Alton Brown is bad at math
I'm a big fan of Alton Brown. He doesn't feed you recipes; he teaches you the basic principles of cooking, and he does it with a geeky flare that appeals to me. I have learned a lot from his first "cook book," which is more of a cooking science book than a book of recipes. It's called I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking. Now I am the proud owner of his new book, which is I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking. That's right, folks. To go from cooking to baking, you simply need to multiply food by mixing before adding heat. If it's so simple to go from cooking to baking, why has Alton previously claimed that a) he doesn't like baking and b) he's not particularly good at it? Why can't people make decent pie crusts?
Well, I can make a good pie crust, but that's beside the point. The answer to these questions is that baking requires precision and a deep understanding of how ingredients behave under different conditions and how they interact with other ingredients. This is made clear by the fact that Alton's book has 83 pages of information about precision, tools, and baking components before he even starts explaining how to bake things. It's the first cook book I've ever seen that has schematic drawings of amino acids. Apparently, for Alton, the key to learning how to bake well was learning how to organize the various methods used in baking. Now he has an outline of five different baking methods, and these are the basis for the organization of the book itself.
Mais revenons a nos moutons. Precision is key to baking. Alton spends entire pages talking about why it's better to weigh ingredients than it is to measure their volume. He says a cup of flour can weigh between 3-6 oz on page 14 and between 3-5 oz on page 18. He talks about owning two scales, one that is precise to within 0.1 grams with a small capacity, and a second that's accurate to 1 gram but has a much larger capacity. Here, we begin to see Brown's failings as a geek. He mixes units: "The [scale] is very precise and measures to the tenth of a gram, but only handles items up to 8 oz." This problem isn't too bad because he balanced the unit mixing with an unnecessary comma, proving he's not an English nerd. But there's a deeper problem here. If you check unit conversions, 0.1 gram is equivalent to 0.03527 ounces. That is slightly more than 1/32 oz. And Alton himself admits that for small additions, volume measurements are fine. I guess this is a good option if you're a) anal or b) rich (this scale of his costs around $80), but it seems unnecessary for most applications.
More striking, the units Alton includes in his recipes don't always work out. He may say the weight of one ingredient is 32 g or 1.125 oz (which is approximately correct) and that the weight of another ingredient (in the same recipe) is 2 g or 1/4 oz (which does not work out: 1/4 oz = approx. 7 g). He mentioned that he almost included the chef's formula method of recording ingredients, but opted against it. The chef's method is to list the weight of all ingredients, normalized by the weight of the flour in the recipe. I wish he'd done that. Now I'll be spending time trying to figure out if he started with metric units (which he loves) or English units (which are more common) when writing his recipes. Oh, well. An experiment! The theory in the book is well worth any strange conversion problems in the recipes.
Well, I can make a good pie crust, but that's beside the point. The answer to these questions is that baking requires precision and a deep understanding of how ingredients behave under different conditions and how they interact with other ingredients. This is made clear by the fact that Alton's book has 83 pages of information about precision, tools, and baking components before he even starts explaining how to bake things. It's the first cook book I've ever seen that has schematic drawings of amino acids. Apparently, for Alton, the key to learning how to bake well was learning how to organize the various methods used in baking. Now he has an outline of five different baking methods, and these are the basis for the organization of the book itself.
Mais revenons a nos moutons. Precision is key to baking. Alton spends entire pages talking about why it's better to weigh ingredients than it is to measure their volume. He says a cup of flour can weigh between 3-6 oz on page 14 and between 3-5 oz on page 18. He talks about owning two scales, one that is precise to within 0.1 grams with a small capacity, and a second that's accurate to 1 gram but has a much larger capacity. Here, we begin to see Brown's failings as a geek. He mixes units: "The [scale] is very precise and measures to the tenth of a gram, but only handles items up to 8 oz." This problem isn't too bad because he balanced the unit mixing with an unnecessary comma, proving he's not an English nerd. But there's a deeper problem here. If you check unit conversions, 0.1 gram is equivalent to 0.03527 ounces. That is slightly more than 1/32 oz. And Alton himself admits that for small additions, volume measurements are fine. I guess this is a good option if you're a) anal or b) rich (this scale of his costs around $80), but it seems unnecessary for most applications.
More striking, the units Alton includes in his recipes don't always work out. He may say the weight of one ingredient is 32 g or 1.125 oz (which is approximately correct) and that the weight of another ingredient (in the same recipe) is 2 g or 1/4 oz (which does not work out: 1/4 oz = approx. 7 g). He mentioned that he almost included the chef's formula method of recording ingredients, but opted against it. The chef's method is to list the weight of all ingredients, normalized by the weight of the flour in the recipe. I wish he'd done that. Now I'll be spending time trying to figure out if he started with metric units (which he loves) or English units (which are more common) when writing his recipes. Oh, well. An experiment! The theory in the book is well worth any strange conversion problems in the recipes.
posted by megan at
11:08 AM
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