Hey guys, a couple notes: 1. I neglected to discuss in the video why I think 'by volume' generally works as a better bridge than 'by weight'. I discuss it at length in the Substack post, but the thrust of it is that (1) we're visual creatures, and it's much easier to estimate 'one tablespoon' than it is '100 grams' and (2) usually, you need to transfer ingredients from container --> dish *somehow*, and that's usually with your hands ("a pinch"), with a spoon, or some sort of cup. 2. Again, I know that this one was a bit of a weird one. I usually don't talk to the camera... I know my eyes wandered to my script at times, and that the audio was a bit rough in parts (damn our neighbors chickens...). Hopefully it all wasn't too distracting. Anyway, just a quick one before we hop back to China for a trip :)
I really like the direction you are going with the channel. I especially enjoy the discussions about border areas and food of the chinese diaspora. It would be nice though to have some more videos about Northern chinese cuisine. Maybe there is something interesting for you guys there, at the level of interaction between Mongolia/other historically nomadic peoples , Korea, Russia with the Northwest Chinese. I'm also interested in food from the hui minorities in the northwest and their interactions with people further to the west and more to the north.
My Italian grandmother, who was an amazing cook, used generic measures. A pinch of sugar A dash of salt An eggshell of milk. All older generations did the same through virtual every culture. And their cooking was amazing!
I was talking about cooking to an engineer (mistake #1) and he insisted that the only reason he doesn't know how to cook is because recipes aren't precise enough for his incredibly intelligent engineering brain. The example he used was, "This one recipe told me to simmer for an hour. What's a simmer? What temperature is that?" Dude, you don't suck at cooking because recipes aren't precise enough...you suck at cooking because you're a *moron.*
Kinda yes. It seems appropriate because eggs can have widely different sizes, even if they're all in the same "large" carton. If only they do this for onions...
It's because eggs can be bought in different sizes. They could just go with 1 large egg's yolk, but the mass is a bit more flexible as you don't have to have the same size of egg, you can combine partial yolks from multiple eggs if need be.
More garlic is more better. Although a friend's wife once made a garlic caesar salad that was so strong we were tasting garlic more than 24 hours after consumption, like a garlic hangover. Sooo, so good.
My mother taught me that you follow a recipe exactly the first time, taste it, then make adjustments for the next time based on how you want those results to differ next time. Fast forward 30 years, and my family is always amazed at how I get so many recipes "right" the first time I make something for them. Two reasons: 1. I have learned by so much experience cooking how to look at a recipe and know how it will taste and how to compare various recipes for the same dish and evaluate which one is the right one for my palate. And 2. I NEVER serve them a recipe the first time I make it; I make a test batch a few days before following the recipe exactly and have the Mrs taste it so we can decide the correct adjustments for everyone's palate before serving to the entire family Cooking is science in methodology but art in execution
This! Or what I do is I test with adjustments that I hypothesize will make a recipe better for me, both taste-wise and availability-wise. And then I decide if I like the recipe as is, with my adjustments, or if I need to change something back, or even adjust more of it 😅
I don't think I've ever followed a recipe to the letter in my entire life even the first time making a dish. I learned cooking from my old Italian grandma and she didn't use scales or measuring cups and made everything, including baked desserts. Every time I look up a recipe I take it more as a general guideline and an indication of how a dish should feel rather than an actual set of instruction
For me when I start try cooking new dish, I looking for 3-5 recipes, and try to look for common thing. like ingredient/condiment etc. and that is the key point, and I use that as reference when cooking that first time, after I use my feeling to make adjustment .
i love how you describe cooking as "science in methodology and art in execution" 🤍 and as someone who's both very interested in science and very sensual, this is exactly why i love cooking bc it is one of the natural peak conversion points for both of these.
A major difference between cooking and baking is that baking involves reactions that are a lot more precise, if you don't put pretty much exactly the amount of the ingredients that the recipe asks for, you may get an unacceptable result. With cooking though, the reactions tend to be less fussy because it's more about texture and flavor, there aren't as many actual chemical reactions going on, for the most part as long as the texture, consistency and flavor are acceptable, it's probably close enough.
I'm in that weird camp of having done a PhD in organic chemistry and routinely measuring reagents to 4 decimals places but completely eschewing that for home cooking by doing things by feel and rough ratios. I just don't want to break out the digital scale at home becasue I already do it for work lol.
As someone who also got a ochem PhD and then ended up not doing much with it afterwards I have really enjoyed getting into cooking. As an activity it hits a lot of the same buttons but I don’t have to worry as much. Plus it be gotten into making cocktail ingredients that are even more chemistry adjacent.
That's interesting. I always thought I preferred cooking by feel because I studied astrophysics - where in most cases we're dealing with such large orders of magnitude that one can simply look at the exponents and ignore the rest...
@@OmniversalInsect And that's fine, people forget that humans were cooking for thousands of years before the invention of precise measuring devices that were standard across large regions. There's a reason why older cookbooks said things like a dash of this, or a pinch of that.
