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45 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
45 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
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---
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layout: post
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title: "Recipes for Engineers"
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description: ""
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category:
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tags: [food]
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---
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It's a little weird applying an engineering mindset to everything, but after navigating a bunch of
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new recipes as part of cooking and baking during quarantine, this what I think could be beneficial.
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1. Don't intersperse recipe directions with anecdotes. When my hands are covered in whatever I'm
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working on, it's difficult to scroll up and down on a laptop or other device.
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2. Provide weight/mass measurements for everything. Everyone has a different way of measuring flour,
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and having to clean all the measuring utensils is a pain. Much easier to dump all the dry
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ingredients into the same bowl by weight (oz, g) and not have individual measurements. Bakers'
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percentages are nice, but please also include a set of reference numbers so I don't have to do
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all the math on the fly (or figure out how it translates to serving sizes)
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3. Make the purpose of each step explicit. When baking, I typically want to wait for the dough to
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double in size, it just happens to take somewhere around two hours. Also, why does pie dough need
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ice water? It's far too little volume to no immediately change temp. A good way to frame the
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discussion is: what would happen if I just left this step out?
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4. When combining ingredients, re-state how much is being added. I don't have containers to
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pre-measure everything and dump in, I'd rather know exactly how much is needed at the moment it
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is needed.
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5. Add context about tolerance where possible. Do I need _exactly_ 352 grams of something? For
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baking, being that precise might well be important. Significant figures matter (and maybe don't
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use more than 2? Or at least explain why more than 2 sigfigs are needed if used)
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6. The shopping list is for total quantities of an ingredient. The only reason to split quantities
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here is for optional steps. But if you need 4g of something at one point, and 4g at another, tell
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me 8g in the ingredients list.
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Other potential intros:
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- It's probably a pathology of software people that they think they can improve everything, so here
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I am writing about recipes
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- Despite the old adage warning about
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[engineers and food](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/fklb1/a_wife_asks_her_husband_a_software_engineer/),
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going to humbly submit some ideas for making more helpful recipes.
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