alt Hacker NewsYou need a kitchen slide rule
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This guy just really, really wants to use his slide rule. A cheap gram-accurate scale and an electronic calculator are a more...scalable kitchen solution.
Also, not all ingredients in a recipe scale linearly--most notably spices, tinctures, and any fermentation components.
The Slide Rule Museum tickles hard some 2000's web nostalgia:
Last year I picked up a bamboo Hemi and worked through the (70yo!) workbook. The trigonometric scales are cool. Making a single slide to find all the sides of a triangle is surprisingly satisfying. It got me to realize that, sliderules with the right scales can solve the roots of any 3-variable equation. I guess this is why there was a proliferation of industry-specific sliderules back in the day.
More generally, aren't simple, well-engineered analog tools so satisfying?
People should just be into slide-rules period. Particularly in the West. We are always so amazed when people in Asia beat people with calculators using their abacuses, but the West had its mechanical computing device too, and like the abacus it can beat a calculator if used well.
I don't see how a slide rule would substantially improve anything in my kitchen, honestly.
> Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour.
I do more baking than cooking. Baker's math is an incredibly useful concept. But that math is trivial to do in my head, and that's much more convenient than a slide rule or other calculating device.
Please, if you want good pesto, worry less about the ratios, and use real Parmiggiano Reggiano instead of "parmesan".
i'm just not a serious enough cook, my kitchen's temperature varies humidity too the water coming out of the tap is random too so I just gave up at the end. Nowadays I read couple of recipes to get the gist of it, define the theme in my head and just go to town... I almost never have all the ingredients, so I substitute at will. I guess one instrument that I still use regularly is my Thermapen, food safety calls for one; and family feels more reassured when they see chicken breast that is ever so slightly pink but the temp reading suggests it's safe lol
This is great! I actually just bought a slide rule a few weeks ago (a Pickett N902-ES), and I've been working through the original booklet. One reason I bought it was to get a different perspective on calculation, since I never used a slide rule in school. Case in point: I do a lot of cooking, and this use case never occurred to me.
Yeah I remember my class was the last in our high school to learn the slide rule, the next year we transitioned to (expensive!) calculators.
People had to be taught not to go wild with the extra precision.
> Kitchen work is all about proportions
Only in Imperial/United States customary units. They start with a few unconvincing metric examples, then throw away the pretence and jump right into cups, tbsp, etc.
If you'd stop using Imperial, and started using metric + scales, the entire problem domain no longer exists.
I have created a python program for exactly that purpose. Its nothing fancy. A yaml file of ingredients, another yamk fole of recipes and a yaml file for nutrient target and then some optimizers and some constaimt enforcers. I can now decide what I want to eat that day and the program tells me what quantity I should eat, what ingredients I need, what ingredient I need to buy, how much time it will take for cooking and how much meal prep boxes etc Extremely helpful for weight loss
And metric containers and recipes.
In metric countries, a small kitchen scale is very common. The US seems to run on volume, rather than weight.
Very cool, I've never used a slide ruler but I can see how in logarithmic space, that 3.3/2 scaling factor simply becomes a distance you add.
Makes me want to get one now, because I like the concept of memorizing ratios rather than recipes (thanks to the popular eponymous book), and this seems more convenient (and satisfying) for non-trivial computations than getting my screen dirty or dictating it to an assistant.
Professional chefs recipes are all in proportions to begin with. For example for a baker everything else in a recipe is in proportion to the weight of the flour.
I improved everything by converting to metric first if the recipe happens to be otherwise, and using metric measuring tools
> I just found myself in someone else’s kitchen and they didn’t have a slide rule.
What? No way that happened! In all seriousness though I almost never find myself in the need to multiply anything in the recipe by the amount different than some multiple of 0.5 and these are pretty easy to do in my head.
As a hobbyist cook, this article starts with a false (or at least misleading) premise:
maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g
The amount of fat is rarely critical, pie crusts and puff pastry the exceptions. Unless the situation is puff pastry, make the full recipe. There are also recipes, like Better Homes and Gardens cookbook "baked rice pudding", that you can fudge ingredients to an extent, but can't double. The heat transfer of a double sized batch of custard prevents the whole thing from cooking.
The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.
PS
I own 2 slide rules. I don't use either one in the kitchen.
I've done quite a bit of math in my head in the kitchen....
I picked up a couple Concise circular rules made in japan a while ago. They're wonderful. I'll toss one in the kitchen.
https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/list.php
Circular rules are superior to slide rules.
i believe i threw a slide ruler in the trash recently. i stopped reading as soon as they said something about a c position. i’d rather have a digital scale- so many fewer measuring cups/spoons used, just do the addition in your head or tare as you add additional ingredients.
As another commenter noted, few things in cooking actually scale linearly, and, in general, if you are following recipes mechanically like this, you produce sub-par results. You always have to adjust quantities for ingredient freshness, humidity, ingredient variance, and other variables, so recipes are only ever guidelines at best. And seasoning is always to taste (your own, and whomever you are cooking for) anyway.
But, sure, I guess this helps you scale up those guidelines in some rare cases where that math isn't trivial to do in your head...