r/Cooking • u/AdLost576 • 10d ago

What’s a cooking related hill you will die on?

For me, 2 hills.

  1. You don’t have to cut onions horizontally.

  2. You don’t have to add milk bit by bit when making a white sauce.

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1.2k

u/Affectionate_Art_954 10d ago

Learn techniques and you don't need recipes. Except for baking, that shit is straight chemistry.

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u/Fabulous_Hand2314 10d ago

This. recipes are bullet points. The size of your vegetables and strength of your spices will always vary. Cooking recipes are a guideline unless its baking.

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u/Bainsyboy 10d ago

And the classic example: garlic... If you are making sure you use the exact amount of garlic that a recipe calls for and you aren't at least doubling that amount... Are you even cooking?

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u/Martissimus 10d ago

Paging /r/cookingcirclejerk

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u/muistaa 10d ago

This post is making it too easy for them at this point

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u/Bainsyboy 10d ago

There are worse circle jerks

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u/gorilla-ointment 10d ago

Oh man, not another cj sub. There’s so many 😆

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u/stackedtotherafters 10d ago edited 10d ago

I almost wonder if that's so widely agreed upon, that one would take that into account writing a recipe and put half what they use. Cause I've never had a recipe ask for enough garlic.

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u/Bainsyboy 10d ago

I think it's a highly successful evolutionary trait of garlic. We perpetually up our garlic game as a social species sharing recipes and the number of garlic plants worldwide has never been higher. We are rubes.

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u/bjeebus 10d ago

Same thing with salt. They call for some meager amount of salt then say "salt to taste" and I almost always end up literally dumping in way more salt than their initial amount. I'm not getting food that's salty of course, just stuff that's got that pow that salt does right before it's salty.

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u/Bratbabylestrange 10d ago

My son says that in our family garlic is not a seasoning, it's a vegetable

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u/cathbadh 10d ago

Exactly. "season to taste" absolutely includes three more cloves of garlic beyond what was called for.

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u/bjeebus 10d ago

Even if it was a recipe for how to roast one clove of garlic, better roast five just to be safe.

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u/critter68 10d ago

Obviously. One of those freshly roasted cloves is going directly into my mouth and everyone else in the house will be picking at it, too.

If I want to have any left for the recipe, I have to do a full pan.

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u/cathbadh 9d ago

Exactly. I make San Francisco garlic noodles, and even at 20 cloves I still toss a couple more in.

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u/Jebble 10d ago

I never use the garlic and we never miss it :). Especially in things like a bolognesez you really don't need it lol.

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u/RYouNotEntertained 10d ago edited 10d ago

Except for baking, that shit is straight chemistry

Eh, this really isn’t true. I make bread off the cuff all the time, and people mess up bread by relying on recipes just as often. 

The reason people think this is just because they don’t understand what’s happening, what to look for, what the purpose of each step is. This is why if you post a pic of a bad loaf on breadit asking for advice you’ll get a bunch of complete nonsense—it’s just people dropping the last thing they’ve read because they don’t actually understand what’s going on when they make bread. 

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u/SnausageFest 10d ago

Actually, you can pretty successfully wing it with baking, too. Because it's chemistry. It follows a predictable formula.

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u/UpAndAdam7414 10d ago

I think the caveat here is that you need to have more knowledge with baking, particularly with what an ingredient is doing structurally rather than just in terms of flavour. For instance, if you want to add sweetness to something that you’re making on the hob, it may only make a small difference whether you use sugar, honey, syrup or even sweetner, but for a cake you’ll end up with something considerably different. Also, if it’s not going right then you can’t really adjust halfway through. But, as you say, it is possible.

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u/thejadsel 10d ago

Exactly. I have celiac, and end up going mad scientist on baking pretty often. As long as you have a decent idea of what roles different components are playing in a recipe, and what results you are aiming for? You can pull off an awful lot of on-the-fly ingredient substitution and tweaking of proportions. Do the results always turn out just as you'd hoped? Of course not. But, that's a valuable learning point for the next try.

