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Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

absurdlyoptimized.com

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Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#81

Post by bkazez »

rendaw wrote: post #75

I like the table layout, with ingredients in a column, and rows being steps. It feels like a "best of both worlds" solution. I'd kind of like to have a list of "baseline required" ingredients though too, to know what to keep around.

Thanks! The layout was inspired by the way my mother recopied her recipes. When I first saw how most recipe books wrote recipes, I was so confused! As for baseline ingredients, it's basically (any liquidy dairy) + (everything else in the recipe). I'll think on how to present this better, thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#82

Post by gettingoverit »

Actually, the whole website is fire. There are articles on the same level on how to select T-shirts and pants.

This is the second time I see a reviewer online doing the thing that was common a couple decades ago: actually doing the research.

Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#83

Post by bkazez »

chrysoprace wrote: post #30

Awesome work. I'm really interested in the parametric-driven recipe card. I wanted to do something like this for bread recipes where you can tweak the hydration / salt levels to alter the recipe but still get a traditional recipe card. I would be really curious to hear about the approach in more detail.

Thanks a lot! Good idea re bread - can you link me to your favorite more general recipes that show all the extremes/variables? I've skimmed some bread textbooks re enriched doughs and have made some Italian breads with sourdough starters, enriched doughs like challah, and once tried the NYT Dutch oven bread, but I don't make bread as often as I make pancakes.

Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#84

Post by bkazez »

thechao wrote: post #3

A ten hour wait doesn't really strike me as a pancake? You should have a "it's 730am, there's four screaming girls, only two of which are related to me, the dogs are begging for scraps, and the demand for pancakes has crossed into Veblen goods territory."

Haha, just for you - check out the new checkbox at the bottom of the form:

https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=&eg...

I'll leave the rounding of the absurdly precise ingredients to you. :)

Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#86

Post by aziaziazi »

bkazez wrote: post #51
jpdenford wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus one!

Good idea, added! If you have only vegan dairy checked, it'll go for vegan butter too. :) https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=soy...

There’s many brand and formula of those butter. For more predictability, raw ingredients might be coco oil, coco butter or Shea butter.

By the way my favorite pancakes are made with tofu and/or silken tofu.

Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#88

Post by raphman »

jamessb wrote: post #77
hedgehog wrote: post #56

I want to like this but it reads like Claude output, how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy?

> it reads like Claude output Yep. From the site's about page: > This site is produced with substantial help from large language models: they assist with the literature search, the drafting, and the arithmetic. https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/about/ > how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy? The inclusion of references without hyperlinks suggests it wasn't thoroughly checked: they were probably put there by Cla…

FWIW, the author writes:

> " Ovalbumin coagulates irreversibly at 80°C (Weijers et al., 2003), permanently setting the foam structure.",

and the paper by Weijers et al. says:

> "A strong temperature dependence on the reaction rate was observed. At 80°C, half of the protein was denatured and aggregated in less than 2 min (half-time, th), while at 68.5°C this took approximately 6 h."

So, the citation is generally true-ish although a little bit imprecise.

At which temperature range Ovalbumin coagulates seems quite irrelevant for the whole article, however. To me it's unnecessary fluff, others might like that kind of detail.

(This does not imply anything regarding the article as a whole - it's just one thing I checked.)

Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#89

Post by seszett »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #76

Neat. Now do it for gluten free flour[1] :) this is the go-to recipe in my home. You can sub in GF flour (Bob's 1:1) and they're consistently excellent. https://smittenkitchen.com/2011/06/blueberry-yogurt-multigra... [1] so I can enjoy it!

Yeah I'm not so much interested into the details of fluffy pancakes as we make flat crêpes here (I'm kinda surprised to see pannekoeken mentioned and not Breton crêpes which are as far as I know better known in the English-speaking world - they are the same, except the Dutch ones are usually garnished with an approximately 1 cm-thick sugar layer afterwards).

Anyway, I'm more interested into good flour blends, from wheat, buckwheat to rice and tapioca flour. Flour can make everything different but it can also make pancakes pretty much impossible to bake correctly if it's not the right blend, and I find it difficult to predict.

Re: Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

#90

Post by seszett »

moron4hire wrote: post #8

> the use of imprecise cup measurements rather than weights It really does not matter. Both because variation doesn't matter and because weights vs volumes are not going to give a big enough variation to really be detectable.

It's true. But it's also so much easier to measure weight that I don't understand why some (mostly American) recipes still use volumes for solids. In practice most people I know also measure liquids by weight when cooking, anyway. You you put your bowl on a scale and everything's easy and you don't need to make a measuring cup dirty.
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