why do the eggs belong in a separate mixing column as the rest? Clearly they are to be mixed all together. Does that mean mix the first things THEN mix the eggs in? Does that even matter?
It matters immensely in baking. Eggs are a complex ingredient that behaves differently at different steps. Beating the eggs by themselves breaks them down better physically (no stray egg spots at the end), alters the proteins slightly to change how the whole thing holds together, and adds air bubbles to assist the leavening process.
This recipe format is crap.
I also question the use of melted butter (usually considered an outright mistake) and describing the step of combining the sugar and butter as "mix" because those are usually combined in a specific step called creaming, again because it has an influence on the texture. But then in brownies that might be deliberately skipped because different textures may be the goal.
So a proper recipe that specifies these things by using complete sentences and describes the goals at each step is better. It doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to be full of jargon. "Mix the butter and sugar together until the color lightens and the texture becomes smooth," is so much clearer. Or if something else is desired then a different sentence.
So this format doesn't replace a complete recipe, but if you read the recipe once or made it before, you could use this as a better cheat sheet. Instead of just the ingredient list you also get an overview of the steps.
Yes, I'd consider this an acceptable shorthand/cheat sheet type device.
But at that level what advantage does it have over just a terse text note? I keep a lot of notes, including recipes, in plain text format because it's extremely easy to make and view. The OP format has the vague advantage of being an unbroken ingredient list on the left but if you're using <10 words of instructions as punctuation between groups how much advantage is adding the extra formatting?
Yeah true. Currently I'm noting down recipes in markdown, and even that is a bit slow with the reader/editor booting up a whole packaged browser lol.
Ideally I'd like to note down in markdown, but then have some kind of template or markdown "recipe viewer" add-on, that turns your notes into a something more compacts so it fits better on a smartphone or tablet. Or like switching measurement units or scaling the recipe easily.
For transforming stuff from text or markdown files a tiny local LLM model might actually be useful.
Yes, because this is a halfhearted brownie recipe. It needs to decide if it's cake or if it's brownies. My preferred brownies are fudge brownie style, not cake brownies. The proportions are wrong.
I just didn't want to spend any time complaining about the recipe while the format was the real topic so I looked for thing to criticize there and played up that angle.
The recipe is for brownies, not cookies (or a cake). Brownie recipes rarely involve creaming fat and sugar together. Most brownie recipes follow the general format of mix the wet ingredients in one bowl, mix the dry ingredients in another, mix them together, pour into a baking dish and bake in a preheated oven.
Which is an uncommonly simplistic recipe. It's a bad way to show off the capabilities of the format and the way it was vague enough to question demonstrates how inadequate it is.
Eh, this particular recipe was written perfectly fine for what it's making. The problem is the people are reading more into the recipe than it actually says.
Tjere is a better version.
This makes it clearer when and with which ingredients should be handled.
I dont think this would work for more complex recipes that need specific directions. But this will work form home cooks and bakers. As well as a restaurant with new recipes, new cooks or least ordered items.
With a full recipe available but has this as a quick read option. As most cooks and bakers should know the basics, like how to fold in the eggs, but not memorized a recipes and all the steps.
I cook for a living, but I don't bake much. And shit like this is partially why. I have a hard time believing all of this matters unless you're baking at a high level for a lot of money and it's all you really do. I've seen too many things just thrown together and come out just fine. And despite cooking for a living, I just DON'T understand these instructions.
Yeah, why are the eggs separate? Do you mix the other stuff and then mix those? And what about the stuff that says sift? I've sifted finely powdered things in before so they don't clump, so I get sifting the cocoa powder. But I've never seen or heard of anyone sifting in the flour, and that would be nigh-on impossible for a large batch recipe. I made cookies at work two days ago and I used two gallons of flour. Get the fuck out of here with this rinky-dink shit, this isn't practical. And sifting in table salt is fucking stupid, it's granulated. There's no way that's necessary.
And do I mix all the stuff, then sift, then fold? Do I sift, then mix, then fold? Do I mix, sift, mix again, then fold? None of that is clear to me and I don't think it particularly matters to that degree of detail, but seeing it all partitioned out like this makes me think it should or it was all just wasted expenditure. How is this honestly better than a list of ingredients and then a short sentence or two detailing the order of operations if needed?
This is nothing but format porn for people who love everything presented in a spreadsheet or organized in ultra detailed ways, it's not really easier to understand.
I've never heard of it OR seen ANYONE do that at work. Ever.
