How I would like to write my recipes

Often times I come across a recipe that say get these ingredients in these amounts, do this and that and we’re done. Some recipes come with a family story to share the origins of it, or some historical background, while other more advanced recipes come with detailed explanations on why and how each ingredient or technique works. The more pictures, photos, the better, because cooking is not just executing tasks, but also the use of sight, and also smell, hear, taste, touch. Really a multi-sensory experience, so words alone can’t really help. Pictures do help with the sight part, and videos are eventually to show “continuous” pictures.

The kind of recipes I admire are like from seriouseats where they go into experimental details to justify why an ingredient is used, and more importantly, how much to cook it for. Kenji is widely credited as having gone into such details to show photo comparisons of cooking, almost like a guide or a tutorial to cook something, like chicken breast at different temperatures to show the texture changes, or using different cooking techniques to get the ideal texture.

What I find missing though is how much to use an ingredient. Often we find seemingly arbitrary or chosen numbers without much detail about why. It’s probably because the ingredients are first selected by hand, as people in the past really just cook by eye and not weigh things out as much. Then when documented as a recipe, the ingredients are formally weighed to get the grams. But till this day, I still see some recipes in cups or volumetric measurements, which I find troubling to understand because weighing by grams is more clear and less ambiguous.

One of my proud examples of how I wrote my own recipe is how I found out the estimated amount of oil needed to cook a good sambal that’s smooth and not clumpy or hard. Through experiments of trying with 1 part oil to 10 parts rempah (10%), or 5 parts, or 1 part, I saw how the texture changes as more oil increases, and found that 50% is the nice minimum to get a decent amount of oil but not too much. In the past, people just eyeball the amount of oil and say fry it in a generous amount of oil. But the analyst in me would ask, how much? How many grams?

So I try to write the recipes that I want to read. That’s why I don’t dish out recipes as quickly as other creators. I like to go into detail to study a base recipe, try out different ratio of ingredients, different types of ingredients, try out other ways or cooking method to get a better result.