Bad advice not only for beginners, but also for any dough recipe, because amounts often need to be exact for a dough to work properly. In this case, cooking really is a science experiment.
Also, I do not like 'salt to taste', particularly for raw egg or raw meat mixtures. Just tell me the amount of salt, whynot?
My experience is the opposite. Most bread recipes for example are both incredibly tolerant of mistakes. Also — flour varies so much in capacity to absorb water and gluten content between brands that I'd say precision is very much illusory unless you are after industrial-style consistency.
Small changes in how you handle doughs of different hydration, and changes in timing/temperature thereafter have a much bigger difference to the outcome. I think it's better to develop an intuition for what the right consistency is and work towards that.
I agree entirely. I feel like this myth of "baking is science, cooking is art" got started and I don't really understand it.
100% reproducible results for both is definitely "science".
The processes that happen to make the flavors and textures and results you're looking for - absolutely "science".
Some very finicky food types require a lot more precision than others, so some (very small percentage of) recipes you absolutely do have to follow very strict recipes and procedures.
But the majority of stuff - baking or "cooking" - you can wing a lot and get great results. You just might not get exactly the results you thought you'd get.
In my experience in a house that doesn't have strict climate control (no humidity control, windows often open, inexact temperature control), intuition on yeast-based dough is actually really important. Two days in a row the same exact simple bread dough recipe can behave very differently due to factors like ambient temperature and humidity.
The trick is getting from a recipe cook to an intuitive cook. For me, I feel like that leap came primarily from a single book (and years of prior absorbed "Good Eats" knowledge):
I also developed intuition after methodically working through a Ruhlman book (Ruhlman's 20, in my case). Just wanted to add it seems to be his style, focusing on imparting intuition rather than recipe mastery. For anyone wanting to become a more intuitive cook, one of his books will carry you very very far.
Bread made with yeast is an exception though. For most baking projects (cookies, cakes, brownies, etc), there are at least two very important things I know about (and I'm far from an expert):
1. The chemical reaction to make it raise. As I said, yeast is different; but if you're using soda, you need the right amount of all the ingredients (soda, acid, salt, etc), at the right time (water starts the reaction, which will fizzle out after a certain amount of time), at the right consistency (over-mixing will screw things up too).
2. You need to balance wet and dry ingredients. So you can't (for instance) just remove sugar or add flour without also removing or adding something "wet", or the balance gets thrown of and everything changes.
For yeast-based bread you're right -- I normally just dump in water until it seems about the right consistency.
I agree with you but I don't think that entirely refutes the original point. Baking does require more precision on average than cooking, but bread recipes don't give you the information you would need to be precise. Adjusting for things like local temperature and humidity or the way your oven bakes are important to the outcome but they're never mentioned in recipes. What you're describing as "intuition" sounds to me like knowledge of those factors, some sense of measuring their impact (even if just by feel) and how to adjust a recipe as needed to account for them. I think we'd do a service to the world by pushing for recipes that are less "follow these directions exactly" and more "here are the techniques this dish uses and how to work with them".
I agree that intuition is just implicit knowledge for these factors... the problem is that making these explicit in recipes would just make them boring and tedious/complex to make. I'm not going to be able to make the thermal mass/heat cycle of my house the same as yours. So unless I temperature control th dough it _is_ going to be different.
It took me a long time to understand why recipes are vague. The answer to this is because:
* Personal and cultural preferences vary widely, in particular around saltiness.
* Ingredients vary in size. A precise salt measurement for a chicken breast will be too much salt if you have a smaller breast and too little if you have a large one.
* Even ingredients of the same size vary in texture and flavor. A cheap grocery store chicken breast might need more salt to become flavorful than a free-range wild-fed chicken whose meat is naturally rich in flavor.
* Ingredients change over time. A teaspoon of dried oregano might be too much if you just got it or too little if the jar is a year old.
* Taste is experienced in context. If you're serving that chicken with heavily salted pasta and a rich cream sauce, you might want to ease off on the salt so the meal isn't overwhelming. Serving it with a salad of bitter greens and you may want to kick up the savoriness.
* Preferences change over time. Some days you're in the mood for something light, some days you want a flavor punch to the face.
Cooking is taking once-living organic things, each of which is unique with its own history, and combining them in order to please the pecularities of some arbitrary set of living organic beings. It's not assembling a LEGO set.
The only problem with salt to taste is that you need to be taught how to salt.
An additional issue with salting to a specific amount is when you're reducing a sauce. The saltiness of the final dish will depend both on the amount of salt you add and the amount of liquid that boiled off
Also, I do not like 'salt to taste', particularly for raw egg or raw meat mixtures. Just tell me the amount of salt, whynot?