"A recipe is a lesson plan" is such a good way to frame this. I've been learning from this channel for several years now, and I have definitely picked up more cooking intuition along the way.
don't worry too much about straying from your usual format. this is a great discussion video and I'm sure you could come up with other interesting topics if you allow yourselves the freedom.
I've been cooking for about 25 years, and have a friend who's my age but just started learning. He's been going out of his mind over the fact that so many recipes go by volume rather than weight, and this video couldn't have come at a better time; you've elucidated it far better than my efforts so far. Thank you and well done!
I've been cooking most my life and many internet and irl recipes (like grandma recipes) still make little sense to me 😂 Suddenly asking for weird tools/ingredients/forms and a cook has to be prepared for any crazy thing the recipe demands. Or spend days looking for it. Some recipes you can outright tell weren't put into practice And some recipes are disgusting which makes you go "did I do this right?????" And you read the recipe and know that no way it ends up delicious I swear I have some tools I used maybe once/twice And then there's tools I use regularly I had a recipe call for a food processor because "you need to be able to short pulse".... My blender can pulse so no point in buying the expensive food processor
My maternal aunt was one of the best cooks in the family. She made many delicious Filipino and Filipino Chinese dishes in the style of the Southern Tagalog regions but she never taught me, I just remember watching and helping her cook for family parties. When she passed, I wanted to replicate her recipes the best that I could. I used other recipes, my memories of how she made them, and how they tasted to make my own recipes based on my aunt’s that were true in spirit. Are they exactly the same? No but I’d say I usually get the essence down and I often feel like I’ve made appropriate improvements to them. I also write them down, even with imprecise measurements more as a set of guidelines for myself in the future. Even when I record measurements by weight, I never really exact with them because “feel” is an important element of cooking that comes with experience. Anyway, very interesting video indeed.
I love both this format and the sheer volume of information contained in this video. That shot at the end made me laugh so hard, because it's so emblematic of Chinese cooking (or any historical recipe, really). I once tried to follow a recipe for ham sui gok where half the listed ingredient quantities were literally "some".
My mom (Italian American) is in her 70s and all of her recipes look like that. She never measures anything; it's all dumped directly into the pan. Everything is eyeballed and how she decides is enough of something is based on experience and like, vibes.
@@chrysanthemum8233 My grandmother was the same with her middle eastern fare, and that's how I do 90% of my cooking. I pull all the ingredients, throw them together till the color in the bowl (when making a spice mix) "looks the right shade of reddish-brown" and call it a day there, really. Then for the other ingredients it's always case of "would this look like enough on a plate" and that's about as far as I take most of the portioning really. That said, when looking at recipes I do tend to prefer by weight (metric weight at that) simply because I find them easier to work with, espeically since later on I generally ratio my ingredients in further recipes I make, and keeping everything in grams makes figuring out those ratios super easy, and they're also in what is pretty much the lowest commonly-used unit as well to set up the ratios. On the other hand, if the recipe says "6 oz of orange juice, 3 teaspoons molasses, 2 pounds of meat, 2 tablespoons of pepper flakes, etc" I have to convert everything down/up to a common unit before I even get started, and we all know what a labyrinthine process converting units in Imperial can be.
I think one weakness the "by feel" approach has is... it needs experience, as you said. What if it's a dish I'm encountering for the first time? If I go by feel, it'll be similar to what I normally cook, whereas the other approaches give me a benchmark of "ok, this dish should taste roughly like this". After the first attempt I'm free to try adjusting it to suit my taste more, so it leans more into the "by feel" approach. And food being such a subjective experience, "by weight" is more accurate, but it's rarely needed for a home cook.
@@elio7610 You ever tried a recipe and went "that's too much garlic, I'll dial it back"? Technically that's cooking by feel. Though I'd admit the distinction only matters on paper, in reality we all make small adjustments that way. I'm talking about those situations where I try to adjust almost all the seasonings to my liking, I'll end up with something that tastes similar to my usual cooking.
@@elio7610 As a chef, have recipe book with exact by weight measurements of ingredients for sauces, soups, marinades, everything. A lot of them you adjust a bit at the end, spices get less aromatic in time, garlic has small differences in how sharp/pungent it is depending on time of year/country of origin, there are many variables. Still recipe is a baseline that will get to very near to where you need to be.
@@elio7610 Because you wanna double check if you have the right ingredients. You can use the measurements on the recipe as approximates that you can eyeball without needing to make those measurements yourself
This video truly sums up my experience in the kitchen, having learned much of my Chinese cooking (despite being Chinese) from your channel. I start off with recipe suggestions for ingredient amounts, but then often add some (no such thing as too much garlic) or take away (black pepper isn't my thing) based on a feel and intuition from what I like and what worked in the past. It sort of ends at a middle ground of "by feel" and "by weight" where the recipe acts as a starting point to avoid too much trial and error wastage.
I loved this video. Like, so much. Recipes are great, but explaining broader concepts helps to frame peoples' mindsets much better. 10/10 please make more! Also your mug isn't ugly!!!
This is probably a good place to mention that the markings on measuring jugs often differ in actual volume by up to 30% between different brands. I've poured '500ml' from one jug into another one to find that it gave a measurement of 350ml in the second jug.