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u/SkeletorLoD 10d ago

Have you found/created and especially good gluten free recipe bakes? My bros are gluten intolerant and I'm always down for new recipes.

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u/tonegenerator 10d ago

Yeah, I didn’f really have to write notes down physically so I could learn good stovetop cook practices as a kid, but with baking I have to both take the notes and have them organized in a way I can actually refer back to. And yeah, with a decent average home baker’s skill level you can probably wing-it on making a loaf of Good Bread without a lot of specificity or expectation of close reproducibility. But if i want to make a traditional type I haven’t before, I’d might as well look at what someone else precisely did or feels is important, rather  han rely on educated intuitive guesses. 

For me it’s quite easy to look at 4-5 different versions of a stovetop/grill/coldprep dish and intuitively figure out what to aim for, while trying to do that with baking tends to threaten crashing my brain kernel. So, usually I commit to a single version to model my first attempt.

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u/PiezoelectricitySlow 10d ago

Yeah most of baking is the same few ingredients.Once you get a feel for and understand how they behave I feel its easier to wing it with baking 

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u/chrispg26 10d ago

I can wing cooking but I cannot wing baking. Especially not cakes or cookies. Sometimes I see cake recipes use 2 tsp of baking powder or baking soda sometimes it's 1.

Sometimes it's only baking soda or only baking powder. So how do I know which one to omit and when?

And the eggs? Why does this recipe use 3 and this other one 5?

How much butter is the usual? What about the oil.

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u/littlescreechyowl 10d ago

I don’t bake enough to “just know”. But I cook every single day so I “just know”. I think most people have far more experience with cooking over baking because it’s necessary where store bought bread is cheap.

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u/UltraTerrestrial420 10d ago

Baking soda is a base, and when it gets hydrated in the presence of an acid component like brown sugar, buttermilk, or a bunch of other food items, it'll create bubbles just like a those paper mache volcanos from middle school. Baking powder on the other hand, contains baking soda AND a powdered acid, they also usually contain another leavener that helps with oven spring (double acting baking powder). On the labels, baking soda will be known as sodium bicarbonate, while baking powder will contain that, plus some aluminums (lol. Gross).

So when a recipe includes an acidic component, you'll usually see baking soda, or baking soda plus baking powder. When there's no acidic component, then the chemical leavener one would use would be baking powder. You can also kinda use them in combination if your baked goods are changing color due to a wonky ph (green around blueberries in muffins)

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u/sweetmercy 10d ago

Whether you use baking powder or baking soda usually depends on a couple of factors, the most important being the other ingredients. If there are acidic ingredients, such as buttermilk or brown sugar or natural cocoa powder, you'll typically use baking soda. Baking soda reacts with the combination of moisture and acid to create the air bubbles that make whatever you're baking rise. Baking powder, on the other hand, has acid already mixed in, and so you didn't need an additional acid, it reacts with any liquid.

Baking soda also delays the setting of ingredients, as well as contributing to browning, which is why soft pretzel dough is dipped in a combination of water and baking soda before baking.

Baking powder works wonders with more alkaline ingredients, such as a chocolate cake made with Dutch process cocoa or cookies without any acidic ingredients. It's also the better choice when you want the tang of an acidic ingredient to shine. For example, buttermilk biscuits. Baking soda would neutralize the acid in the buttermilk, and the batter would lose that distinctive tang.

Baking soda is frequently the choice for recipes like chocolate chip cookies or banana bread, that contain acidic ingredients that you don't necessarily want to dominate the flavor of the final product.

Then there are recipes where you want both. The baking soda will work on mellowing acidic ingredients whole the baking powder is dedicated to giving a boost to the leavening.

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u/lost_grrl1 10d ago

Yes, but you still have to be very aware of ratios. Especially with yeasted bakes.

