| Human recipes are extremely inconsistent in that manner too. When I was fresh out of college my wife and I tried to make some sort of recipe with hamburger and flour. I now know and understand it was trying to get us to make a roux [1] and then mix the hamburger into that. But it described the steps for that very simply and directly with no way to know when to stop cooking the roux, and I had no idea what a roux was at the time. So we ended up with one of the worst meals I've ever cooked: Browned hamburger mixed in soggy raw flour. Heck, I wasn't even salting anything properly then, so it would be unseasoned browned hamburger in soggy raw flour. As cash-strapped as I was at the time, that one still went in the trash. If I recall even the dog was not impressed. Many years later I saw the Good Eats episode on roux and the light bulb went off. Mind you, even made properly what I recall of that recipe would be something more like a base to further spice and use with something else rather than a meal. It was a supposed to be a simple recipe, but it was really too simple. But it would at least be an edible base for further elaboration. Since then I've been on the lookout for recipes that are clearly invoking some cooking technique but don't really describe it correctly, either because they assume you already know it, or it is straight-up just described wrong. There's a lot of them. The "Internet Cookbook" is full of ideas and I like it for that, but it's quite caveat emptor when it comes to following recipes directly. The skills to make a recipe website, SEO it so it actually gets hits, keep all the ads working, and get pretty cooking pictures don't overlap much with the skill of writing a good recipe. [1]: https://www.seriouseats.com/a-brief-guide-to-roux#toc-what-i... |