I don't see how a slide rule would substantially improve anything in my kitchen, honestly.
> Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour.
I do more baking than cooking. Baker's math is an incredibly useful concept. But that math is trivial to do in my head, and that's much more convenient than a slide rule or other calculating device.
Also nearly all western baking involves whole eggs, which you must treat as a unit unless you're doing just terrible volume. You can figure out the "base" (one egg) proportion and then just scale by integers of that.
As a hobbyist cook, this article starts with a false (or at least misleading) premise:
maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g
The amount of fat is rarely critical, pie crusts and puff pastry the exceptions. Unless the situation is puff pastry, make the full recipe. There are also recipes, like Better Homes and Gardens cookbook "baked rice pudding", that you can fudge ingredients to an extent, but can't double. The heat transfer of a double sized batch of custard prevents the whole thing from cooking.
The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.
PS
I own 2 slide rules. I don't use either one in the kitchen.
Truth. To be blunt, while some aspects of some recipes can be scaled linearly, others can not.
Bakers percentages (measuring by-weight as a percentage of the largest mass ingredient (usually flour or water)) only work for lean dough and only for the non-fermenting components of that dough.
Put more concretely, one does not linearly scale the yeast in a lean dough. It results in far too rapid a fermentation, over-proofed dough, and less flavor complexity.
I think I own three. My grandfathers, my father's, and a cheap one I picked up at a garage sale as a kid.
I'd never put them near my kitchen - too precious. Also, not necessary? Today I readjusted the measurements for a chemistry experiment by 50% without a calculation aid and it's really not that hard.
> The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.
It differs from chemical process engineering in that the latter actually cares about consistency and quality of outcome.
Kitchens are rarely even equipped properly for cooking to be anything other than art. Fortunately, humans aren't particularly discerning about taste either :).
i believe i threw a slide ruler in the trash recently. i stopped reading as soon as they said something about a c position. i’d rather have a digital scale- so many fewer measuring cups/spoons used, just do the addition in your head or tare as you add additional ingredients.
Very cool, I've never used a slide ruler but I can see how in logarithmic space, that 3.3/2 scaling factor simply becomes a distance you add.
Makes me want to get one now, because I like the concept of memorizing ratios rather than recipes (thanks to the popular eponymous book), and this seems more convenient (and satisfying) for non-trivial computations than getting my screen dirty or dictating it to an assistant.
This guy just really, really wants to use his slide rule. A cheap gram-accurate scale and an electronic calculator are a more...scalable kitchen solution.
Also, not all ingredients in a recipe scale linearly--most notably spices, tinctures, and any fermentation components.
i'm just not a serious enough cook, my kitchen's temperature varies humidity too the water coming out of the tap is random too so I just gave up at the end. Nowadays I read couple of recipes to get the gist of it, define the theme in my head and just go to town... I almost never have all the ingredients, so I substitute at will. I guess one instrument that I still use regularly is my Thermapen, food safety calls for one; and family feels more reassured when they see chicken breast that is ever so slightly pink but the temp reading suggests it's safe lol
Only in Imperial/United States customary units. They start with a few unconvincing metric examples, then throw away the pretence and jump right into cups, tbsp, etc.
If you'd stop using Imperial, and started using metric + scales, the entire problem domain no longer exists.
Last year I picked up a bamboo Hemi and worked through the (70yo!) workbook. The trigonometric scales are cool. Making a single slide to find all the sides of a triangle is surprisingly satisfying. It got me to realize that, sliderules with the right scales can solve the roots of any 3-variable equation. I guess this is why there was a proliferation of industry-specific sliderules back in the day.
More generally, aren't simple, well-engineered analog tools so satisfying?
People should just be into slide-rules period. Particularly in the West. We are always so amazed when people in Asia beat people with calculators using their abacuses, but the West had its mechanical computing device too, and like the abacus it can beat a calculator if used well.
> I just found myself in someone else’s kitchen and they didn’t have a slide rule.
What? No way that happened! In all seriousness though I almost never find myself in the need to multiply anything in the recipe by the amount different than some multiple of 0.5 and these are pretty easy to do in my head.
This is great! I actually just bought a slide rule a few weeks ago (a Pickett N902-ES), and I've been working through the original booklet. One reason I bought it was to get a different perspective on calculation, since I never used a slide rule in school. Case in point: I do a lot of cooking, and this use case never occurred to me.
I have created a python program for exactly that purpose. Its nothing fancy. A yaml file of ingredients, another yamk fole of recipes and a yaml file for nutrient target and then some optimizers and some constaimt enforcers. I can now decide what I want to eat that day and the program tells me what quantity I should eat, what ingredients I need, what ingredient I need to buy, how much time it will take for cooking and how much meal prep boxes etc
Extremely helpful for weight loss
Professional chefs recipes are all in proportions to begin with. For example for a baker everything else in a recipe is in proportion to the weight of the flour.
