Cmon man, there’s two kinds of recipes: one with exact measurements and precise instructions, usually written in metric with a lot of notes and contingencies… and then there’s general guideline cheat sheets and refreshers, which you use when you already know how to cook it.

If a recipe tells me “a couple spoonsful” and I don’t know what to do, the problem is not the recipe, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.

So what do you do? you learn. or I guess you could be like NileRed and watch food burn in front of your face because you don’t want to deviate from the recipe. over and over again. but hopefully you’ll learn to deviate soon.

American here. I always sucked at baking until I discovered a UK site using the metric master race measurements.

It was all in grams instead of tablespoons/ounces/cups.

Suddenly my shit was perfect…

baking by volume is INSANE why would anyone do that?!

i remember as a kid my nan telling me to not pack the flour too tightly in the cups or the measurement will be off. like why not just weigh the flour?!

Where do galette (buck wheat savory pancakes from Britanny) and puff pastry come together? Or is that just another Amerikan kitchen misnomer like “pepperoni” or “bologna”?

Same only with Pasteis De Nata:

Pastéis de nata from the Big Green Egg

Craving pastéis de nata? No need to buy them when you can bake this sweet Portuguese delicacy yourself using this recipe on your Big Green Egg.

Big Green Egg (www.biggreenegg.eu)

My problem: There are different puff pastries out there and so I made the recipe THREE TIMES to figure out the best one to use.

Spoiler - The most expensive one.

Dufour.

PUFF PASTRY DOUGH - Dufour Pastry Kitchens

Dufour's puff pastry is the epitome of fine dough—crisp, buttery, and flaky, perfect for both savory and sweet creations.

Dufour Pastry Kitchens (dufourpastrykitchens.com)

Here’s the difference:

“first enclosing a “butter block” in the dough”

Compared with:

Frozen Sheets Pastry Dough - Pepperidge Farm

When you start with Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry, you can create extraordinary dishes, both savory and sweet. Let your imagination take you to delicious places! Each Puff Pastry sheet is made up of many delicate layers, each one essential to creating its supremely light, airy texture. Sheets are ready to be shaped, filled and baked. […]

Pepperidge Farm (www.pepperidgefarm.com)

“VEGETABLE OILS (PALM, SOYBEAN, HYDROGENATED COTTONSEED)”

Store brand is the same.

None of them were AWFUL, just the Dufour is head and shoulders above the others, and 4x the price.

The reason for having to add an egg, milk, or some other simple ingredient is because the mix companies found out people were more willing to adopt these mixes if there was a step where they had to do something beyond just adding water. Or at least this is what they told me on the Jiffy Mix factory tour as a child.

I often have issues explaining to literally everyone that oz and fl oz are not the same… Only true match is water which is what it was created for.

8oz is weight.
8 fl oz is volume…

So a cup of flour is a volume measurement of something that should be measured by weight.

I bought a food scale and gram everything now.

Oh, man, “bottle of Coca-Cola”. When I was a kid, that meant a 16 ounce glass bottle, but prior to that it could have been 8 ounces, 10 ounces. Now it could be 1, 2, or even 3 liters.

I often have issues explaining to literally everyone that oz and fl oz are not the same… Only true match is water which is what it was created for.

8oz is weight.
8 fl oz is volume…

So a cup of flour is a volume measurement of something that should be measured by weight.

I bought a food scale and gram everything now.

The problem with that is that the size of the pot changes the volume of water with a linear finger measure.

Like for extremes if you had a test tube shaped pot with a foot of rice deep and only a finger depth of water is way different than a giant wide pot where grains area single layer and then a finger depth over top.

Do they still sell 3 liters? I haven’t seen one in ages.

Yeah but it kinda messes up fried rice

Who the fuck is buying those boxes if they still need things like eggs adding?

It’s just pre-measured flour, baking soda and sugar. You can do that in under a minute. Shit, the stuff is in the same aisle.

The website joyofbaking.com defines the term galette as “a French term signifying a flat round cake that can be either sweet or savory and while [recipes can use] puff pastry as a base, they can also be made from risen doughs like brioche, or with a sweet pastry crust.”

You don’t use that part for the fried rice. You just eat it.

Who the fuck is buying those boxes if they still need things like eggs adding?

It’s just pre-measured flour, baking soda and sugar. You can do that in under a minute. Shit, the stuff is in the same aisle.

It would be better if other recipes adjusted accordingly.

The Zatarans Jambalaya box still says to add a pound of smoked sausage. But those sausages went down to 14oz. Then 12oz. Now some are 10oz. The box still says to add a pound. It’s becoming a hotdog/bun situation.

But then I don’t have all the rice I should for fried rice

I have two scales in the kitchen. One regular digital food scale I use all the time. One that’s better suited for measuring cocaine that I bought when I was needing a lot more precision to brew one gallon batches of beer.

Most recipes will use the volume measurement since everyone has measuring cups and almost no one has a food scale. Flour is close enough to a fluid anyway.