Comments by "Muizz" (@muizzy) on "Adam Ragusea" channel.

  1. I watched the whole video, and I understand your argument, but it's also mute. Here's why: 1) You explicitly say that you shape recipes around "chunk" ingredients like how much pasta there is in a box of pasta. You then argue that the fluid ingredients change based upon this and make a song and dance about how rounding would screw with the proportions. What you forget to include in your analysis, is that you can just scale a pound to 500 grams and scale all the fluid ingredients by the same amount, without rounding. Suddenly, this argument is fixed. 2) At the end of your video, you mention that a tablespoon in different countries means something else. I'd like to point out two things here. First, this means that for anyone reading your recipe and following along in, say, Europe, who has imperial measuring tools, will still mess quantities like a tablespoon up. Second, these quantities (like the entire imperial system) is already defined in terms of the metric system. 3) Beyond point 2, a much more important argument against imperial recipes is that they are unreliable by virtue of being based on volume. Say we were making brownies and the recipe asks for 1 cup of cocoa powder. If my powder is ground finer than yours, I will be adding more cocoa to my brownies than you will. This also goes for things like rice and pasta, or anything which either has variable size, or variable density. Another example may be brown sugar: Do you just loosely pour it into the cup, or do you compress it? Both are exactly a cup, but both have wildly differing quantities. This is why even US bakers have standardized on the metric system: Expressing ingredients in grams ensures that your brownies and my brownies are exactly the same, even if our ingredients may differ.
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  2. Usually, you have very strong arguments for things, but these sound fairly weak to me. Most of them seem to come from a fundamental disagreement: I believe that recipes exist to ensure repeatability. While it seems like you believe recipes exist to teach the cook a dish. In that light, I'd counter-argue the points you made like this: 1. Eye-balling, though great for everyday cooking, has no place in the "formal" system of a recipe; as it decreases reproducibility. 2. This is a valid argument towards the quality of life, but not one towards the quality of the recipe. 3. This is mostly a non-argument. Assuming the worst case of a mixing bowl to which you need to add extra wet and dry ingredients, you're still only left with 1 mixing bowl to wash up (which you'd need to do anyway), and one small measuring bowl. (Dry can be weighed before wet.) The difference in washing up is minimal. 4. You debunked this one yourself. Having 2 scales, one for heavy things, and one for light things, is not an objection when you're comparing the space it occupies to a bunch of measuring cups. Using 2 scales like that also ensures higher accuracy than volume; even in small quantities. 5. This is why I believe we have very different views of recipes. The recipes I write and maintain are after many iterations of trial and error, getting a little closer to perfection every time. They're made for me and my friends, not because I don't know how to make a creme brulee, but because this exact version of creme brulee is the best I have thus far managed to make.
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