[bourgoin]

Likewise, the stroganoff recipe simply says to cook 'strips of beef' in a skillet. There are some cuts which you are not going to be very happy with the result if you do this with.

I don't see how REMOVING information benefits either a beginner or an experienced cook.

[AussieWog93]

To many people, myself included, the point of cooking isn't about producing a particular end result as consistently as possible.

It's a unique form of expression, like painting or writing.

Of course, it's useful to see what other people are doing so you can expand your own skillset and create your own twist on what they were doing, and this is where recipes come in handy. But I don't _want_ to be told exactly how to create my next meal. I just want some pointers in the right direction. Too much information destroys my creative input and just makes the recipe not fun to follow.

I'm not sure if it made sense - it's difficult to explain why you enjoy something. But please understand that there are people who neither need nor want a perfectly reproducible "food production algorithm".

[bourgoin]

I understand your perspective. I love cooking as well and I like to tweak recipes and try to never make a dish exactly the same way twice.

There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will.

I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence.

Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.

[DiggyJohnson]

This was really well said. I think a big reason that our perspective is not widely-voiced is that it is very difficult to put into words. It seems obvious.

[nextlevelwizard]

You can submit pull requests if you feel like this information is important.