@@cameronschyuder9034 Simple. You get a scale. Put your jug on it. Tare. Pour in 500 grams of water. Reference with the markings on the jug. Either throw out the faulty jug or correct the markings. One mililiter of water weighs one gram. Well, technically it weighs a tiny little bit less than a gram at room temperature, but that's too small of a difference for kitchen scales to catch anyways, so 500 ml of water should weigh 500 grams.
I grew up cooking with my mom; I just loved spending time with her in the kitchen. She was a great cook, and something I learned early on is that she never followed recipes. She used them as guidelines and then adjusted as she went, as if cooking was an adventure much more than a chore. It instilled in me a love of the adventure of exploring different foods- the reason I love this channel!
Aww what a nice story. Same for me, but with my father. I came home from school, did my homework, then prepared dinner with him. He taught me the mechanics of cooking. My grandmother was his opposite, following every recipe to a T, still with excellent technique. It was nice to have both influences.
I bet you've been told this, but you strike me as potentially the best teacher of ANY subject that I've seen in awhile. You have a way to make us feel empowered to do what you do - by guiding us along the way. Thank you!
i LOVE this format of video. i love when you guys get into the history of things or the "why" of things. im a chemistry teacher and a baker and i love these sorts of discussions
I love this one. This channel is just Cooking Demystified (+ extra philosophy & history about Chinese cuisines specifically). Cannot explain how much I adore this approach and how much it tells me about the character of both of you.
I really appreciated this breakdown! Learning how to cook a new cuisine can be daunting and your channel has consistently helped to bridge that barrier, so thank you both!
I enjoyed this "different" video. The background sounds especially were interesting. Your explanations were excellent, and as someone who's been cooking professionally for almost 20 years, I couldn't agree more.
I am new to this type of cooking, just got our first "real" wok and an induction wok cook top. Your videos on how to use a wok and techniques are fantastic. Just the right amount of explanation on how and why you do what you are doing along with a basic recipe that is easy to follow. Not only am I learning how to make that meal but more importantly seeing and learning how it all goes together. For me this video proves the reason why I am here learning! Can't wait for my skills to improve and work my way though your recipes! Thank you!
Been watching for a little bit. Great to see the voice in person! Love your recipes! My partner studied in Qingdao and Shanghai, but I'm the cook, so your videos keep a happy home for us! Thank you!
Man, Chris, I know I’m going to sound obsequious, but you’re a fiercely bright guy-and I appreciate that the humility and self-effacement with which you and Steph approach your lessons makes you relatable without veering into self-deprecation. I work in corporate learning and development, and, even before the end of the video, I had decided to share this my colleagues; this video is about much more than just cooking. I hope you’ll make more videos like this. Your usual ones are great, too, but those can leave me ravenously hungry since I don’t get to eat the food I just watched y’all whip up; at least a lecture satiates my brain instead of sending me to the kitchen in goblin mode for a midnight snack. Keep up the good work!
Hey, I really liked this format! It's good to finally put a face to the voice. (Not sure if you showed your face in some other videos, haha!) You make a great point about how the recipe is written depending on the final user, for example, whether it's for a home cook, restaurant, or military (I've never heard about a 20-something-page recipe, super interesting!). You also mentioned that the feel for things is something to be learned. My non-cooking friends often say, "You are such a good cook, I wish I had this feeling around the kitchen," to which I always respond, "It's all about practice." I started with meticulously weighed ingredients. If a recipe had volume measurements, I weighed them myself and made notes. I'm all about the scientific method ;) Nowadays, I feel more comfortable with cooking by feel because I understand what this final dish feels, looks, smells, etc., like. When trying anything new, I look for similarities with the things I've made before. Videos are beneficial for learning. It's almost like having someone teach that recipe to you in person. I can't imagine learning how to cook just from a text-based cookbook with no pictures! ;_;
This sort of information is excellent. Out of all our "regular" recipes (and we typically prefer weights as measurements) none are the same as what they started out as. They've all been tweaked. We usually write all this down, and then still follow the new recipe. That's just because we have trouble remembering what we've changed especially when it's a dish we don't make often. When watching your regular videos, I'm trying to read between the lines and see why you're doing things the way you are. It never hurts to have things that are not as obvious spelled out. Thanks!
Weight is a much superior way to measure. But in the end of the day, cooking is based on taste. So you must always taste, taste and taste your food and then adjust.
I actually find volume better in many ways myself. It's easier to intuit discreet volumes rather than weights The only situation where I find weight to be truly superior rather than a matter of personal taste or upbringing is bread baking and spice mixes, or more accurately whenever I have to deal with things like hydration or baker's percentages and when measuring some kind of fine granular substance in bulk
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 The real advantage to weights for most items is that you can use the same scale to measure just about everything. Whereas you can run out of measuring cups and spoons if you're having to measure a bunch of weight and dry ingredients. I never had issues with recipes with flour prior to switching to weighing and I still don't have issues with flour after switching. I do it purely because it makes the preprocess easier, I can measure out as many cups of flour ahead of time as I like rather than having to count them as they go into the bowl.