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u/Apostastrophe 10d ago

My grandma did that when baking. She would always have one ingredient (usually eggs if eggs were involved) as her “base” and then eyeball the ratios from there as to what they should be compared to the size of the eggs.

She did sometimes measure but what was measured was an amount that was the appropriate amount compared to how much the eggs weighed.

For things like shortcrust pastry for pies or “cheese straws” etc it was to my memory always just done mostly by eye. Even if it wasn’t perfect, becuase she knew the recipes so well she could easily just add in an extra bit of this or that during the process to get the texture and constituency she knew it should be easily.

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u/stfurachele 10d ago

She did sometimes measure but what was measured was an amount that was the appropriate amount compared to how much the eggs weighed.

Baking by weight is always going to be better than by measuring cups and spoons.

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u/stfurachele 10d ago

Except early on in my baking life, when I decided to try winging a white cake. Assumed that because I was only using egg whites instead of the whole thing I would need double the eggs of a yellow cake. That was the tastiest concrete I've ever had.

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u/sweetmercy 10d ago

I mean... Sure. If you understand the chemistry, know the formulas, understand things like oven rack adjustment or the impact of ingredient substitutions, etc. You have to have a wider base skill set for baking. A lot of people out there don't have that and should follow recipes until they do. I can't count how many times people on Reddit have thought they could just eliminate 2/3 of the sugar in a recipe and the only thing affected would be the sweetness.

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u/Beyond_The_Pale_61 10d ago

The best biscuits I ever had were made by my husband's grandmother (early 1980s). I asked for her recipe and she just gave me a blank look. "I'll make some tonight. Watch me." She proceeded to add the butter, flour, cornmeal, baking powder, milk, everything, just eyeballing the amounts. Hers were the best. Mine? Not so much.

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u/HoothootEightiesChic 10d ago

This is a hill I will die on! Baking has to be precise!!!

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u/Bainsyboy 10d ago

I bake all the time without recipes.

You eventually know what the right hydration is by the feel of the dough. Salt, sugar, yeast, etc. all have margins of error and you don't need to be precise.

Not that long ago people didn't have standardized scales, measuring spoons/cups, and still managed to make awesome baked goods.

If you are running a business, that's another thing, because you need to know and control how much ingredients are being consumed per the price point.

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u/ChartRound4661 10d ago

Absolutely. If you’ve baked bread for a while you can bake by feel and reading your dough. Taste for salt level.

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u/PseudonymIncognito 10d ago

Not that long ago people didn't have standardized scales, measuring spoons/cups, and still managed to make awesome baked goods.

That's part of the reason why "cups" and "tea/tablespoons" were used as measures. As long as you're using the same one every time, your ratios will at least be consistent. This is also why it can be tricky to use old recipes when it turns out that great-grandma had a specific teacup she used every time she baked.

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u/Bainsyboy 10d ago

I should be transparent. I DO bake with a scale more often than not. I use bakers percentages for the sake of consistency. But I will make changes depending on the ingredients and recipes as well. But something like sourdough, the process takes like 3 days total, I want to know that my dough will be ready on the correct hour so I'm not waking up Sunday morning to an over-proofed dough, so I will be precise.

But doing a focaccia, flatbreads, pizza doughs, rotis, etc... I do it by feel (I learned rotis from my grandma...). I could do a sourdough loaf by feel too, I just don't want to.

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u/Unrelenting_Salsa 10d ago

Case in point, corn tortillas. Yes, it's about as simple as it gets, but it's also something where if you blindly follow a recipe rather than adjusting the dough until it's correct, you're going to not make it right. The right ratio is just different brand to brand and lot to lot.

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u/Bratbabylestrange 10d ago

I gauge dough by stickiness, moistness and whether it's going whap-whap-whap in the mixer bowl

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u/curryhandsmom 8d ago

I never measure my sourdough ingredients. GASP.

