Lol. I grew up in southern Louisiana, the only time I follow a recipe and measure things out is during the holidays when I'm cooking for lot of people.

I wing it, and may have lived dangerously once or twice due to my love of hot foods.

Same, I mean who only uses 1 clove of garlic?! At that point of the recipe it's clearly written by a mad person ;)

Not all of us want to smell French.

Just don’t crush the clove and leave it whole…

Not crushing it is the same as putting in less, except less is cheaper.

recipe for bread? throw a reasonable amount of yeast and some sugar in a bowl of room-temperature-to-warm water, wait 5-10 minutes, pour in flour while kneading, until you get a wettish dough, let it rise for 30 minutes, then put the dough in the oven on basically any temperature until it looks done

This is my approach too. I only ever measure the liquid - water or sometimes water with a bit of milk. And measure is a strong word - I just fill 2 cup measuring cup I have because that gives me enough for two large loaves. It doesn't seem to matter much how much starter you put into the batch, as long as it's 'enough'. I usually almost-empty my partly full quart jar of starter. A glug of oil or a pat of butter, a small palm full of salt. As long as you add flour gradually until you get the desired consistency, you're fine. Maybe you get longer/shorter rising times, but I usually do cool and slow rising for hours and hours so I don't really notice much of a difference there.

Easy bread using bakers ratios. I make this bread all the time. This will take about 2.5 hours from start to finish:

1. Flour 100%

2. Water 60% [0]

3. Salt 2%

4. Yeast 1-1.5% (active dried or instant) [1]

Instructions:

1. mix it all together

2. knead it for 10 minutes (or until it passes the window pane test) [2]

3. let it rise for 1 hour at room temperature.

4. knock it down to release most air. Shape and place in a bread pan. Let it rise again for another 40 minutes.

5. Cook at 220°C (200 in a fan oven) for 40 minutes.

[0] 60% (~65% for brown flour) is the sweet spot for easy to make bread. Any higher and you are going to have to use a "stretch and fold" technique to knead the dough which is more time consuming.

[1] Active Dried Yeast will need to be mixed with some luke warm (blood temperature) water before hand and left to sit for about 10 minutes. Instant Yeast can be mixed straight in with the flour!

[2] https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2022/10/14/what-is-the...

> I’ve decided to entirely disregard the suggested measurements provided in recipes, which means that I guess I’ve decided not to follow recipes at all anymore.

When I want to cook something new I'll grab several recipes and compare the ingredients and relative measures to get a meta-concept of what constitutes the fundamental essence of that dish. I use that as a base reference but actually cook by intuition/taste.

For me a recipe is mainly a list of ingredients, with the execution being a matter of personal preference.

Baking is chemistry so amounts matter. In most cooking though, they aren’t critical.

I like some family recipes from India: if you get a list of ingredients up front at all, no amounts will be specified. And in the middle you’ll see “add the milk” when no milk had appeared in the recipe up to that point.

One of my friends wanted to make Lemon Rice as good as his mother's. He always followed the recipe religiously, but it never tasted the same.

Eventually, he insisted on watching his mother make the dish.

Only for her to use limes. "Aha!" he said. "Indian Lemons" she replied. :-)

My Baubi famously wrote all the recipes down wrong so no one else would make it quite like her.

Yes! My great-grandmother will give you recipes but always omit key ingredients.

The standard response when discovered is always: well of course that….

At a Python conference many years ago, around the year 2000, Eric Raymond gave a keynote. This was when his "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was widely discussed, and he was pushing the then new term "open source".

He used as an analogy how you can go to <fancy restaurant>, taste something amazing, and ask for and get the recipe. Yet even though you could make it yourself, you'll still visit the restaurant because they have the skills and practice to make it more easily than you could.

By analogy, he argued, even if you release under an open source license, you'll still get people hiring your services because that's more effective.

Someone in the audience objected. He pointed out that he had worked at <fancy restaurant>, that the recipes deliberately omitted detail, and that staff had to sign an NDA - it was nothing like "open source".

I already had my doubts about Raymond's understanding of things. That was the final nail.

One example of this is that Brewdog release quantities and precise instructions and notes so that enthusiasts can homebrew their favourite beers. I know because one of my colleagues spent a lot of money on computerised brewing gear and always has a homebrew or two in progress because he likes experimenting and tweaking things slightly.

But these people also still go to the pub to drink them on a night out or buy them in a can from time to time. The truth is that it's actually a lot of hassle to do homebrew well so that it tastes consistently good, and even ignoring the expensive equipment my friend has, he still probably pays more per pint to brew his own than just buying it pre-made. Obviously, he does both because he enjoys the process.

> But these people also still go to the pub to drink them on a night out

People also eat out a restaurants even though most are able to cook their own meals that are just as good, if not better.

It's not just about the food (or beer). It's also about convenience, enjoying the setting, etc.

> Except for bread, but as soon as I can commit a recipe for bread to memory, I’m through!

You should investigate using "baker's math" for bread. Seriously. It simplifies everything enormously by replacing the need for detailed recipes with formulas more akin to cocktail making (1 part this, 2 parts that). Your recipes become trivial to remember, and also it makes it trivial to scale them to different quantities.

You're in luck - delicious bread can be made from a simple recipe with no suggested measurements. You'll need a large mixing bowl, a kitchen scale, and four ingredients:

  - Put some flour into the bowl[1]. Make a note of its weight.
  - Add 2% of the flour's weight in salt.
  - Add 0.5% of the flour's weight in yeast[2].
  - Add 70% of the flour's weight in warm water[3].
  Stir until you get a rough, sloppy dough.
  Cover bowl with plastic wrap and leave to rise for 8-10 hours.

  Set your oven to 450°F / 230°C. 
  Put in a Dutch oven, without its lid, to warm.
  Scrape the bowl out onto a floured surface.
  Dust your hands with flour and shape the dough into a ball.
  Cover with plastic and let sit for 30 minutes.

  Put the dough ball into the dutch oven.
  Put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes.
  Remove the lid and bake for 15 minutes more.
  Take the loaf out of the dutch oven and let it cool completely.

1) Bread flour is best, but all-purpose will do.

2) Instant yeast is best; "active dry" yeast must be dissolved into the water before mixing into the flour and salt.

3) Warm like a cozy bath; too much heat kills yeast.