Lucas' Recipe Repo

TL;DR This is a gratuitous write up of my own thoughts but the summary is that I like cooking because I like science and eating.

I started cooking for myself the summer before my junior year at Rutgers University. The apartment lease we signed for the coming academic year actually started the summer before that year. Given that I had a job in a research group in the physics department that summer, I decided to spend most of my time in New Brunswick rather than commuting from home.

Cooking for myself over the summer went well enough that I decided to forgo the university meal plan that year and the next. I actually think my cooking over that time period was… not great. There was nothing inedible but I wasn’t exactly outperforming the dining hall in quality - especially when I was trying to replicate their dishes. Probably more important is that I enjoyed prepping food, trying new recipes, and improving over time. Even if I couldn’t tell that my modifications were bad (cinnamon in tomato sauce was my worst offender), I could tell I had picked up a useful, lifelong hobby.

By the time I got to graduate school, I started learning about “food science.” Initially this meant I was just seeking out more reputable sources for recipes - no more “Alice’s three ingredient breaded chicken” made with chicken breast, corn flakes, and mayo (and don’t forget to bring the chicken to 175 F, just for safety)¹. Serious Eats, NYT Cooking, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, The Joy of Cooking, Chef John (from Foooood Wishes dot com), and Gordon Ramsay (via YouTube) became my go-to sources for inspiration and direction and I would (and still do) cross check them against each other to optimize whatever I made.

These sources all have two things in common. First, the writers all have serious culinary backgrounds (chef’s in restaurants, recipes testers, etc) and produce their articles/recipes/videos for a living with the main product being the food. And that’s a crucial distinction. When I was starting to cook, there were a few food blogs I followed that appeared to be high quality because they had great photos, a nice website, and long write ups - and “hey, they are doing this for a living so they must be doing something right.” While I found some decent (and even great) recipes on these, none of them had the food as the main product. Instead, the main product was the long posts with enormous images that are preferred by Google’s search algorithm and that drive traffic (and thus, ad revenue) to the page. The recipe can be complete garbage, the images misleading (via heavy photo-shopping), and the comments filled with complaints - none of that matters to make the page profitable. That doesn’t mean these things are true about your favorite food blog but my level of skepticism slowly increased when I started getting burned by these one-by-one.

Which brings me to the second commonality between my go-to sources: more often than not, there’s a decent explanation about why the recipe is structured as it is (flavor development, textures, etc) and why certain ingredients are chosen (acidity, sweetness, etc). Obviously there’s the benefit that the reader is now exposed to more generic culinary skills (more on that in a moment). But, with regard to the quality of the material, this also means one can have more confidence in the recipe itself because the author is actually thinking about these things. The average food blogger will most likely gloss over this. Again, priorities are pleasing search algorithms for high traffic, not testing 15 variations of the recipe.

Once I noticed these common traits (and the differences from lower quality material), I started paying more attention to the science behind what makes good food taste good. Something as simple as Gordon Ramsay’s, “No color, no flavor” started to mean something. But then things got interesting when Ramsay’s instructions to not salt eggs before cooking were contradicted by Kenji (Serious Eats and The Food Lab) who showed that salt actually keeps the eggs tender. But what about flavor? Kenji claimed that the more uniform seasoning was better while Gordon claimed the benefits of salt being one of the first things to hit your tongue. Who is right?

And this is the fun part. This is where I get to decide. And on the question of salting eggs, I like half before cooking for even distribution and and half as “garnish” that hits your tongue immediately. This repository has all of my other opinions on similar topics - just baked into the recipes instead of in long writeups like this one. Its also the home to my recipes that I’m afraid I’ll forget or that are just written on a stained piece of paper tucked in a book. I already use version control for my regular work, why not for recipes as well?