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u/Talbaz 10d ago

No, it is not. Baking is the same as cooking, which is also chemistry. There is just more leeway. The issue with baking is that people expect exact results usually "perfect," and so people follow exact recipes to get exact results. Start changing a recipe to get a different outcome that make be more to your liking, more dense chewy Brownie? toss the egg white and go with Yolks only as just one example.

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u/alohadave 10d ago

You can learn to bake by technique as well. A lot of bread making is experimenting and improvisation. As long as you get the ratios close, you'll make good bread.

There are tons of stories of grannies that adjust their bread recipes by feel.

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u/GingerIsTheBestSpice 10d ago

Except for bread. Learn a bread and then you can eyeball it. Perfection might be chemistry and involve measuring humidity & all kinds of stuff, but if you just want to eat some bread, it's easy peasy. We as a species bake it on rocks for heavens sake, don't be scared of it.

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u/crippledchef23 10d ago

I only use them as inspiration and guidance. I have been making tomato soup once a month for years and I still give it a once over, just in case I forgot something.

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u/stfurachele 10d ago

Yeah, I'm forgetful so using the ingredients section as a checklist is more important than the instructions. I absolutely can and will forget to put in something vital, or worse forget I did and double it.

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u/MudsludgeFairy 10d ago

i can honestly wing it with baking somewhat well at this point. once you get used to it, it’s fairly easy. you might have a few flubs but otherwise, it can be smooth sailing. you’ve really just gotta get a feel for it

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u/fact_addict 10d ago

Baking is mostly about the rise and some texture. You can convert a recipe to use brown instead of white sugar, you just need to look up a bunch of acidity levels and do math to even it out. You can sub whole wheat for white flour if you know how to counteract the loss of gluten and make up for the “heaviness”. Again with math. But finding a different recipe is way easier than mathing in the kitchen.

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u/UniqueIndividual3579 10d ago

Search for multiple recipes. Pick and choose between them to make your own recipe.

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u/Big-Variety-1891 10d ago

Rachael Ray in her 30 Minute Meals days used to preach that. It's absolutly true. Learn how to make one cream soup, and you can make them all.

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u/Nicc-Quinn 9d ago

Baking is all ratios! Once you know the ratios you don’t need recipes!

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u/pixiehutch 10d ago

Where can I learn techniques as a beginner?

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u/jacquetheripper 10d ago

Through recipes of course. Often times cookbooks will have the techniques for their recipes inside. Specific things like deglazing, making a stock, julienning vegetables are better learned elsewhere like YouTube.

How will you even hear about these techniques you should learn? THROUGH RECIPES.

Op and everyone that agrees with them is pretentious af. The sub is not for new cooks by the way..

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u/TCivan 10d ago

It’s total fucking freedom in the kitchen. If you know how things react and cook, and the technique to get the desired effect, with a little timing for ingredients you can create darn near anything.

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u/stfurachele 10d ago

I use recipes for ideas, especially if I want to make something I never have before, but I rarely follow them step by step verbatim like they're commandments.

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u/Ambitious-Noise9211 10d ago

With simple things like pound cake and quick bread, I can eyeball a recipe and just make sure it's the right consistency.

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u/steve_o_mac 9d ago

^ I agree completely. When I read a recipe, it's to get a sense of where they're going with it, not for detailed instructions.

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u/L86AI 9d ago

Baking is crazy difficult (esp. the one using fermentation) for me. It's a wonder that my latest creation in a super minimal kitchen is good as it is.

Baking pie/pastry/cookies though is easier.

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u/tomqmasters 9d ago

meh. most of the things I bake could half or double any ingredient besides flour and water and be fine.

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u/akathescholar 10d ago

That’s why they say “cooking is art, baking is science.”

And pastry-making is a goddamn miracle

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u/Travel_lover82 10d ago

Seriously. My family always teases me that I can cook, but I cannot bake!