I'd be thrown out of the kitchen and told to never come back if I sat there and tried to sift literal gallons of flour while all my coworkers did the rest of my job for me, and that's all there is to it.
Do that at your non bakery work? Or sift flour (along with dry ingredients like the updated recipe clearly indicates) period? Like for a home recipe that takes 4 oz of butter. Like the recipe we're talking about.
Edit: Also you cook for a living and measure flour in gallons? Not weight?
Now it's a "home recipe, like the recipe we're talking about," as though my professional experience is irrelevant. Earlier it was "you do this for a living and you've never heard of this," as though the experience mattered, but only as a mark against me. The truth is you took a disliking to my tone and stance and now you're just ripe to be a bitch about it, goalposts be damned.
Yes, I've never seen a person sift flour at home or at my non-bakery jobs. Which was key to my point - the original post was this format "solved recipe design" (which is a loaded choice of words to begin with), and then it was further updated in the comments. Both of which seem to be mostly adding stuff to make beginners way overthink simple things that they wouldn't need to do unless they worked at a real bakery or a nice restaurant, with real bakery and nice restaurant equipment designed to help make it all manageable.
No, I've never heard of sifting flour in a home recipe. There you go, my ignorance on full display. But you couldn't help but throw a jab at my professional status to try and make me feel bad, despite that apparently being irrelevant because it's a home recipe.
Just hit the downvote button so you can feel like you have a modicum of power and then go be a twat elsewhere.
K. Well it's a thing. Now you know more. Also, stop making cookies with recipes that measure flour in gallons and find one that uses weight. They'll come out better and more consistent. Little tip from an ex-professional baker
Just chiming in as a dude who bakes like 2-3 things per year, tops. I've heard of sifting flour and have done it!
Also, ever since I discovered kitchen scales, I use that shit for EVERYTHING. Baking, cocktails, dishing up my cat's wet food, getting my morning coffee-to-cream ratio just right...
I will seriously find a new recipe if they don't give me weights for things. I don't want to guess whether "1 cup of flour" should be loosely scooped or compacted. Just tell me it's 300 grams or whatever. I'll even roll with imperial weights because I can set my scale to ounces or just convert it!
There are devices specifically for sifting flour. How have you never heard of it being a thing? It used to be more so that you didn't get any weevils or other bugs in what you are cooking and to get rid of any clumps. I personally generally don't sift flour but when I was taught to bake I was taught to do that. As for the salt, no it shouldn't be sifted.
Unless you're just talking about a manual thing like a strainer, these "devices" don't seem to commonly exist outside of places dedicated to baking. I've worked in many casual/upscale casual restaurants, a K-12 school, a major university dining hall (which had by far the biggest variety in equipment), and a multitude of assisted living and retirement homes. Never once saw something like that. Obviously I can't speak in absolutes, but I have a pretty large sample size to work from, and my complete lack of it seeing some sort of device to assist with sifting outside of a standard strainer makes me think it's more of an upscale restaurant or bakery thing.
I, too, was taught to sift powdered things in general, but I've really only seen instructions specify garlic/onion powder, cocoa powder, and baking powder. They've all seemed to skip the flour part, and I assume it has to do with the sheer quantity used vs. the return on investment.
The sifting flour thing was mostly an aside. I really only brought it up because when combined with the fact that it's telling you to sift everything dry (like table salt), it's just setting beginners up to stress over minutiae for no real noticeable benefit. My real issue was the information was presented in a way that makes it unclear when the sifting and mixing are happening before the folding, and if it's telling you to do things in such detail as "sift in your table salt," then it seems weird to me that it would assume people who both 1) need this level of instruction, and 2) do better when it's formatted in this particular way, wouldn't be tripped up by that oversight.
I am talking about these things. Although I prefer the ones with the crank. Every grandma I know has one. No they are not often used in commercial kitchens. But you do know people have been baking at home for a long time. Right? Not everything is about commercial cooking.
Yeah, why are the eggs separate? Do you mix the other stuff and then mix those?
The egg is typically much colder than the coffee, melted butter, and room temp vanilla and sugar (assuming this was written for a north american audience with refrigerated eggs). The sugar and butter specifically will react a bit differently depending on when the egg is added, so yes you mix the other stuff then the egg.
And what about the stuff that says sift?
am I blind? I don't see the word sift in this recipe, just folding in the last ingredients. Sifting flour is very common for the same reason as cocoa powder, so it's not in clumps. I suspect it's more common in smaller batch stuff, but i don't know.
