ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]

I know it feels that way - believe me, I mentioned I’m autistic for a reason, and that reason is I had plenty of meltdowns over the impreciseness of instructions before getting it - but it’s not running before you can walk, it’s walking before you run. Being precise and scientific about your cooking is the Olympic sprint of cooking, the high level michelin-starred stuff, not worrying about precision is the first teetering steps that lets you start to refine your technique.

There is wiggle room in baking, but it relies on a deeper understanding of the ingredients than cooking. If a recipe wants 250g of flour and you only have 200g, you have to adjust the amounts of sugars and fats as well, and while the flavourings have a lot more wiggle room, some of them still require swapping out base ingredients for them to maintain the correct ratios.
With cooking if a recipe calls for 500g of potatoes and you only have 300g you can just put 300g in and keep cooking. Recipe calls for 300g tomatoes but you don’t want to waste the last quarter of your 400g can? We’re having an extra tomato-y sauce tonight. You have a lot more room to change ingredients around without it having a significant effect on the rest of the recipe.

Sorry sib, but you gotta buy the spices. They’re like salt and oil, or pots and pans - you are almost always going to be using some of them, no matter what you’re cooking. It helps a lot to find an Indian supermarket, because you can get big packets of spices for much cheaper than the bottles in regular supermarkets.

Also too many spices has never been an issue I’ve had with Jamie, if anything I feel he overrelies on access to good quality ingredients. Yotam Ottolenghi is the spice dickhead, most of his recipes require a specific overpriced spice blend only he sells.

Yes, and I’m explaining that a significant part of being an experienced cook is just the understanding that cooking isn’t precise. You do not need to work out what sized teaspoons the author was using, just get any of the teaspoons out of your drawer, fill it up, mix it in, and then taste to see if it seems ok. The final result will depend on factors you can’t control for - the conditions ingredients were grown in, the age of spices when they were ground, the specific cultivar you’re using - and the author doesn’t have your personal tastes, so while they can tell you the ingredients to use they can’t give you the precise amounts that you’ll enjoy. To find that out you need to make the dish repeatedly with small adjustments until you hone in on your tastes.

Autist and scientist here: you’re thinking of baking. Baking is the science one, cooking is infuriating because all of those really vague and inaccurate instructions are in fact as precise and accurate as they need to be. Seasoning is done with the heart, you do have to stir or knead u ntil it “looks right”, “a handful” is the right amount to add. The only way to find the “right” amounts is to cook over and over until you instinctively know what enough looks like.

Anyway the ingredient I really really hate is from Jamie Oliver’s “working girl’s” pasta, where he lists “2 big handfuls of really ripe tomatoes”. I HAVE CANNED TOMATOES YOURE GETTING CANNED TOMATOES JAMIE, I DONT HAVE FUCKING TIME TO GO LOOKONG FOR REALKY RIPE TOMATOES

Also standard teaspoon is 5ml. Just use that and taste to see if it needs more.

I was riding my bike to work along the canal path a couple of weeks ago and came across a dog, that when told to move over to let me pass, looked up at it’s owner then turned and came gallumphing towards me to play instead. It was so excited to disobey I nearly fell over my bars laughing.