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The Art of Measuring Recipes: Recipes and Measurement

© Andrew A. Orr

A RECIPE is a communications tool. It is an abbreviated way of passing information from one person to another. It tells the cook what ingredients are needed to make a given dish and gives instructions about how to make it. It tells the person who buys the food what products must be on hand for each menu item the establishment serves. Recipes give the person essential information for figuring food costs and keeping them from getting out of hand. The typical food-service kitchen revolves around recipes that are standardized for its menu.

However, one thing a recipe does not communicate very well is how to become a good cook. Some people think that following a recipe is all there is to cooking. Many cooks simply follow one recipe after another for all their cooking lives. If a recipe is mislaid, they cannot make the dish. If they do not have all the ingredients on hand, they are lost. They do not really understand what they are doing.

Learning to cook by following one recipe after another is like learning English by reading the dictionary. You could memorize the meanings of all the words in the book but you would never know how to put them together to make meaningful sentences. In the same way you could know dozens of recipes by heart and make them repeatedly. Without ever understanding how the ingredients function together to make a dish or without ever understanding why a certain product turns out well one time and poorly the next.

This topic will look at both sides of recipes their indispensable roles in the kitchen and the pitfalls of trying to learn to cook from them. It will suggest a more meaningful approach to recipes than the one ingredient after another point of view of most cookbooks. You will see how to look at ingredients in terms of what they do in a recipe and how they relate to one another. I will introduce you to the concept of cooking with your senses and your common sense. I will also give you some nuts-and-bolts information about weights, measures, and temperatures and explain how to convert recipes from one quantity to another.

After completing this topic, you should be able to define a standardized recipe and cite reasons for its use. You should be able to understand the concepts of recipe structure and ingredient roles. You should be able to explain and demonstrate three ways of measuring ingredients. You should be able to convert a recipe to a larger or smaller yield or a different portion size. You should be able to cost a standardized recipe. You should be able to understand the relationship of Fahrenheit to Celsius temperatures.

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