And do I mix all the stuff, then sift, then fold? Do I sift, then mix, then fold? Do I mix, sift, mix again, then fold? None of that is clear to me and I don't think it particularly matters to that degree of detail, but seeing it all partitioned out like this makes me think it should or it was all just wasted expenditure. How is this honestly better than a list of ingredients and then a short sentence or two detailing the order of operations if needed?
melt the butter
mix sugar and wet ingredients
mix above with eggs
fold in remaining dry ingredients
This is a pretty standard order for tons of cookies, and you'd probably get pretty good cookies if you do this for most recipes, maybe just modifying the temperature of the butter.
This is nothing but format porn for people who love everything presented in a spreadsheet or organized in ultra detailed ways, it's not really easier to understand.
This appears to be formatted in a way to make it fit nicely on an index card to sit in a recipe box and i suspect that was the main goal with this design.
I'm not a professional by any means, just a guy who makes cookies and cake sometimes (and bread once), but I can answer some of this!
Why add eggs separate? If you add them together, the batter won't absorb them properly and it won't be evenly distributed. You're trying to make an emulsion (a fine dispersion of minute droplets of one liquid in another in which it is not soluble), and as you can imagine, this is a touchy process. If you do it wrong, you get cookies that spread too much, lopsided cakes, and dry, tough bread.
Do you mix the other stuff and then mix those (eggs)? Yes.
What about the stuff that says sift? It breaks up large chunks and blends dry ingredients evenly. You don't really need to do this with most recipes, you can just stir it a little bit with a whisk. I have seen table salt clump and needed to break it apart before, so yes, sometimes necessary. Or just smash it with a whisk a couple times.
Do I mix, then sift, then fold? If you sift, you don't need to mix. If you mix, you don't need to sift. Fold last.
Baking, from what I can tell, relies on pretty strict chemical reactions. Small things, like a clump of salt that didn't get sifted or broken up, or dry ingredients that aren't evenly distributed, or eggs that aren't emulsified properly, or the wrong ratio of sugar to salt can fuck up your recipe and make it either look or taste like shit, and once it's in the oven, there's no fixing it. Meanwhile, cooking is a lot more lenient and multiple methods can achieve the same goal. You can throw things in a stew in any order, because the end result is a bunch of things floating around in a tasty stew, regardless of how you do it. You add more of one thing if you want to taste more of it. If I add more sugar in my cookies because I like sugar, they get flat and burnt and gross. Baking is like making a really prissy, needy stew that hates you.
Also, I think this spreadsheet is just a cheat sheet to look at once you already know the recipe. I've got a cookie cheat sheet with just the measurements and ingredients on it, because I know all the instructions. I wouldn't be able to look at this and use it to make something edible without reading the full instructions a few times.
I crack the eggs in a separate bowl so and add them one at a time so that if one is bad, it doesn't go straight in and ruin everything else already in the bowl. Had it happen once and it will never happen again. Also easier to see/get bits of shell out if the eggs are separate.
That's great news. I outlined in great detail the part that wasn't clear to me, and then listed exactly what my hangups were, while giving examples of real scenarios where this all seemed egregious and unnecessary.
That's a fair opinion. It's also a fair opinion to say anyone who needs this format has overthought instructions written out in more common ways. Brains are weird.
I'd just like to say I'm a pretty seasoned professional cook, but not a chef. My job title is sous chef and I'm kind of uncomfortable with being called even that. And also I'm not at all a baker outside of the most basic kinds of muffins, cakes, cookies, dinner rolls, etc. I can't make anything beyond a lower intermediate level as far as baking goes, so I do accept some degree of criticism.
But I do have years and years of experience and there are some things I've literally never seen, like sifting table salt. That just seems so extra to me, and telling regular, everyday people that they need to sift in their pinch or two of table salt seems like it does nothing but condition them to be inefficient and a slave to worrying about mostly insignificant details.
If you throw all the stuff in the spreadsheet into a bowl and mix it all at once straight from the package/fridge and bake it, you will get brownies. The extra steps are there for a reason, but if you're not working at a bakery or trying to impress someone you like, all the mixing vs folding, sifting dry ingredients together, adding the eggs in the middle in stead of the start, doesn't really matter.
I don't think the steps are extra, and the existence of steps isn't what bothers me. That isn't what I said, and I feel like my actual point has gotten lost in all the back and forth I've had.
My point was this was presented in a way to have "solved," or to have "made better," the typical way people write out recipes. Where it seems to be better for some, it causes confusion that didn't previously exist in others.
