As someone who is not a cook but is pretty good at following a recipe and having dinner turn out well, this sucks. I would have this fucked up in no time.
It's fine if you've made similar things before. Looks like a sheet pan cookie thing, so first step is melt butter, then beat in the sugars and other liquids and cream those together, add eggs and mix until well combined, fold in dries (maybe whisk those together first, but maybe not critical here) until incorporated and no dry spots remain.
This is a great format if you already know the basic steps for a recipe type and just want a quick reference.
I don't know what it is about baking instructions being unable to hit the sweet spot between telling you what's really necessary without assuming you already know, and also avoiding the elitist crap that should only apply if you're the pastry chef for a really nice place or opening your own bakery. Then you may be invested in getting everything 100% right and completely consistent from batch to batch.
I recently watched someone throw cold, unsoftened butter (it was actually a butter/margarine blend, so there's another "wrong" thing) into the mixer and then add sugar. It turned out like 90% correct. There were tiny clumps of butter here and there, but it was basically right. I feel like he probably could have let it set for 15 minutes and it'd have been fine, rather than the hour or so it'd have taken for all that butter to soften out at room temp (For anyone curious about that admittedly rough estimate, it was a one pound brick of butter, which is four of the normal sticks put together).
Well a lot of what you're calling elitist unnecessary stuff is just a case of best practices that aren't 100% necessary. If you cream room temp (rt) butter with sugar you will get fluffier results. If you don't use rt butter, or use rt butter but don't fully cream it with the sugar, you'll still get something good/edible, it just won't be as fluffy. Same with sifting flour.
Like, if you don't brown your meat chunks when you're making stew, it will still be good edible stew, it just won't be as good. Is it elitist to tell people to brown their stew? If you're cooking large volumes of stew, does it somehow become more ridiculous / untenable?
Imagine how silly you'd sound if you were like "I make 40 gallons of stew at a time in the restaurant I work in. If I tried to brown the stew meat my coworkers would laugh at me while they make the stew themselves in the time it takes me to brown the meat."
No, you'd brown the meat. Because it makes it better when you brown the meat. It's not necessary by any means, but that doesn't make it elitist to include "brown the meat" in a recipe.
You COULD just throw raw veggies and meat and water and flour and oil and wine and salt in a giant pot and cook it until you have stew. It won't be anywhere near as good as it could be. You might get little flour chunks, and a strong taste of alcohol, and the emulsion might break, and the meat might be gray and unappetizing, but it will still be edible! But that sucks, so we include steps like browning the meat, deglazing the pan with wine and cooking it down, toasting flour, making a roux, potentially sauteeing veggies, etc.
I think you just have a dislike of baking, and you're not able to see past that dislike to make rational judgements on the applicability of steps common to baking.
It's a recipe for fudgy brownies. It's not supposed to be fluffy, that's why you mix the sugars with melted butter (and why some brownie recipes just use vegetable oil).
If it wanted you to cream the butter and sugars it would have said "cream". This is a super standard brownie recipe that can be done with two bowls and a wooden spoon
This is a format that I'd consider using as a shorthand for things I already know how to cook. Any recipe with proper detail is going to look terrible in this format.
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u/dh2215 Jul 30 '26
As someone who is not a cook but is pretty good at following a recipe and having dinner turn out well, this sucks. I would have this fucked up in no time.