Spoons can vary in size, so is it a tablespoon or a teaspoon? When dealing with spices you'll be adding 3 times the amount if you go with tablespoon interpretation so it'd be a pretty big difference in flavour and intensity.

The problem isn't with American conventions. We have no "spoonful" measure any more than you do. That website is not following any American convention by declining to specify its spice amounts.

If its helpful to anyone not well versed in cooking, focus on salt first. IME its by far the most important component in most dishes.

* tablespoon 15ml * teaspoon 5ml * 1/2 teaspoon 2.5ml * 1/4 teaspoon 1ml

(1) not exactly this set, but a similar one https://www.amazon.de/-/en/HAUSPROFI-Stainless-steel-measuri...

The issue is what a "spoonful" constitutes. Check the link to the recipe.

Why? As it happens, a 1tbsp basin on a utensil, with loose food (e.g. rice, corn, pudding, whatever) heaped atop the basin to its sloughing point, constitutes pretty much exactly a “mouthful” of food (for almost all human skull+jaw sizes age ≥6yo.)

Soup spoons are larger than table spoons, because you can’t heap soup, so you need a larger basin to get a mouthful of soup.

Likewise, 1tsp is the traditional heaped-to-sloughing capacity of a tea spoon—a spoon given with a tea cup+saucer, used for measuring sugar into your tea, and then stirring said tea. These are actually rather uncommon today, as they aren’t sold in flatware sets, but rather must be purchased separately. You may not have ever seen a true tea spoon. If you’ve ever seen a bar spoon, that’s an elongated tea spoon — both have a 1tsp basin.

The answer is that a "spoonful" is not precisely defined. "Tablespoon" and "teaspoon" are defined measurements, but "spoonful" isn't.

The answer from another comment is that the author meant "tablespoon."

> The idea is that when someone says "spoonful", they mean "one unit of the thing as you'd normally apportion that thing, using the spoon you'd normally use when interacting with that thing."

> So, one "spoonful of sugar" (or most spices) is a teaspoonful, because you use tea spoons when interacting with sugar in everyday life; while one "spoonful of honey" (or soup stock, or reserved pasta water, or any other thing that you only tend interact with in the context of cooking) is a tablespoonful. (Or actually, a wooden-mixing-spoon-ful, since that's what cooks had on hand to measure with — but as it turns out, wooden mixing spoons usually had the same level liquid capacity as table-spoons. The heaping measures weren't equivalent between wooden mixing spoons and tablespoons, though, and this has caused much numerical error when modernizing old recipes!)

This converter table I sometimes use for conversions lists a spoon as 10ml, https://foodconverter.com/ounces-to-cups-spoons-grams-conver...

So most likely they're relying on the "incidental standardizing" of normal silverware, and making a guess that most people's regular eating spoons are bizarrely similar in size.

Since we're on HN, there's probably a really interesting philosophical rabbit hole one could go down, concerning the idea of things that aren't officially standardized (by some standard-setting body), but end up gravitating towards almost being so, due to industrial pressures and consumer expectations.

  1 table/butter knife
  1 regular fork
  1 small ("salad") fork
  1 regular ("table" large?) spoon - approx equiv to 1tbsp
  1 small ("tea") spoon - approx equiv to 1tsp

Since the spoons are so flat, they can't really compare to a proper measuring spoon.

We didn't talk about the small forks much. The smaller variants get substantially less frequently, at least in my households.

(Which is to say you're not wrong at all, I'm just stressing how standardized that subset is).

You can really see it with plastic utensils. If you get them from a restaurant, the spoons and so on are pretty consistent - not absolutely so, but it's interesting how often they'll be a certain type.

Like step 5 says, taste it and adjust. The foods already cooked by the time your adding the spices

Also, I do not like 'salt to taste', particularly for raw egg or raw meat mixtures. Just tell me the amount of salt, whynot?

