Re:Based Cooking
by munificent on Thursday March 11, 2021 @01:27PM
(#26427259)
> Just tell me the amount of salt, whynot?
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.
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.