Definitely not your usual type of video, but still a great one. Love how you guys always go the extra mile to correctly showcase and explain what you do.
Love this format ❤ Something this made me think about is how, as you become a more experienced cook, it is much easier to rely on ALL of your senses. With the dough example, you know how it should feel to the touch and even look. With a curry, you know how it should smell and taste at various phases of cooking it. Even sound can be useful to know what meat or veggies should sound like when hitting a pan heated to the right temperature. It's part of why I had a much easier time learning to cook by being taught in person (working in a kitchen) and watching videos than reading recipes... seeing how more experienced cooks use the resources available to them. A recipe can give me roughly the combination of components I will need to use, but it is very difficult for it to show the nuances of how those things come together, even if you are an experienced cook and understand all the words on the page
LOVE this video, even if it's a little more philosophy of cooking than a recipe video. There are so many people in my family who've been cooking for decades but never learned how to cook, just how to follow directions. I think it's so important to cultivate "feel", so I love that you talk about TEACHING and not just following instructions.
So glad to hear you talk about the "baking is a science" trope. I always just tell people to "add water until it sticks to the spoon", or "kneed until you can stretch it thin" -- giving exact measurements for such multivariable processes feels like it would set people up for failure.
The "window pane" test is so much more useful in understanding gluten development than just telling people to keep kneading for 10 or so minutes etc. I often find the usual 10 minutes excessive.
When making bread the only ingredient I measure is the volume of water (water has same volume and mass because metric is cool). Everything else I do by feel and it works out just fine.
I prefer to both have a rough guideline on how much i should need and a description of the intermediate result i'm supposed to achieve. Not a very experienced cook so every bit of information sometimes helps, but often times i feel comfortable enough to disregard the guidelines and do it how i feel like.
I really really like this video. I think it put into words something I've been thinking about for a while but could never quite formulate. Especially the post about the 20 page brownie recipe. I hope to see more videos like this!
More of this kind of videos, I think they're very helpful and I never knew restaurant periodicals exist! Also to reinforce what you said, ingredients in the kitchen are all natural products that vary by region, season, variety, and just luck. Your small onion may be equivalent to my large onion if you try to isolate the "active ingredient". I think the most important thing for anyone to take away is that the first time you try a new recipe is going to be your worst attempt no matter which format you follow, so don't obsess over inconsequential details. Personally, I only scan the ingredient list for rough proportions and just make it up as I cook. I enjoy the process more and can always season to fix at the end.
One of the best cooking channels on youtube by far. Their advice has made me a significantly more intuitive cook across all cusines that i love! You guys are gems!
A good reminder to find balance with the steps of a recipe and to pay attention to how the recipe is developing. My younger daughter, when boiling pasta, will set a timer “because that’s the instructions”. She has moved past that and is now adjusting recipes and whatnot. I am so proud.
I do think that even later on it's worth setting timers when it's more than a few minutes - not as a final decider, but more like a reminder to check. Especially something like boiling pasta, if it's fresh pasta there's no need - but dried pasta that might need 12 minutes? Yeah, I'm going to put a timer on to remind me that it's about done. I don't think that it's something that needs to be 'moved past' to be comfortable adjusting the recipes.
I do not have ADHD and I still set a timer for pasta lol. As weird as it sounds, I can usually tell the difference between, say, 10 minute and 9:30 minute elbow pasta. But your point is still good and your daughter is on the right path!
Enjoy this format tremendously. You are telegenic ! It’s often pleasurable and educational to a look at different production formats. Otherwise, it will become too routine.
This was a really informative and clear video, thank you! I know you're not so comfortable in front of the camera but you did a great job! As a brit who has grown up with the standard Cantonese for westerners takeaway fare (which I adore btw no hate at all), it's been fascinating to learn so much about Chinese cooking. As much as I know you're not the biggest fan, the simplest and biggest delight for me was discovering tomato and egg on rice 😍 Thank you for all that you, Steph and everyone involved do for us here on the channel!
This was a wonderful video and very helpful. I often came across ginger in many recipes saying an inch of ginger. Thank you for clearing this up Makes total sense. Much love to you and your wife ❤. As far as your mug. Both you and wife have a really nice calming look and talk.
I'm so sending this to my friend that complies about how I writte my recipes, thank you lol I've always been part of the team intuitive cooking mostly because I learned by trial and error, but it's been super interesting learning why you choose it and teach it, huge props
Love the format but maybe mention for everyone to go try a restaurant that makes the foods. The way the ingredients were made in the Chinese cookbooks isn’t wrong - but I want that baseline of ingredients, just as you mentioned. It still comes down to taste, which is built on repetition of cooking the dish and knowing what is good. So to summarize my thoughts, you have to know the flavor you’re going for. Going to the restaurant that actually serves the food helps. Tell people to improvise to suit their tastes but explore their palate. Love the show and I think sichuan is seriously underrated in the states!
