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A German cookbook that I have first introduced me to the hub and spoke method of recipes. As in, it provided a base recipe at its most simplistic fashion, and then after that recipe, it listed ways you could modify that recipe for different kinds of dishes. Essentially listing points in the original where you could modify it in specific ways.
And this was no modern cookbook. It was printed back in the 60s.
So you're basically telling chefs to research and write out for you all the variables?
Baking is a science, cooking is an art.
Every recipe handed down through generations has notes, changes, etc....that's what makes it beautiful.
I am lucky to have my grandmother's cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from....but I don't use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.
There is no exact science you're looking for, the garlic grown here won't be the same as the garlic grown there, your experience won't be the same as someone who has cooked for years saying 'fuck it, throw that in there and let's see what happens'.
....lol, amateur hour
(to be clear, I was saying 'amateur hour' tongue-in-cheek ;)
I am lucky to have my grandmother’s cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from…but I don’t use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.
That's wonderful! All I got was a disintegrating notebook of delights. I do like deciphering it but not when I'm hungry!
I get it!
Now to really boil your noodle I used to work with a lot of (French) chefs who when they wrote out recipes for magazines and such (pre internet) they DGAF if it was accurate or not... "if zey screw eet up, zey sink it is zere fault"
Haha I wonder if they just didn't want to share their secrets!
The only secret French chefs have (and they will deny this) is that they love Ketchup
Parametric recipes are great. The central ingredient is quantity 1 and everything else is a ratio by weight. You then scale it to your needs. So an equilibrium brine would be.
1 meat 1 water 0.03 salt Brine for 1 day per 2 inch of thickest section.
They don't work for everything. So when baking a loaf of bread time and temp are spefic to loaf size. It still works for a batch of bread dough however.
This also helps you think in ratios which help general recipe construction. Once you know what flour to egg radio you like for your bread you can alter recipes to your preference.
Ratios.
On thing that drives me nuts is weight measures for dry ingredients vs numerical egg measurements. Just give me ingredient ratios normalized to the egg mass.
Same could be said for "an onion" or "3 cloves of garlic". Just give me the weights, please.
You should look for kitchen tested recipes.