Also, not all ingredients in a recipe scale linearly--most notably spices, tinctures, and any fermentation components.
Is punching a number into a calculator and then multiplying by M (memory function, for the scale factor) really that much work than carefully sliding tithe slider into position and reading/eyeballing the output?
Why would you do this while you're cooking? I do all of my calculations before I start, usually in front of a computer.
Random dumb example: say you need 6/7ths of 3/4 of a tablespoon of table salt... or 0.64 tablespoons. That's not gonna be a common measuring device.
Look it up in terms of grams, though, call it 20g per tablespoon (or measure the original amount in grams if you like), multiple by .64, get 12.8g, use your scale to get ~13. I'm more confident in my ability to get 13g with my scale than I am to get 0.64 tablespoons (half + half of a quarter is what I'd have to use with my measuring stuff, and the "half of a quarter" is annoying when they're rounded and all...). If your voice assistant can take care of the conversions, it GREATLY speeds it up too.
(The observant could respond here that 0.64 tablespoons is damn close to 2 teaspoons and so this example off the top of my head is dumb. Which is true, but frankly I have to look up a bunch of those sorts of things any time I try them, and it could've landed on something more awkward like 0.4 tablespoons total.)
Correct, first thing I thought of. :-)
> ... and it could've landed on something more awkward like 0.4 tablespoons total.
Let me try to tackle that one. 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons, so that's 1.2 teaspoons. Most tablespoon & teaspoon sets have a 1/4 teaspoon as the smallest available measurement, so I'd probably make that 1.25 teaspoons and leave the 1/4 teaspoon not quite full.
I know several families who homeschool. Getting kids to help you in the kitchen is apparently a very good way to get them comfortable with doing math with fractions.
Incidentally, our own problems go the other way. My wife likes to get recipes from American recipe sites that give measurements in cups or tablespoons, but we live outside America (I got a job overseas) so the local store sells things in grams or kg. So when I'm doing the grocery shopping on my way home from work, I often have to look up "how much does one cup of sour cream weigh" to know whether I should buy the 250g package or the 1kg package. Once the ingredients arrive in the kitchen, we find the fraction math easy. (Though we also, very often, make use of the kitchen scale in measuring ingredients).
It is also all moot because ingredients (especially spices) have massive variance in potency, sweetness, bitterness, sourness, etc., so recipes are only ever a guideline. I.e. if you double a spice that is twice / half as potent as expected, you can get an unpalatable / bland dish, and IMO factors between 0.25 to 4.00 are extremely common for plenty of ingredients. So you always just need to taste and adjust accordingly. This is also ignoring that certain ingredients can vary in multiple dimensions (e.g. a lemon that is a lot sweeter than expected but less sour, and so simple scaling of the lemon alone can't get you want want: you need to reach for white sugar and/or citric acid to get your desired pH and sweetness).
It is also a fantasy that all flavour concentrations are perceived linearly anyway (and this is especially the case for acidity / sour / pH generally, but also spiciness in e.g. ginger, pepper, capsaicin).
Is that “put the leaves in the cup” or “put the leaves in the cup and press them down” or “roughly chop the basil leaves and put them into the cup” or “finely chop the basil leaves and put them into a cup”?
Using a slide rule is all very well, but you only really need it if you’re using daft measurements like cups and spoons. If you just use grams and millilitres you don’t need one.
For baking where its almost an exact science, it baffles me why recipes still use cups and spoons. I specifically search for recipes where the measurements are in grams. SeriousEats is often where I end up.
Which is why you can easily tell the difference between an expert baker and an idiot by whether they - respectively - measure flour by weight or by volume.
> Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour.
I do more baking than cooking. Baker's math is an incredibly useful concept. But that math is trivial to do in my head, and that's much more convenient than a slide rule or other calculating device.
maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g
The amount of fat is rarely critical, pie crusts and puff pastry the exceptions. Unless the situation is puff pastry, make the full recipe. There are also recipes, like Better Homes and Gardens cookbook "baked rice pudding", that you can fudge ingredients to an extent, but can't double. The heat transfer of a double sized batch of custard prevents the whole thing from cooking.
The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.
PS
I own 2 slide rules. I don't use either one in the kitchen.
Bakers percentages (measuring by-weight as a percentage of the largest mass ingredient (usually flour or water)) only work for lean dough and only for the non-fermenting components of that dough.
Put more concretely, one does not linearly scale the yeast in a lean dough. It results in far too rapid a fermentation, over-proofed dough, and less flavor complexity.
