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Based Cooking

based.cooking

181–190 of 485 posts

Re: Based Cooking

#181

Am I the only one who thinks that this concept is perfectly good, and all the things the site doesn't have are just great further development of the idea? What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that. All the complaints about the quality of the recipes or the lack of more in-depth explaination of each one, some kind of voting/reputation system for the recipes and for the submitters and the voters, Y…

Git might not be the best way to manage recipes, especially when you're targeting a section of users who might have never heard of what it is. Sure, the idea of 'viewable history' is nice, but the average cook would find trouble with it. A wiki seems much better suited for this. To add a recipe, you need to a learn markdown and create a PR. Learning markdown might not be hard, but learning to create a pull request, a…

I don't think "people who are good at cooking and bad at technology" is the target audience here. The target audience is tech people tired of ads and nonsense.

Re: Based Cooking

#182

Am I the only one who thinks that this concept is perfectly good, and all the things the site doesn't have are just great further development of the idea? What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that. All the complaints about the quality of the recipes or the lack of more in-depth explaination of each one, some kind of voting/reputation system for the recipes and for the submitters and the voters, Y…

> What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

Re: Based Cooking

#184
post #133

Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe: - There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it. - Pound with what…

I learned to cook a lot from the 3x5 cards my mom has in a cupboard. They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter. Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway. I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or…

> I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.

Interpretation is also why many people are really bad at it (and art).

If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.

But other than that point regarding the main topic, I don't disagree.

I usually make most food I'm tangentially familiar with without a recipe. But when I'm encountering a new one from a region I'm less familiar with, I need to go through a few recipes before I get the framework for it.

Re: Based Cooking

#185
Kenji Lopez (MIT grad chef who is reasonably famous on YouTube and for writing for Serious Eats for years and for writing this amazing cookbook https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0...) gives the exact opposite advice of this blog for salt where he recommends using large flake salt for finishing and "table salt" for cooking.

Re: Based Cooking

#186

Am I the only one who thinks that this concept is perfectly good, and all the things the site doesn't have are just great further development of the idea? What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that. All the complaints about the quality of the recipes or the lack of more in-depth explaination of each one, some kind of voting/reputation system for the recipes and for the submitters and the voters, Y…

There are some food writers that are good at getting to the core of a dish idea, listing out the variations. Felicity Cloake's "Perfect" column in The Guardian for example.

For the Wikipedia of food, Nikki Segnit's Lateral Cooking / Flavour Thesaurus are great -- you start out with basic "stew" technique and then a dozen usual and unusual variations.

Re: Based Cooking

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what the word means to you, that’s how you feel about content that the word is associated with. Just like “homeopathy” generally makes me think “pseudoscience” but really means “dilute a bunch of stuff and use it as medicine”. It’s natural to feel that content that is “based” to people who use that word is “cringe” to you because you disagree with their opinions on what is “based”, but it doesn’t change th…

I think you've got the definition of homeopathy incorrect. I checked wikipedia and it says, "Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine." It does mean pseudoscience, specifically medicine, just like your association with it. As far as I can tell from on the usage of based I've seen, it means cringe/unpleasant/racist (depending on context).

> As far as I can tell from on the usage of based I've seen, it means cringe/unpleasant/racist (depending on context).

Again, you need to separate your feelings about the things being described as “based” with the meaning intended by the people using the word. If I hate hippies and think anything they call “groovy” is really ugly and uncool, that doesn’t mean I get to just declare that “groovy means ugly and uncool”. That’s what you’re doing.

Re: Based Cooking

#188

You know why all these sites have pages of effluvia accompanying their recipes? Because lists of ingredients and steps are not copyrightable. A book of recipes, however, is copyrightable. On the web, to make the content copyrightable, they have to add stuff. "A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the…

I was under the impression this was mainly to track user engagement for ad networks and search engines. Navigating to a page and leaving it open doesn't rank as highly for engagement; navigating to a page, scrolling through an article (which contains possible ads), and skipping back and forth between the ingredients list, steps, and explanatory text, is interpreted as higher engagement

Re: Based Cooking

#189
The info about salt is plain wrong. Kosher salt is used for curing meat and as a mainly decorative addition to baking, you don't need to use it for cooking, it doesn't dissolve noticably slower in liquids. In fact when most recipes specify a volumetric measurement of salt they mean table salt and if you were to use kosher or sea salt you would be under seasoning due the reduced volume, nothing to do with how quickly it dissolves.

You should definitely not be using large grain salt in baking for this reason, unless it is to decorate a finished product.

Iodine deficiencies were and are very, very real. They're also on the rise due to food deserts and rising poverty. Iodised salt largely eliminated iodine deficiencies so people with poor knowledge of the history think they just went away. Most processed food does not contained iodised salt, so table salt is an essential source or iodine for a great many people around the world.

Idosing salt was and is one of the greatest public health success stories of the 20th century, do not talk about it like some conspiracy by government.

Re: Based Cooking

#190

Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe: - There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it. - Pound with what…

Likewise, the stroganoff recipe simply says to cook 'strips of beef' in a skillet. There are some cuts which you are not going to be very happy with the result if you do this with. I don't see how REMOVING information benefits either a beginner or an experienced cook.

You can submit pull requests if you feel like this information is important.
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