Small changes in how you handle doughs of different hydration, and changes in timing/temperature thereafter have a much bigger difference to the outcome. I think it's better to develop an intuition for what the right consistency is and work towards that.

100% reproducible results for both is definitely "science".

The processes that happen to make the flavors and textures and results you're looking for - absolutely "science".

Some very finicky food types require a lot more precision than others, so some (very small percentage of) recipes you absolutely do have to follow very strict recipes and procedures.

But the majority of stuff - baking or "cooking" - you can wing a lot and get great results. You just might not get exactly the results you thought you'd get.

In my experience in a house that doesn't have strict climate control (no humidity control, windows often open, inexact temperature control), intuition on yeast-based dough is actually really important. Two days in a row the same exact simple bread dough recipe can behave very differently due to factors like ambient temperature and humidity.

The trick is getting from a recipe cook to an intuitive cook. For me, I feel like that leap came primarily from a single book (and years of prior absorbed "Good Eats" knowledge):

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3931154-ratio Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman

Highly recommended read.

1. The chemical reaction to make it raise. As I said, yeast is different; but if you're using soda, you need the right amount of all the ingredients (soda, acid, salt, etc), at the right time (water starts the reaction, which will fizzle out after a certain amount of time), at the right consistency (over-mixing will screw things up too).

2. You need to balance wet and dry ingredients. So you can't (for instance) just remove sugar or add flour without also removing or adding something "wet", or the balance gets thrown of and everything changes.

For yeast-based bread you're right -- I normally just dump in water until it seems about the right consistency.

It took me a long time to understand why recipes are vague. The answer to this is because:

* Personal and cultural preferences vary widely, in particular around saltiness.

* Ingredients vary in size. A precise salt measurement for a chicken breast will be too much salt if you have a smaller breast and too little if you have a large one.

* Even ingredients of the same size vary in texture and flavor. A cheap grocery store chicken breast might need more salt to become flavorful than a free-range wild-fed chicken whose meat is naturally rich in flavor.

* Ingredients change over time. A teaspoon of dried oregano might be too much if you just got it or too little if the jar is a year old.

* Taste is experienced in context. If you're serving that chicken with heavily salted pasta and a rich cream sauce, you might want to ease off on the salt so the meal isn't overwhelming. Serving it with a salad of bitter greens and you may want to kick up the savoriness.

* Preferences change over time. Some days you're in the mood for something light, some days you want a flavor punch to the face.

Cooking is taking once-living organic things, each of which is unique with its own history, and combining them in order to please the pecularities of some arbitrary set of living organic beings. It's not assembling a LEGO set.

An additional issue with salting to a specific amount is when you're reducing a sauce. The saltiness of the final dish will depend both on the amount of salt you add and the amount of liquid that boiled off

Cooking can be freewheeling, slapdash, and to taste.

Baking is a science of measurement and repeatability.

If you're unlucky — and the more inexperienced you are the more unlucky you are — then you'll guess wrong, and your dish will be at best okay, and at worst inedible.

A few failed experiments like this, and you'll hate cooking, or approach cooking with fear. Recipes have to be very precise, because recipes are aimed at people who are new: new to cooking or new to the dish.

Imaging cooking was putting raw food in a box and a meal comes out of the other end. Imagine that box has a series of dials each ranging from 0-100. You don’t know what any of the dials actually do. Depending on your input, any number of settings can make a meal ranging from edible to amazing. But far more settings result in “Dubious Food.” Any individual setting can ruin the entire thing. Sure, you can power through 100 to the X combinations and ultimately, after much frustration and time and ruined food, sort of figure things out. But it’s much easier if someone says “set dial A to 53, dial B to 36,”. This lets you just tweak one dial and figure out what that dial does. Once you’ve done that you can go from dial to dial and then see how multiple dials interact. But if you just start fiddling with knobs you either get lucky or learn nothing; or you’re relying on knowledge you think everyone has even though they don’t.

Failure is ok.

Recipes should have all the ingredients in measurable quantities. All steps should be laid out in proper order, with proper technique, times and temperatures explained.