As soon as baking was mentioned, I was about to type the same message about the importance of feel. I've made plenty of loaves with my only measuring implements being an empty wine bottle and measuring spoons (measuring spoons for salt and starter, and then adding flour by feel) to greater success than many efforts with kitchen scales. Knowing how a well-hydrated dough should feel makes it easier to achieve consistent results than following recipes to the letter, but that knowledge only comes with a lot of experience of how results change despite using the same measurements.
I just found your channel but I really appreciate these videos. I think you've got a nice oratory style, I like your cadence, and I didn't notice your eyes wandering to the script if they did. I say keep at it when the format suits the content you're making.
I've only been cooking for 30yrs, and it's usually done by feel. Recipes for me are "what ingredients do I need" It definitely helps for some sauces to know what the balance "should" be
I really love videos like this, that explain the thought process behind decisions. I feel like they bolster the techniques I'm learning from the channel and provide a great insight into the "why" of it all.
I think this is also a good explanation of why cooking feels "easy" to someone with sufficient experience. We aren't following the recipes exactly, and we are making substitutions on the fly. If it is something we've made before, the recipe is mostly just there to remind us. But for baking, I only tolerate by weight recipes. Even still: flour measurements are only a suggestion. That's why there is often a description of what consistency the dough or batter should have.
i got into cooking again because of this channel, and really started to learn about all the “but actually…” things in cooking. I really like these videos that explore a concept or method, because they can be more applicable to my daily cooking than a recipe that looks really tasty but has ingredients that are a bit out of reach. Can’t wait for the next one!
loved this video! it's a topic i often think about but never sought the specific answer to. on the one hand i always get frustrated trying to get specific recipes out of my grandma when she just handwaves everything as 'a bit of this, some of that', but on the other hand, i get frustrated when i'm trying to look at a regular recipe and it's calling for a really specific measurement of something like onions (because it's like, i'm not going to use 76.5% of this onion, i'll use half or all of it so just tell me which!) it's interesting to think about these preferences for delivering a recipe and their applications. thanks for all your hard work!
Ginger by inch had caused a problem for me once when I've scaled up a certain dish that I had made only once or twice before. It was an Indian dish (cannot recall which one), in which multiplying those inches of ginger ended up with excessively gingery dish (probably due to thickness of the ginger). I ended up doubling an already tripled recipe to correct this error, which was still very gingery but acceptable. In the future, I won't make this error, but was still disruptive at the time. Cook and learn.
Having grown up in the States, I was very hesitant to switch to weights for cooking (dragged my heals for 15 years), then I decided to try my hand at baking - not only did I switch, I even use my scales to make cocktails. Part because I don't want to have to wash more stuff, but the consistency is off the charts. I've even got a good chunk of my immediate family in the States to make the shift. Thanks for taking the time to go through this - personally, I tend to follow a recipe until I decide to pivot and make it mine (more garlic today, more citrus, more spice, etc), jumping into the pool has been easier for me using weights, as I can dip my toe in for recipes that aren't in my inner repertoire. This was a great oversight for seasoned cooks or newbies, I think for the most part, we just find what works for us and go with that.
"not only did I switch, I even use my scales to make cocktails" As someone who's used a scale in the kitchen for like 15 years...that sounds exhausting.
As an intermediate home cook and baker, I find weights really helpful both when learning and when experimenting with changes. They let me modify just one variable by a known amount and work towards a consistent personal recipe.
This is a really good way to look at recipes! And I like the different video format once in a while. Personally I have a hard time following recipes and almost always just end up skimming the cooking instructions then mostly paying attention to the ingredients, putting in whatever amount I feel like at the time. I cook almost every day and there's only a few things I make that are exactly the same every time (japonica rice and miso soup, but even the miso additions other than wakame vary depending on the season and availability), everything else varies pretty wildly. I like variety and I don't tend to make meal plans, I just buy (or forage) what looks good and find a dish that fits or make something up. Weight or volume doesn't matter too much to me because I won't listen anyway 😂
Wang Gang DEFINITELY does some parts of his recipes by feel. What translates to “the right amount” shows up in his videos and for what I can gather from his written recipes very often, especially in regard to starch incorporation.
I usually cook by intuition now (and I still fail once in a while), but your videos helped me to get the experience to get the intuition in the first place. I love you guys!
I think it boils down to 2 philosophies: Exact recipes (aka by weight) should generally be used in commercial or large batch recipe settings, since by feel will generally stop working or wont lead to consistent taste. Forgiving recipes (aka by feel) are favored by home cooks as there is generally a lot of leeway in adjusting to taste. But that said, this usually is still suited to family sized portions, since the larger portions lend to its forgiveness. Single serve generally needs to go back to exact recipes. In any case, i do believe that certain cuisines favor by feel more, chinese among them. Ultimately though, recipe style preference i think is down to the cook. It does take some experience to work by feel, so it is not something a novice, especially without guidance or a baseline to go off, can easily go by. So an exact recipe is helpful in that way. On the other hand, it is intimidating to think you may mess up if the recipe is not followed exactly. So i guess in the end, everyone should just understand that cooking is a learning process and we should enjoy the failures as much as the successes.
