alt Hacker NewsAs 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.
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I think I own three. My grandfathers, my father's, and a cheap one I picked up at a garage sale as a kid.
I'd never put them near my kitchen - too precious. Also, not necessary? Today I readjusted the measurements for a chemistry experiment by 50% without a calculation aid and it's really not that hard.
Truth. To be blunt, while some aspects of some recipes can be scaled linearly, others can not.
Bakers percentages (measuring by-weight as a percentage of the largest mass ingredient (usually flour or water)) only work for lean dough and only for the non-fermenting components of that dough.
Put more concretely, one does not linearly scale the yeast in a lean dough. It results in far too rapid a fermentation, over-proofed dough, and less flavor complexity.