Cooking is stacking exponents with whole range of parameters, so linear scaling indeed happens only sometimes, if you squint hard :). Unfortunately, the error bars on everything are huge - purity and quantity of ingredients, accuracy of measuring devices, accuracy and reliability of equipment, and people's care about the process - they're all so bad that cooking simply cannot be anything better than an art.
(The non-art variant is called process engineering.)
But yeah, it is the messiness and art of it that keeps it fun for me (especially after a day of math and coding)!
It differs from chemical process engineering in that the latter actually cares about consistency and quality of outcome.
Kitchens are rarely even equipped properly for cooking to be anything other than art. Fortunately, humans aren't particularly discerning about taste either :).
I'd never put them near my kitchen - too precious. Also, not necessary? Today I readjusted the measurements for a chemistry experiment by 50% without a calculation aid and it's really not that hard.
Last year I picked up a bamboo Hemi and worked through the (70yo!) workbook. The trigonometric scales are cool. Making a single slide to find all the sides of a triangle is surprisingly satisfying. It got me to realize that, sliderules with the right scales can solve the roots of any 3-variable equation. I guess this is why there was a proliferation of industry-specific sliderules back in the day.
More generally, aren't simple, well-engineered analog tools so satisfying?
With much tutoring, I learned to use a sextant and doing that gives one some sense of the "sorcery" and power achievable with blue-water navigation.
Boyer and Merzbach cover some of the development of these tools in their "History of Mathematics". Highly recommended.
Makes me want to get one now, because I like the concept of memorizing ratios rather than recipes (thanks to the popular eponymous book), and this seems more convenient (and satisfying) for non-trivial computations than getting my screen dirty or dictating it to an assistant.
In metric countries, a small kitchen scale is very common. The US seems to run on volume, rather than weight.
Baking is based on proportions. As long as you use the same measuring tool, the details don’t matter.
2 cups of flour works regardless of the size of your cup
> J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, the managing editor of the blog Serious Eats, once asked 10 people to measure a cup of all-purpose flour into a bowl. When the cooks were done, Mr. Lopez-Alt weighed each bowl. “Depending on how strong you are or your scooping method, I found that a 'cup of flour’ could be anywhere from 4 to 6 ounces,” he said. That’s a significant difference: one cook might be making a cake with one-and-a-half times as much flour as another.
So you have to carefully scoop precisely the same way every time to even be close to accurate??
Technically you’re supposed to sift your flour before measuring. This removes clumps and also helps you get consistent packing. I think in ye olden days it also got rid of any leftover wheat husks that made it through.
My point wasn’t that you get the same amount of flour every time. You get the same ratio of ingredients today.
Ime people way overthink home baking. If you’re not trying to make 500 perfectly identical units, you really don’t have to sweat the measurements so much. Make the dough or batter then adjust until it feels right. Having good pictures (or experience) for different stages of a recipe is way more important than detailed measurements.
As a quick sanity test, if it did, serious baking resources would just always specify to use sifted flour (as this is easier and requires less equipment than a scale), but since they don't (e.g. Modernist Bread/Pizza, if you really demand a citation), you can infer that sifting is not effective in making reproducible results. Also, note e.g. chemistry is not done using sifted volumes (peruse quickly the amount of articles trying to assess the bulk vs "tapped density" of various powders: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22ta...). This should cause some skepticism about claims that sifting your flour is going to make baking results particularly consistent.
Sifting definitely helps remove variance (especially if you always buy the same flour and use the same sifting method into the same bowl, and then put un-needed sifted powder back into the jar), but IMO is far inferior to just weighing.
You're still right everyone overthinks home baking. Precision only matters if you are aiming for perfection, and even a horribly misspecified recipe made at home, but consumed fresh, is still generally going to be good, and definitely better than anything you buy at a supermarket. (And this is precisely why using a slide rule for precision is massively missing the point). As you said, there are many indicators that are more important to pay attention to.
And hope that if you share your recipe, or get one from someone else, that everyone is using the same tool.
And yet still you are right you must often adjust significantly in baking for other factors (temperature + yeast activity, humidity, flour grind and composition, and general feel on kneading).
This couldn't be more wrong and no serious baking is done by volume for dry ingredients (flour, yeast, sugar, salt preferments, other additives).
EDIT: It is clear from your other comments you almost certainly know what you are doing, but this particular part is very wrong. You can't measure powders reliably by volume, regardless of sifting, tapping, or tamping.