This is great. I used to be a cook/chef for about 8 years many years ago. And even now, I cook a lot at home. I always follow a recipe as close as I can when cooking a new dish for the first two times or so. After that, once I get the feel for the amounts, I just eye-spot it. If it's an old classic, I don't even need a recipe. I love your channel as it has helped me discover (or re-discover) new flavors, dishes, and techniques. I am from the US originally but have been living and teaching in S. Korea for the past 15 years. So I have really honed my Asian cooking skills to include East and Southeast Asian foods, as well as Indian/Pakistani foods.
Honestly, I think this is a great format to pair with your recipe- and technique-driven videos; it's very easy to lose sight of the philosophy and context on this stuff. Much the same way as Kenji's "the best chili" recipe was never meant to be made verbatim, knowing *why* we're doing what we're doing is as important as the technical process itself.
Kenji's recipes are definitely not meant to be made verbatim, as there always seems to be some aspect of whatever it is he's making that's either plain wrong or just a little off. He does an enormous amount of great research, but always seems to misinterpret something.
@@sparkeyjones6261 that's a different argument entirely - I was referring to the philosophy in his recipes, where often he wants to show the ways to maximize flavor and results and asks the reader to decide which ones they're willing to use - which "umami bomb", whether to whip the egg whites for pancakes, etc.
@@vagentzero Huh, I have The Food Lab and read nearly every article he ever wrote for Serious Eats, and I don't think that's true at all. Like 95% of his recipes he expects you to do all that stuff, and the only exceptions I recall are excessively fiddly process or stuff for like, picky eaters (leaving liver out of something) or people who don't have access to certain ingredients. Frankly, it's a bit much, I think all his recipes with a thousand steps and ingredients are pretty bad and miss sight of the spirit of the original dish.
@@SatchmoBronson I have no problem with fiddly processes, in fact I quite enjoy preparing foods that require a great deal of time and effort. Kenji details these processes fairly well, until a point... then he'll blow it with one or more aspects of the process that are just plain wrong or slightly inaccurate. It's like he's following tried and true methods passed down for generations... and then suddenly makes stuff up because he thinks it will work better. And, I get the impression that he's often making some of these foods for the first time himself. I'd much rather take instruction from people with more experience.
I love your channel and have learned so much over the years as a subscriber. These videos are great. I’d enjoy seeing one about all the starches, how they are prepared differently, and best uses.
First, your content is amazing! You guys are doing such a great job! All your videos taught me soooo much! Keep doing it! Second, I agree 100% with your explanation, I'm a chef myself, and cooking you need both, precision ams feeling and also connection with your dish, your ingredients your equipment, it sounds romantic but is the reality. I wish the best for you guys, can't wait for your next video 🥰
this video was awesome! The philosophy of cooking makes me want to cook even more than recipes! Instead of being rote or repetitive, I can think about deeper things while I attempt the recipes
Great video. Also worth pointing out that if you work in a professional setting where prep is done in bulk, it makes perfect sense to call for x grams of ginger or onion because you're not measuring the unpeeled, unchopped stuff! I totally agree with your philosophy of having approximate measurements as a starting point, it reassures beginners while experienced cooks know they can fudge it.
I really appreciate how Internet Shaquille does a lot of his videos, where he tries to emphasize a process or reasoning behind why certain decisions are made, then gives an example recipe using those rules. In the later case, I think by weight w/ specific ingredients used makes the most sense so you have (1) the general idea, and (2) a *specific* execution of it. Y'all have also definitely done this on occasion, which I also appreciate
He's got a great video about building intuition in the kitchen that is my go-to explanation of my process for cooking. I've been cooking a long time, so I know what tastes good. This isn't because I'm more talented than a friend, it's simply because I've taken the time to develop my intuition.
Superb Chris. I use by weight for recipes that require it, and go by feel for other recipes. I really enjoyed it and I think that it's a good learning point for the neophyte.
I enjoyed this video. especially the end on how to adjust the taste of the final product. "if ts flat, maybe some vinegar" I..never thought about it that way!
As a young bride I took some cooking courses designed for the home cook but instructed by professional chefs in a commercial kitchen designed for teaching. We were taught "method" cooking and measured everything by volume which we then had to taste after each ingredient addition so that we understood why the product/recipe turned out the way it did. Measurement bty was mostly volume in the palm of the hand and we were taught to add in small increments to taste until you liked it except for liquids, (measuring cups here) which were added slowly and again tasted after each addition. So a recipe was really just a guide. Baking otoh was taught by weight. I thank my lucky stars now that I took these courses as it freed me up to be able to experiment freely with all recipes instead of slavishly following a recipe developed for the taste of someone else.
Amazing vid. The lesson at the end of the day is use recipes as a jumping off point, trust your own tastes and cook cook cook until you figure it out. A chef friend once told me “recipes are guidelines, not commandments”
in my experience in professional kitchens in America, a lot of people I've worked with get upset or confused when they execute a recipe and I taste it and ask it to be modified slightly, because the recipe should be correct of course! my solution has just been teaching how to taste, what to taste for and building that confidence to change things even if its not gospel. I love getting to teach that simply just a squeeze of lemon juice or pinch of citric acid makes peoples faces light up on how good it tastes suddenly another great video chris
Good video on a neglected topic. I think it's an important point to focus on the result rather than the process since preferences, ingredients, and equipment vary so much 👍.
