I agree that the much of the value of recipes is as a source of new techniques and combinations. However, I strongly prefer precise recipes vs vague recipes. A recipe should be reproducible as much as possible. I can choose to make changes or combine another recipe based on my priorities. However, vagueness in a recipe adds randomness on top of your changes. If precision for a single element does not matter or varies unpredictably that should be called out. Precision also helps me understand how different recipes can be combined into something new.

If you are just giving me a technique or idea then write the article that expresses that. The recipe should be precise but the real value comes from the prose.

That's fair, and perhaps precision could be part of the structure. The default is "exactly", but there are options for adding according to taste, judgment, mood, whatever, and some way of expressing a suggested range.

The Joy of Cooking's waffle recipe suggests 1/2c butter, but says you can drop that to 1/4c or bump it to 1c depending on how decadently crisp you want the result to be.

Note also that a lot of times the variations are to account for some other inherent variation, like adjusting the sugar in a pie depending on how sweet your fruit is.

"That's fair, and perhaps precision could be part of the structure. The default is "exactly", but there are options for adding according to taste, judgment, mood, whatever, and some way of expressing a suggested range."

Yes, that is ideal. List exactly what you did in your ingredients list. Then add information about what you change and the impact of this. Kenji López-Alt's recipe is the perfect example of this. I prefer starting from the Jacques Torres' recipe but I still go back to Kenji's article. It shows me the impact of moving any of the dials for the cookie I want.

"Note also that a lot of times the variations are to account for some other inherent variation, like adjusting the sugar in a pie depending on how sweet your fruit is."

Yes, but that should be called out.

The key thing is that a recipe should be an actual recipe. It should be precise documentation that allows you to reproduce a product as much as possible. Prose is what actually is teaching you how to cook.

Tbh I can't actually imagine the measurements in a cookbook were ever really intended to be precise, at least in the kind I've seen. Like even 4 cloves of garlic is vague; it'd have to be given in weight, but no one actually reading a recipe would prefer 30g of garlic over 1 clove.

Maybe differs in a restaurant or business, but for home cooking thinking of recipes as precise seems absurd to me. Its 600g... a number that was clearly rounded, and I would bet they eyeballed the amount they wanted and then measured it. Theres too much imprecision in a home kitchen to pretend to be precise

As someone relatively amateur to cooking, this is entirely news to me. Whenever something doesn't turn out right, I just assume I didn't follow the recipe exact enough somewhere along the way, but have no idea where. Outside of "be more precise when baking", I don't know enough to know when I need to follow recipes exactly and/or how much leeway I have for fudging otherwise.

It's actually incredibly frustrating when trying to follow a cook book _because_ they're often so vague. Even things like "4 cloves of garlic" are nerve-wracking because I have no idea how big the average garlic clove is, whether mine is above or below that, how much that matters, in what ways that will affect the taste, how I should accommodate for more/less garlic later, and so on. Garlic's an easy example, but this frustration applies to almost every ingredient -- especially when they're "to taste" or "until brown" (how brown?) or "until ready" and so on.

Give me 600g, give me "stir for 2 seconds", give me detail! If I wanted to go off-book, I wouldn't be using a recipe!

just what do you intend to do? Get a recipe that says 2 pounds chicken leg, 30g garlic, 10 sesame seeds and 4.2 cups yogurt; and then sit down and measure everything to these precise requirements? Realize you only have 4.1 cups of yogurt, and start skimming a little meat of the chicken to toss? It'd take you a day just to prepare the ingredient measurements! Drop some yogurt and you're back to the measuring table

Home cooking is an improvised activity, primarily because its so lenient in what it'll accept. Of course, maybe the french will tell you otherwise, but most food doesn't come with any intent to be 100% reproducible (and it'd be extremely boring if it were), or "designed". They come out leniently tasty, and they look good leniently.

Until brown? Until it looks like a good shade of brown. Until ready? Until it feels like its ready. To taste? Until its tasty.

Its imprecise, because its an ancient activity. You do what seems like a good idea, and don't do it next time if it fails. Its a game where losing is kinda fun (unless you're "designing" food, which I have nothing to say about)

Personally, I don't find "losing" (e.g. making food that isn't good) fun at all, but rather a large waste of time. I would love a recipe that details the quantities of everything I need, and -- yes -- I would (and do) measure down other ingredients when I don't have enough of one, because the minor upfront time cost of doing so outweighs the risk of wasting the entire meal if it turns out bad, IMO.

I recognize that some people enjoy the art of cooking, but I personally don't. I cook to make food so I can survive. Perhaps I just haven't found the right cook books for my demographic.

I 100% agree with you. Perhaps this kind of structure would be better suited to baking recipes? This sort of precision (amounts, timing, even order of ingredients) can be very important when baking.

Even there, I'm not too sure. I've found bread baking to be shockingly tolerant to variation— as long as I do 1tsp dried yeast per cup of water, and about 1.5 cups of water per loaf, it turns out beautifully. And if there's not enough yeast or it's rising slowly, whatever, just give it another hour to do its thing.

Anyway, that's across white, part whole wheat, part rye, and includes all kinds of additives like bran, wheat germ, cheese, herbs, roasted garlic, even tossing in a pot of leftover porridge from breakfast. Basic bread is almost impossible to screw up.

I agree with you on bread. You have to go way off the rails to screw up bread. I was thinking more along the lines of sponges or macarons, things that are a lot more sensitive to variation.

> I think treating food preparation as equivalent to a Vagrantfile would really lose something along the way.

That's a neat idea, though, in a different direction. If you could implement some kind of standard recipe API and build a business around being a broker for commercial kitchens, wherein a customer inputs a recipe that follows a certain schema and an address, and the commercial kitchens respond saying either "no, we can't make that - we don't have the necessary ingredients / we're cooking at capacity / etc." or "sure, here's how much time it would take and here's how much it would cost." You would lose economies of scale found in most commercial kitchens, but customers would gain much more freedom over what they're ordering compared to pick-from-a-list traditional menus. Users could also search for highly rated recipes from around the world and see if somebody local could make it for them etc.

Mark Bittman was the second biggest influencer of the way I prepare food. The first was a college roommate, who literally improvised everything he cooked, as far as ingredients and proportions go, and it tasted amazing every time. It opened my eyes to how subjective cooking can be.

I tried Blue Apron once. So boring.

Mark Bittman is one of the people behind Purple Carrot.

Cooking is an art form. Baking is a science.