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Poptart rule
(slrpnk.net)
I fucking suck at cooking
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Baking is the best place to start. You often just measure your ingredients precisely and then mix them for simple recipes.
None of this "a pinch of" bullshit. How many grams in a pinch you vague fuck!?!
Baking is the worst place to start for a beginner, because it reauires more precision in ingredient quantity and technique. There's little room for error.
Whereas with cooking a simple dish like pasta or rice, you have more leeway with quantities and cooking times and preparation. And wayy more room for error. You can easily experiment with more/less of ingredients because it won't affect the overall dish and flavour much.
Whereas with baking, dough for example is hell. You need an almost astronomical precision unless you want to glue your entire kitchen, or make it too runny, or too floury. Baking also becomes more difficult wihout measurement devices, whereas with cooking trusting something loose like a cup or just eyeballing isn't catastrophic.
Also baking is heavily dependent on factors beyond many peoples control, such as the humidity and temperature in your home, or the quality of your oven. Cookies are fine, everyone should take a crack at them, but anything with yeast is a fussy little bitch that will fuck you over just for fun.
Making simple bread is very easy and hard to fuck up as long as you follow the goddamn instructions. It's an excellent place to start. It's where I started and I know how to make some very good stuff now. It's a lot easier to get started than many fear.
Want to immediately crowd please while still doing dead simple baking? Club med bread. Piss easy bread that people tend to love and think is much more complicated.
Assuming OOP does infact just microwave poptarts and relies on other ready-mades, I don't think they have all the necessary equipment for baking.
I just think it's a tougher place to start in because while you get exact measurements, there's more nuance and less room for improvising.
I tried baking something (pigs in blankets) for the first time after having cooked for years. If you are not fully prepared for every micro-disaster that can strike during dough making, your life will be hell. Cooking pasta only has the prerequisite of knowing how to boil water, and reading the time for how much to boil the noodles.
You can follow the instructions on bread, quantities and time to bake, and yet there's still stuff you have to account for and know from experience.
I know it's not the answer you want but really that'd mean whatever you feel is right like a pinch of salt just means add the amount of salt that makes it taste good to you which would be much better written as salt to taste but that's what they mean generally same applies with anything that's a small undefined vague amount of an item that's just there for flavour really I know that's not super helpful if you're not good at cooking and don't know what is the right amount for you though it's sort of just something you have to learn the intuition for what'd be right for a dish for your taste buds :/
I don’t know. Every ingredient can be adjusted to your personal taste, the point of quantities is to have a meaningful starting point. I’d rather read a 1/4 teaspoon than a pinch. Besides, a pinch is pretty hard to reproduce with any consistency.
(Also why not add ~~a pinch~~ a 1/4 teaspoon of punctuation to your prose my bro? My head is out of breath.
)
I hate punctuation and I'd guess the thinking is the recipe author doesn't even know them self what they used and also it's like a permission thing again could be clearer by saying to taste but maybe the thinking is if they say a ¼ tsp people will add exactly that and be rigid where as you say a shake of it and they'll decide for themselves how much they want
The answer to "a pinch of salt" is that you "season to taste". Literally, taste it, then add more if it needs more. Your pinch and my pinch will be different, because you and I will like different amounts of salt.
And it's actually nearly impossible to find "a pinch of salt" in a recipe these days. Most recipes will give you exact measures for herbs and spices.
Kinda hard when it's a baked recipe. Bread recipes especially seem to have a habit of pinch measurements, and yet you can't taste it before baking
Which is ironic given that the previous commenter was extolling how scientific and precise baking is, and how you never have to deal with vague measurements.
Baking - especially bread - is in fact incredibly fussy. It's hugely dependent on factors like humidity and temperature, and just what mood the yeast is in that day.
But if you are struggling with bread recipes that include vague measurements for salt, generally 5g of salt for every 250g of flour should be alright.
Also avoid bread recipes that measure flour by volume (cups). Look for ones that measure by weight instead. Much more reliable.
A pinch is 1/8th of a teaspoon.