Ok, this is the first time I see the face on the channel. Even though I never actually cared, now I feel the need to check back on older videos when that happened. ... I'll get to it eventually. I liked the video for, uh, basically confirming my opinion. Thought of the baking example pretty soon, remembering a conversion during foreign exchange where I made a dough and was asked "how you're doing that?" and I answered "I dunno, I just go by feel", to which he responded "then you're good". It always takes experience, so the weight measurements are really helpful before I have acquired a sufficient amount of that. I like recipes that give specific amounts, then quantify that with examples, like "it should have this consistency, add water if it does not". The unspecific recipes do remind me of older recipes that might've been common at the time, but aren't anymore, like "add the usual amount of *spice mix that no one knows what it contained anymore*", or spiced wine that meticulously lists all the spices to the 1/10th ounce, but fails to mention the wine. But, I gotta say, the way he's subtly looking off-camera is a bit distracting. :D
I loved this video. I really do appreciate you taking the time out and explaining things so very well. It makes me feel good that you follow Kenji, and King Arthur, and all the same people that I follow and watch religiously. As I do you.
the one that always gets me is when a recipe specifies a volume of oil for sauteeing or panfrying, despite the huge impact that pan size has on the amount needed
I liked this video, would watch more like it. I like to learn a recipe enough to internalize it, so I can keep the recipe to remind me of what goes in, but once I know it, I usually end up riffing on the recipe, adjusting, trying things out, swapping ingredients, or adding additional ones. I want measurements to start, so I can learn the steps and taste as I go along, and I'll cook it that way more than once, until I know how I want it to finish, then I can cook the dish by feel. I learned to cook from recipes as a teen, so that's why I like to learn new dishes from a recipe, its familiar. Sort of related, my job after high school was fixing electronics in the military, we had step by step troubleshooting guides, but we also learned to look at how the device worked, it's theory of operation, to guide you to finding how and why it was failing. I take the same approach to cooking, I want to know how the dish works, which i learn by recipe and following steps until I grasp how it develops and the desired end state, then I can cook freely. What this means is that I'm not a good impromptu chef, I want to have time to think it through, to have all my ingredients on hand. And I'll freely admit I am terrible at juggling multiple dishes so everything is ready at once, unless I can farm out some of the work to devices (rice cooker, pressure cooker, crock pot, my little 2-cup deep fryer).
Great video, really well thought out and articulated. I think you two have extremely specific, labor/measurement intensive recipes that feel like they take a long time to make. However, I literally could not have started cooking Chinese food without this. I really agree with your take on as a new/intermediate cook, specific amounts are needed to develop the feel. Now that I know a thing or two, I NEVER read the values you prescribe for your seasonings/sauces/chicken weight. I just buy a chicken, getting 400g of chicken is impossible/impractical. Keep up the good work. Maybe it would be helpful to mention in your recipes the sentiment in this video.
I think something important that you didn't really mention is that if you're following a recipe that's not perfectly laid out, you're still very unlikely to find yourself in this-food-tastes-disgusting territroy. A couple of grams of ginger, or seasoning, or whatever may take you into 'imperfect', but whatever you end up with is still going to taste wonderful. I suppose my point really is, don't let perfection stand in the way of great. Don't be scared to be slightly out by your measurements, whatever you make it still gonna taste fantastic. And the tweaks to take it to perfection will come with practice.
Hey guys, a couple notes:
1. I neglected to discuss in the video why I think 'by volume' generally works as a better bridge than 'by weight'. I discuss it at length in the Substack post, but the thrust of it is that (1) we're visual creatures, and it's much easier to estimate 'one tablespoon' than it is '100 grams' and (2) usually, you need to transfer ingredients from container --> dish *somehow*, and that's usually with your hands ("a pinch"), with a spoon, or some sort of cup.
2. Again, I know that this one was a bit of a weird one. I usually don't talk to the camera... I know my eyes wandered to my script at times, and that the audio was a bit rough in parts (damn our neighbors chickens...). Hopefully it all wasn't too distracting.
Anyway, just a quick one before we hop back to China for a trip :)
I really like the direction you are going with the channel. I especially enjoy the discussions about border areas and food of the chinese diaspora. It would be nice though to have some more videos about Northern chinese cuisine. Maybe there is something interesting for you guys there, at the level of interaction between Mongolia/other historically nomadic peoples , Korea, Russia with the Northwest Chinese. I'm also interested in food from the hui minorities in the northwest and their interactions with people further to the west and more to the north.
My Italian grandmother, who was an amazing cook, used generic measures.
A pinch of sugar
A dash of salt
An eggshell of milk.
All older generations did the same through virtual every culture. And their cooking was amazing!
I was talking about cooking to an engineer (mistake #1) and he insisted that the only reason he doesn't know how to cook is because recipes aren't precise enough for his incredibly intelligent engineering brain. The example he used was, "This one recipe told me to simmer for an hour. What's a simmer? What temperature is that?"
