & water, just know how it should look, and yes my husband sometimes gets annoyed that it’s not more standardized but I’m not a commercial chef I am a cook.
The exceptions - My sourdough bread, and the sourdough chocolate chip cookies - carefully measured by weight and if I am winging the bread (never the cookies) I try to still write down the measurements in case it’s the best bread I have ever made. The bread I could almost certainly make it without measuring at this point, I can tell by how it feels, what it will do, but have the scale and use it.
My mom cooked from recipes. Only from recipes . She asked her mom once how to make good biscuits, and her mom said “the water has to be very cold”. Which, honestly, would have helped me a lot. But my mom wanted a recipe!
oh dude entire family agrees that i make the best rice in the family and i’ve tried to teach them how i make the rice but like it’s a big fucking argument how to make rice properly. at this point i think it’s just become a joke.
One scoop of rice. Rinsed a few times until the water is mostly clear. Throw it in the pot I always use for rice. Add water to the lower line that has developed over the years of making rice in the same pot. The upper line is from making mac and cheese so don’t use that one. Some salt. Maybe some oil or butter depending on the final dish. Place the lid on.
Bring to a boil, reduce to low. Wait until the lid harmonics change to tell you there isn’t any liquid water in there anymore. Use a fork to check the bottom of the pot for water. Done.
No one else here knows how to make rice. Everyone thinks a rice cooker would make my life easier. I had one. I tossed it because it kept scorching the rice.
Cooking freehanded can work. Cooking is art. Baking, on the other hand, is science. Every ingredient must be measured precisely, or you’ll get seriously funny results. And often on the bad side of funny.
Once you figure out the science you can even freehand baking. Salt, flour, water yeast. Got a flour with more protein? Up the water and decrease the salt a little. Trying to make bread out of cake flour? Decrease the water a touch. Know what your target hydration level is for a bread type and you can pretty much wing the rest. Can’t do a double rise today? Do a slow rise in the fridge overnight. Want a slightly thicker crust? Add more salt. Baking has a lot of potential for freeform once you figure out the mechanics behind what goes into a recipe.
Yes, but you need to be quite advanced for that. This is bakers knowledge, not housewives/homecook knowledge.
You can also science cooking. Meat thermometers are absolutely fantastic.
The heating time time on some frozen chicken strips was for “a cup”. Of long frozen pieces of chicken.
My favourite is “one cup of spinach”.
If you cook a cup of spinach you gonna be left a single spinach leaf when it’s done lol. Spinach follows no rules.
Is a cup not equivalent to 250ml?
depending on the cup but still, is the spinach pressed or loose? measured before or after chopping?
It’s the absurdity of specifying a volume for a leaf. A few leaves of spinach can fill a cup or a kilo of leaves can fill 250ml if shredded.