As another commenter noted, few things in cooking actually scale linearly, and, in general, if you are following recipes mechanically like this, you produce sub-par results. You always have to adjust quantities for ingredient freshness, humidity, ingredient variance, and other variables, so recipes are only ever guidelines at best. And seasoning is always to taste (your own, and whomever you are cooking for) anyway.
But, sure, I guess this helps you scale up those guidelines in some rare cases where that math isn't trivial to do in your head...
What I would actually like in every kitchen is a scale and a lookup table for the weight of a cup of flour, cup of rice, mL of oil, etc. No more volume based measurements.
I think such scaling as the author suggests, can be done in the head. 57g is roughy 3/4 of 80g. It's trivial to take 3/4 of almost anything. 250g -> ~180..185g, 40 -> 30, 50 -> 37g. Unless you do bakery, where proportions are very important, there's no need for 3 digit precision.
And yes, in general a slide ruler is a great tool. I should try it again.
Is that “put the leaves in the cup” or “put the leaves in the cup and press them down” or “roughly chop the basil leaves and put them into the cup” or “finely chop the basil leaves and put them into a cup”?
Using a slide rule is all very well, but you only really need it if you’re using daft measurements like cups and spoons. If you just use grams and millilitres you don’t need one.
And then there is flour, which when measured by volume can exhibit massive differences in actual amounts depending on how packed said flour is.
Which is why you can easily tell the difference between an expert baker and an idiot by whether they - respectively - measure flour by weight or by volume.
34 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 42.7 ms ] thread> Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour.
I do more baking than cooking. Baker's math is an incredibly useful concept. But that math is trivial to do in my head, and that's much more convenient than a slide rule or other calculating device.
maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g
The amount of fat is rarely critical, pie crusts and puff pastry the exceptions. Unless the situation is puff pastry, make the full recipe. There are also recipes, like Better Homes and Gardens cookbook "baked rice pudding", that you can fudge ingredients to an extent, but can't double. The heat transfer of a double sized batch of custard prevents the whole thing from cooking.
The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.
PS
I own 2 slide rules. I don't use either one in the kitchen.
Bakers percentages (measuring by-weight as a percentage of the largest mass ingredient (usually flour or water)) only work for lean dough and only for the non-fermenting components of that dough.
Put more concretely, one does not linearly scale the yeast in a lean dough. It results in far too rapid a fermentation, over-proofed dough, and less flavor complexity.
I'd never put them near my kitchen - too precious. Also, not necessary? Today I readjusted the measurements for a chemistry experiment by 50% without a calculation aid and it's really not that hard.
It differs from chemical process engineering in that the latter actually cares about consistency and quality of outcome.
Kitchens are rarely even equipped properly for cooking to be anything other than art. Fortunately, humans aren't particularly discerning about taste either :).
Makes me want to get one now, because I like the concept of memorizing ratios rather than recipes (thanks to the popular eponymous book), and this seems more convenient (and satisfying) for non-trivial computations than getting my screen dirty or dictating it to an assistant.
In metric countries, a small kitchen scale is very common. The US seems to run on volume, rather than weight.
Also, not all ingredients in a recipe scale linearly--most notably spices, tinctures, and any fermentation components.
Only in Imperial/United States customary units. They start with a few unconvincing metric examples, then throw away the pretence and jump right into cups, tbsp, etc.
If you'd stop using Imperial, and started using metric + scales, the entire problem domain no longer exists.
https://sliderulemuseum.com/
Last year I picked up a bamboo Hemi and worked through the (70yo!) workbook. The trigonometric scales are cool. Making a single slide to find all the sides of a triangle is surprisingly satisfying. It got me to realize that, sliderules with the right scales can solve the roots of any 3-variable equation. I guess this is why there was a proliferation of industry-specific sliderules back in the day.
More generally, aren't simple, well-engineered analog tools so satisfying?
What? No way that happened! In all seriousness though I almost never find myself in the need to multiply anything in the recipe by the amount different than some multiple of 0.5 and these are pretty easy to do in my head.
https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/list.php
Circular rules are superior to slide rules.
People had to be taught not to go wild with the extra precision.
But, sure, I guess this helps you scale up those guidelines in some rare cases where that math isn't trivial to do in your head...
And yes, in general a slide ruler is a great tool. I should try it again.
Is that “put the leaves in the cup” or “put the leaves in the cup and press them down” or “roughly chop the basil leaves and put them into the cup” or “finely chop the basil leaves and put them into a cup”?
Using a slide rule is all very well, but you only really need it if you’re using daft measurements like cups and spoons. If you just use grams and millilitres you don’t need one.
Which is why you can easily tell the difference between an expert baker and an idiot by whether they - respectively - measure flour by weight or by volume.