Sure. Once you're past the beginner stage, you can just glance at the description and figure out what you need. But you have to pass that beginner stage first.

> We really need to teach kids

Ah yeah. Because every single beginner is a kid, and everyone learns to cook when they are kids.

For a lot of ingredients this can be false precision. That fresh thing of dried ginger is going to be 5x more flavorful than the jar that has been sitting in your cabinet for two years. Saying "1 tsp" doesn't actually produce consistent results and can actually discourage people from adding more if they need it.

I think it is good to have these precise amounts but also good to tell people which amounts are critical and which amounts can survive being doubled or halved without trouble.

In this case the ambiguity is a factor of 3X, the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Or possibly more: given the quantities of the recipe he may mean some kind of personal dedicated spice spoon that could be around 1/2 tsp. In which case a tablespoon would be a factor of 6x, which is sufficient to make a recipe inedible.

If that recipe appealed, I would say that if you use a teaspoon the recipe would work (assuming he hasn't made other errors in the recipe; I didn't look that closely). But he's not following the conventions and I'd probably go looking for a difference recipe.

Once you've made a few recipes successfully you can, as you point out, easily halve or double spices. But I'd start with recipes that were better tested than this one.

Spices tend to be flexible outside a few exceptions. I'd wager that you can just wildly change almost any spice amount in almost any recipe before you've ever made it and and have any sort of calibrated taste it'll turn out fine. Salt is a way bigger risk here and not many recipes give precise salt measurements.

Hey may mean something else, including his own spoon of perhaps a half-teaspoon, which would also be a reasonable amount of spice. There's enough slack in spicing that a factor of 2 wouldn't be inedible, especially if you're serving it with a starch like rice. But a factor of 3 is almost certainly more than intended.

That's not an American thing, not since the 19th century. That's just failing to follow the conventions.

Also 30 cranks of black pepper? Are the pepper mills standardised? What is a crank full 360 degrees or less? Or some back and forth motion, but again how large motion? How does this even work with my electric grinder?

Yeah, that alone is nonsense. Very confusing, coming from someone who is touting himself on the website as a "food science" guy.

Do people normally measure spices? I never do. Ever. I assume the cook's lack of exact measuring (eyeballing) is why it says "spoonful", rather than "teaspoon."

For me, no, not anymore. Recipes serve as inspiration and I rarely do more than scan the ingredients list and then go off to make something (inspired).

It's taken me a lot longer to develop a great intuition of which herbs, spices, and ingredients combine to make a great flavor than it did to develop the intuition of how /much/ to use if I know what I'm using.

The problem here is the threeish kinds of cooks:

  - beginner
  - experienced recipe follower
  - experienced intuitive

Camps #1 and #2 want exactly the same thing, they just need varying level of specificity. Both would strongly prefer you give them exact measurements.

My guess is #1/#2 is the bulk of people who cook.

The recipe cards that everyone's family seems to have as heirloom keepsakes - those are all more #2 with a dash of #3 ambiguity thrown in to throw off any people trying to copy grandma's old recipe.

The recipes swapped at potlucks and family dinners - same. There's usually a (simpler or more shortcuty than the person might want to admit) recipe buried under there.

If I'm working from a recipe, yes? I don't sweat extreme precision, but I do use measuring spoons. Especially in something like a cookbook, I assume the author has put some thought into the measurements.

Estimating, I would say he is using between 1 and 2 measuring teaspoons when he does a spoonful. So probably start with 1 tsp if you aren't sure more will work and go up from there if you feel like it. The video you've linked is as much a sketch as it is a recipe anyway.

Teaspoon where you have a bit of a pyramid on top

A “regular eating spoon” is usually a tablespoon, hence the name. A teaspoon is typically used for adding sugar to, or stirring, coffee or tea, or eating desserts.

They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter.

Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway.

I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.

Interpretation is also why many people are really bad at it (and art).

If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.