This is why any half-ways sane baker works off a scale.
Anyway, it's not really an issue.
I have no idea if this is true but it sounds like a coherent argument that isn't just volumetric vs mass units.
* and to head off the obvious "just don't worry about it if you go a few grams over" rebuttal: that defeats the purpose of using a scale for precision! So either you don't worry about the wiggle room in measurements (at which point just use volume, it's faster), or you strive for precision and it takes you much more work. Either way it's a worse solution unless you really, truly need maximum accuracy.
You're right volumes seem easier, at first blush, but the cost of this easiness is a dramatic / considerable reduction in consistency, compared to when measuring by mass.
Once you switch to regularly scaling by mass (just as a guideline, and still adjusting to taste, texture, and other factors), you'll realize the apparent easiness of volumes is pure illusion, and actually makes getting good results much harder.
You can have huge variance variance with flour or sugar depending on how hard it is packed and even humidity:
> I weighed each cup on its own, tared the scale, then scooped it into a bucket of granular sugar and bulldozed the top with the flat side of a butter knife (I figured that there's less divergence in sugar-measurement technique, and it's composed of fine granules that settle fairly evenly).
> The results ranged from 6.81 ounces (193 grams) to 8.08 ounces (230 grams).
* https://food52.com/story/16497-the-truth-about-your-measurin...
And you have to trust your measuring cups (>5% off) and spoons (>20% off):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Q21DWg0Fk&t=54s
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEXLt4gz7lY&t=59s
* https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2014/11/03/your-measur...
Have you ever verified that your cups/spoons are actually accurate?
> Takes a few seconds. If I use a scale, I have to watch the scale carefully until I'm getting close, then slow down my rate of pouring into the bowl greatly so that I don't go over.
Yes, that's the point, especially in baking: to get an accurate quantity. (Though in cooking it's less important, relatively speaking.)
And yes, in general a slide ruler is a great tool. I should try it again.
I don't understand complex numbers and time--frequency domain translations but I suspect a log understanding feels similar to those.
https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/list.php
Circular rules are superior to slide rules.
People had to be taught not to go wild with the extra precision.
Indicating proportions with respect to weight is much simpler. Just put a scale under your mixing bowl and weight stuff as you add them. Less stuff to clean, less waste, easier to dose.
I think Slide rule is an amazing invention, for it's simplicity and vastness of calculations that can be done.
Only in Imperial/United States customary units. They start with a few unconvincing metric examples, then throw away the pretence and jump right into cups, tbsp, etc.
If you'd stop using Imperial, and started using metric + scales, the entire problem domain no longer exists.
I would disagree slightly for this when it comes to making precise doughs or other things like brines, syrups, candy, and etc. Or at least I would change "estimating" to "adjusting" in your statement above. When it comes to trying something new (whether in baking from a proper source, like e.g. Modernist Bread or Modernist Pizza, or otherwise), a scale is invaluable.
But yeah, once you have some something a few times and have the feel, you can convert to volumes and go based on your senses. There's a baseline science / formula to some cooking, but the rest really is art.
This feels like a nit, because really I am just glad to see someone else pointing out the obvious realities here. While I would be hesitant to try Mr. Slide Rule's cooking, I'd try your cooking without fear!
> Only in Imperial/United States customary units.
Cooking is only about proportions in some very narrow fields (e.g. baking), and, even then, adjustment to ingredients, environment, and other contextual factors is paramount, and most adjustments need to be non-linear (whether by mass, volume, or surface-area). If the proportions are anything other than guidelines, you are doing mediocre cooking, at best.
If you see a recipe involving flour and it uses volume, it is trash, will not be reproducible. All serious baking is done by mass and mass only, except for glazes / coatings and/or if a very specific product / brand is specified. EDIT: as another commenter here noted, yeast also does not scale linearly (obviously) except in special cases.
Also, oils in general should be measured neither by volume nor by mass, but relative to what they need to coat / submerge (be that an ingredient, a cooking surface, or some combination of the two), or, for deep-frying, based on the amount needed to not drop temperature too significantly for whatever batch you are frying. That is, much cooking is about surface areas of your ingredients.
What? No way that happened! In all seriousness though I almost never find myself in the need to multiply anything in the recipe by the amount different than some multiple of 0.5 and these are pretty easy to do in my head.
But, sure, I guess this helps you scale up those guidelines in some rare cases where that math isn't trivial to do in your head...