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Comment by someone7x | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as a pointless refactoring of baking because it mostly serves to make the engineer feel smart.

When engineering is applied to cooking, it usually looks a lot more like Kenji Alt-Lopez and his peers when they refactor a recipe to produce a classic dish without any superstitious steps.

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I'm always amazed at how fiercely some defend measuring by volume instead of by mass. I've had tougher discussions on Reddit about "cups" than about nuclear energy.

Sometimes I think people just lack experience with a good scale. Once you understand what the tare button is for, there really aren't any problems. Also, with a good scale, after you press tare, it can count into the negative. So, if I need 10 grams of something and don't want to dirty another small bowl, I can place the jar with the item on the scale, press tare, and remove stuff until it reads -10 grams.

It's especially frustrating when the packing density of whatever you're measuring is vague, like "2 cups of chopped leaves."

It is also frustrating that there are differences between US American, Canadian, British and Australian cups. And the pure irony that „Because actual drinking cups may differ greatly from the size of this unit, standard measuring cups may be used, with a metric cup being 250 millilitres.“

Yeah, my mom watched me cook the other day and decided she needed to use her scale more. So much easier. Dump stuff in bowl, tare, dump next thing in bowl.

And if I ever need to measure honey (usually you can eyeball it), it's gotta be by weight. A tablespoon of honey is 21g, but you're not going to it back out of the tablespoon.

This blog was created in 2004 which coincides with the peak of Alton Brown's show "Good Eats" and the introduction of more "scientific cooking". Perhaps the name was inspired by that? Though the "about" section on the webpage claims the name was chosen without too much consideration.

> About the name: Cooking For Engineers Michael selected the name "Cooking For Engineers" on a whim. He has no idea if it means "To cook for the purposes of providing engineers with food" or "To instruct engineers in the science and art of cooking". He likes the ambiguity, and other people seem to find the name intriguing and even interesting. He regrets that the name can be misread (when in a rush) to be "Cooking Foreigners".

This is just some food for thought, but I think taking a scientific approach to home cooking can make it more accessible to men. By that I mean: making home cooking seem less like caregiving and more like "rational science" legitimizes it as a masculine activity. Thus allowing men to enjoy it, judgment-free.

I agree. Baking is for me increasingly like the rest of cooking— based on feel and adaptation, particularly where variable ingredients like eggs and fruit are involved that can vary in size/composition and necessitate corresponding adjustments to the amounts of flour and sugar.

All that to say, the moisture/volume analysis is interesting from a theory point of view and would perhaps help achieve a deeper understanding of the fundamentals, but at least for me baking is largely driven by instinct and that seems to have served me well.

The thing about baking though is that much greater precision is needed. I can usually just eyeball stuff for stovetop cooking, but doing the same with baking can give wildly bad results.

I agree, baking is way more difficult.

It's like a longer feedback loop. A lot of cooking is like a really tight repl - maybe even with unit tests (tasting midway through). You can see results and modify on the fly. Baking is like hardware - you might not know where the bugs are until the thing comes back from the pcb print (comes out of the oven).

People say this, but there's a lot of feedback you can still get along the way when baking— this batter is too runny or lumpy or stiff or tastes not sweet enough, or whatever else.

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