Take soup, for instance. You need a certain amount of liquid, veggies and meat are optional in their type and amounts and you need to apply the correct methods and tools.

I've had a domain and plans to write about this for years but never gotten around to it. Maybe 2015 is the year - even casual interest around here would hitch it up on my priority list.

This isn't "hacking" (loathe this word when used this way) cooking, you've just learned the basic ratios of recipes.

I slow cooked homemade bbq chicken with a dry rub last weekend. You can play games for your whole life with the ratio of paprika to cayenne. A lot of people are really happy with 1:1:1 ratios of onion garlic chilli but I prefer weaker heat and stronger onion and garlic flavor. Another ratio is brown sugar to salt, I prefer no/low sugar and higher salt, but tastes do vary. I suppose "no sugar" is such extreme hacking, that some might not consider my bbq chicken to be bbq chicken anymore. Oh well.

Another analogy is its like modding a game. (and edited to add, its like design patterns)

...featuring a novel kind of diagrams which show you when to do what, for example, look at the bottom of http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/227/Ratatouille

For example, understanding the science of cooking meat lets you cook safely, precisely, and to a very high standard. If you understand how flavour pairings work in terms of aromatic chemicals, you can generate likely combinations from what you have available. And so on.

Most programming is that way too, really: putting ingredients together in a way that makes sense for the end user.

Modernist Cuisine is pretty amazing, but not quite the same sort of thing I was thinking about: it isn't exactly newbie-accessible, either in price or approach.

1. The structure of cooking. A lot of recipes share common patterns, but in recipe books they are presented as individual recipes rather than as modular building blocks and techniques.

2. A scientific approach to cooking. By this I do not mean a description of the chemistry, but rather a more experimental approach and a focus on verifying claims based on taste testing and boiling down recipes to their essentials. There is a lot of stuff around food that to me sound implausible or unnecessary. For example the idea that expensive wine tastes significantly better, or that kosher salt tastes differently, or that searing a steak seals in the juices are as far as I know all myths. There are tons of smaller examples, like recipes that call for adding tomato paste, canned tomatoes, and water, or recipes that call for adding the same spice at several different points in the process. If that is experimentally shown to make a difference, then sure, but otherwise keep it simple. On the other hand there are some things that do clearly work in my experience. Increasing the PH of the cooking water keeps vegetables, potatoes, rice more firm, lowering the PH of cooking water turns them into mush. Grinding spices fresh and combining tastes much better than a pre mixed garam masala. Some herbs are ok dried (e.g. thyme, mint), but some are worthless when dried (e.g. basil, parsley). There is a lot of knowledge like that which you could learn by running your own experiments or from a lot of experience, but that takes far too much time for the average person. It would be great if somebody ran the experiments, and for each recipe tried several different ways of cooking it, and determined the best way to cook it with a taste test panel.

3. Quality over quantity & originality. Many recipe books contain a lot of recipes around a specific cuisine or even sub part of a cuisine (e.g. french soups). Many books try to have original recipes rather than classics. I don't care about any of that. Given that I have a limited lifetime, I don't want a book with 50 moderate French soups and 2 great French soups, or a book with 50 moderate Indian curries with an original twist by the author and 3 great Indian curries. Given that I can easily access millions of recipes, the value of a book is not in the recipes which it contains but in the recipes which it does not contain. Please only include the truly great recipes. This also ties in to point #1. This page for example: http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/recipe/easy-homemade-curr... It lists 5 curry pastes as 5 different recipes, but 90% of the ingredients are the same. So give a basic recipe, and list the variations. Secondly, it suggests toasting the spices, which in my experience does enhance the flavor of some of the spices, but it destroys the flavor of others. This ties into point #2. Run an experiment: toast each spice individually, then for each spice dissolve the toasted and untoasted version separately in water and in oil, and then taste the difference. I could run that experiment myself, but it would be handy if I didn't have to.

The reason you sear steak is to cause what are known as the "Mailliard reactions", a complex waterfall series of reactions that happen when you expose meat proteins to temperatures over 140C. That decomposes the surface of the meat into a very complex collection of extremely tasty aromatic compounds (including some of the compounds responsible for the taste of coffee and chocolate).

If you're interested in this sort of thing, a) the experiments have already been done, b) I recommend Harold McGee's "On Food And Cooking" as a solid starting point. "America's Test Kitchen" is also good.

This is also the kind of thing I was thinking could be covered in a "Cooking for Hackers" series.