[tedmielczarek]

I agree with you but I don't think that entirely refutes the original point. Baking does require more precision on average than cooking, but bread recipes don't give you the information you would need to be precise. Adjusting for things like local temperature and humidity or the way your oven bakes are important to the outcome but they're never mentioned in recipes. What you're describing as "intuition" sounds to me like knowledge of those factors, some sense of measuring their impact (even if just by feel) and how to adjust a recipe as needed to account for them. I think we'd do a service to the world by pushing for recipes that are less "follow these directions exactly" and more "here are the techniques this dish uses and how to work with them".

[bigfudge]

I agree that intuition is just implicit knowledge for these factors... the problem is that making these explicit in recipes would just make them boring and tedious/complex to make. I'm not going to be able to make the thermal mass/heat cycle of my house the same as yours. So unless I temperature control th dough it _is_ going to be different.