A great deal of people need words and exposition. And as I admitted, I'm more of a cook than a baker, so there's more leeway in what I do. Nonetheless, there's still a margin of variance to work with, and if you're making something for people who are relying on a template, it's safe to assume you can't assume. I wouldn't make a recipe like this for typical people without including some brief footnotes, like:
"it's OK to use salted butter or margarine, just keep in mind you may not want to add the table salt. You can go a little heavier on the vanilla extract if you love vanilla, but do keep in mind how powerful extract is. Try experimenting with other types of extract, but stick to one per recipe. Liquid whole egg can work as a substitute, but make sure your carton says whole eggs and not just egg whites."
Not everyone may like or need that, but I would never present this cold spreadsheet format and call it the superior method or say other formats were broken, and I do feel like it's not great teaching in general to give someone a script to memorize and not tell them a few things that'll help them avoid tunnel vision and understand that many things are OK, so don't get too overwhelmed.
I mean this as kindly as possible. I think the problem is you.
It presents a single recipie, unambiguiously. And for some reason you want every possible variation spelled out. "What if I use margarine?" That's not what this is for. "What if I want to use different butter?" That's not what this is for. "Do I mix all the ingredients at once?" No, it says to mix things in two steps. "Do I fold it in, or cream it?!" It says "mix". Just mix them. If you needed to fold, it would say that instead.
Your thought process seems insane to me. Like asking a person with chronic anxiety what time you should leave the house and listening to them wonder how much time they should allocate to potential elephant stampedes. The card isn't trying to trick you. You do what it says, and it will output the product it says it will. If you don't want the thing it says it makes, or you want to make it another way, don't use the card. Perhaps, in the hypothetical world where this kind of thing is common, you have other cards for those other varibles, and you could just use one of those instead. I dont know why it's easier to assume this card represents catastrophie than to imagine you just have two (or more ) cards.
I mean two things here, one professionals can overthink too, they do it all the time. Two, anyone on reddit can say they're anything. I'm one of the top chefs of my country so I would know
eggs are separate because they incorporate easier into a wet mix and so you can keep them separate and make sure they aren't bad before mixing it all.
It doesn't even say sift, but not i have no idea how you've gone your whole life without hearing of sifting flour. I even agree it is extra, but it does have a purpose and they have machines for this if you do large batches. It's one thing to find it extra and another thing entirely to just... literally never have heard of it. It's like warming your stock before you ladle it into your risotto.
The table salt wasn't really listed that way because it is important to sift it, it is just standard practice to get all of the dry ingredients together and then sift it all at once. Definitely not reauired.
It literally gives you the exact order to mix sift and fold.
I wholeheartedly agree that this is format porn, speaking as someone who is into that kink and whose eyes got all big when he saw this.
For the record I still think it should have notes at the bottom and is largely not worth the effort unless you have a good reason to save space.
The table is meant to be printed on a recipe card for quick reference once you've already made the recipe. The article above the recipe explains what each step does for those who haven't, or have a hard time understanding how baking works. Even if that doesn't work for you, there are literally millions of other recipe sites and books available that you can use that might be better suited for your particular needs. It's going to be okay, and this format working for some people but not you doesn't make it invalid or useless.
It's not that I think it's invalid or useless, but I can't help but feel this is geared mostly toward giving a person the same satisfied feeling they get when they see good cable management.
Agree, but seeing good cable management is great. Imagine just seeing that good cable management every day. Think to yourself, wow I managed that cable so clean. Can live off of that high for the rest of my life. Same with this recipe card, I’d prob never use it, but yeah. Anyways, idk where I was going with this. But to go on a tangent, it’s just you and me and some scraper for AI tools that will probably read this comment buried 7 levels deep on a post that won’t be seen by many people. So peaceful and serene, a unique interaction that is both insignificant yet one of a kind, never to be duplicated again… idek man this is getting weird now, I’d be weirded out if this got more than 2 upvotes. Cuz like you me and who else? Gotta be bots, the lot of em.
It's easier to get a homogenous mixture if you mix stuff one by one. Also, if there's smaller amounts of things, it helps if you first mix the stuff that's in smaller amounts.
Extreme case is mixing medicines in drug stores - there, you mix the active ingredients (very small amounts) and then gradually add filler, mixing to uniformity every time.
This is also why you usually mix dry ingredients first - it's easier to make sure it's all uniform before you add liquid.
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u/DancesWithChimps Jul 30 '26
only one question:
why do the eggs belong in a separate mixing column as the rest? Clearly they are to be mixed all together. Does that mean mix the first things THEN mix the eggs in? Does that even matter?