But other than that point regarding the main topic, I don't disagree.

I usually make most food I'm tangentially familiar with without a recipe. But when I'm encountering a new one from a region I'm less familiar with, I need to go through a few recipes before I get the framework for it.

That's not fair, I practically never follow a recipe to the letter, and mostly don't use one at all. But I read them for ideas or the broad strokes behind something I haven't made before.

Take the Serious Eats version. Yes, it's 10x more complicated, but it has photos and careful descriptions and measurements: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/09/the-best-chicken...

It doesn't need to be complicated. Everyone who cooks knows the answers to these questions because they can remember that time their oil started smoking or they burnt this or undercooked that. Just start trying it, you'll learn as you go.

Ad ad ad... some irrelevant random video trying to play when I clearly don't want it to.

The site is really not about the quality of recipe, though they could be made better via your contribution.

A large category where it matters a lot (I've heard) is baking. If you're making a soup or a sauce or some mashed potatoes, most of your changes are predictable and linear -- less salt means less salty. Less butter means less buttery. But when you bake things interact in sharp ways, and the ingredients interact with each other in more interesting ways. Maybe "less predictably" with certain priors -- not in a strong sense (it's chemistry). But in a weaker sense, "why didn't it rise" isn't answerable by "didn't add enough X" for any fixed X, and in most recipes 2X won't mean "twice as much rising".

But I've written down notes (for myself) when configuring a server, so later I'll know what I did. (super helpful)

Thing is, sometimes I write the exact command, but other times I just say general stuff like "setup an account" or "install devtools" ...

which is just like a lot of cooking recipes.

I don't understand the complaint here. A stick of butter is half a cup, 8 tablespoons. The standardization is more ironclad than pretty much any other product you can get in a grocery store.

A cup means 280ml here, but 237ml in the US. A literal tablespoon varies from 7ml to 25ml, and is defined to be between 14.8ml and 20ml depending on locale.

Why not just specify in terms of litres and grams, which are the same everywhere?

So? What we have here is someone whose mother wrote down recipes involving sticks of butter. There's no ambiguity about the amount or the geography.

This is a time interpretation could be a horrible difference.

https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/east-coast-vs-west-coast...

And yes, blog recipes are the worst, but there are still excellent cookbooks out there, or even BBC Good food website has pretty good recipes without the bloat of people telling you their entire life story first

It explains all these things, even what a pinch is, how to use a stove, everything you could ever need in the kitchen.

I have been entertaining the idea of writing a cookbook, that is not based on recipes, but defines some king of framework, describes the main criteria that you will use to judge the result and gives a definition and parameter range to the usual vague "cook until done", "salt, pepper to taste". Kind of Good Eats meets Naked Chef, but describes it all in OO, FP, C2 Wiki and Agile metaphors.

I don't see how REMOVING information benefits either a beginner or an experienced cook.

It's a unique form of expression, like painting or writing.

Of course, it's useful to see what other people are doing so you can expand your own skillset and create your own twist on what they were doing, and this is where recipes come in handy. But I don't _want_ to be told exactly how to create my next meal. I just want some pointers in the right direction. Too much information destroys my creative input and just makes the recipe not fun to follow.

I'm not sure if it made sense - it's difficult to explain why you enjoy something. But please understand that there are people who neither need nor want a perfectly reproducible "food production algorithm".

There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will.

I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence.

Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.

Baking would be one that need to be more exact.

Either way, the simplicity of presentation here transcends any such criticism which misses the point entirely.

Any other recipe site you visit today will have you scrolling for days just to find the ingredients amid ads and filler backstory.

I just love that this bucks that trend.

As for the quality of recipe, well, the site invites you to contribute.

Julia Child's classic (https://archive.org/details/JuliaChildMasteringTheArtOfFrenc...) does something similar in free-form.

Writing my own notes is great for understanding and retention. They get printed out, then tested to earn the right to a plastic sleeve and a place in the folder! Analogue with a digital backup.