Dude, you don't suck at cooking because recipes aren't precise enough...you suck at cooking because you're a *moron.*
I like this video! Educational, fun! Give us more😊
@@ssthegNever heard of eggshells as a measurement unit 😂 I thought thimble was the weirdest unit I heard
I liked this video a suitable amount
For me it was one imperial mouth curl.
Hahahahah but you lot are actually slow and I wouldn’t be finding that funny if I was you xox
In mass or in volume?
Many inches of enjoyment were had
@@TheRealSamSpeddingthat sounds so dirty…
it's always kinda funny when recipes commit hard enough to call for an exact mass of egg yolk instead of "1"
Kinda yes. It seems appropriate because eggs can have widely different sizes, even if they're all in the same "large" carton. If only they do this for onions...
It's because eggs can be bought in different sizes. They could just go with 1 large egg's yolk, but the mass is a bit more flexible as you don't have to have the same size of egg, you can combine partial yolks from multiple eggs if need be.
Shoulda known shaq watches this channel
Lots of restaurants use pasteurised egg yolkes and whites for baking and things like mayonnaise.
3 egg yolks were too few, 4 were to many so now you have half a egg yolk in the fridge.
ginger, like garlic, one measures with one's heart.
Exactly. And my heart is quite
gluttonous.
More garlic is more better. Although a friend's wife once made a garlic caesar salad that was so strong we were tasting garlic more than 24 hours after consumption, like a garlic hangover. Sooo, so good.
Also ginger and garlic vary in flavor a lot.
And onions. How big is a "small onion"? It's as much onion as you want. If you want more, use more. If you want less, use less.
No less than 157 heads of garlic, the food have to taste something.
My mother taught me that you follow a recipe exactly the first time, taste it, then make adjustments for the next time based on how you want those results to differ next time.
Fast forward 30 years, and my family is always amazed at how I get so many recipes "right" the first time I make something for them. Two reasons: 1. I have learned by so much experience cooking how to look at a recipe and know how it will taste and how to compare various recipes for the same dish and evaluate which one is the right one for my palate. And 2. I NEVER serve them a recipe the first time I make it; I make a test batch a few days before following the recipe exactly and have the Mrs taste it so we can decide the correct adjustments for everyone's palate before serving to the entire family
Cooking is science in methodology but art in execution
This! Or what I do is I test with adjustments that I hypothesize will make a recipe better for me, both taste-wise and availability-wise. And then I decide if I like the recipe as is, with my adjustments, or if I need to change something back, or even adjust more of it 😅
I don't think I've ever followed a recipe to the letter in my entire life even the first time making a dish. I learned cooking from my old Italian grandma and she didn't use scales or measuring cups and made everything, including baked desserts. Every time I look up a recipe I take it more as a general guideline and an indication of how a dish should feel rather than an actual set of instruction
thing is, it's an art to achieve scientific methodology. you have to be incredibly creative to isolate factors.
For me when I start try cooking new dish, I looking for 3-5 recipes, and try to look for common thing. like ingredient/condiment etc.
and that is the key point, and I use that as reference when cooking that first time, after I use my feeling to make adjustment .
i love how you describe cooking as "science in methodology and art in execution" 🤍
and as someone who's both very interested in science and very sensual, this is exactly why i love cooking bc it is one of the natural peak conversion points for both of these.
god, the ISO standard bit is so real but also damnit i want the mathematically exact same massaman curry as Pailin
This is an entire mood 😂
A major difference between cooking and baking is that baking involves reactions that are a lot more precise, if you don't put pretty much exactly the amount of the ingredients that the recipe asks for, you may get an unacceptable result.
With cooking though, the reactions tend to be less fussy because it's more about texture and flavor, there aren't as many actual chemical reactions going on, for the most part as long as the texture, consistency and flavor are acceptable, it's probably close enough.
I'm in that weird camp of having done a PhD in organic chemistry and routinely measuring reagents to 4 decimals places but completely eschewing that for home cooking by doing things by feel and rough ratios. I just don't want to break out the digital scale at home becasue I already do it for work lol.
As someone who also got a ochem PhD and then ended up not doing much with it afterwards I have really enjoyed getting into cooking. As an activity it hits a lot of the same buttons but I don’t have to worry as much. Plus it be gotten into making cocktail ingredients that are even more chemistry adjacent.
That's interesting. I always thought I preferred cooking by feel because I studied astrophysics - where in most cases we're dealing with such large orders of magnitude that one can simply look at the exponents and ignore the rest...
Going to be studying chemistry at university soon and I do literally all my cooking by feel and eyeballing.
@@OmniversalInsect And that's fine, people forget that humans were cooking for thousands of years before the invention of precise measuring devices that were standard across large regions. There's a reason why older cookbooks said things like a dash of this, or a pinch of that.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade tbf tho a lot of older cookbooks and their recipes are terrible.
"A recipe is a lesson plan" is such a good way to frame this. I've been learning from this channel for several years now, and I have definitely picked up more cooking intuition along the way.
don't worry too much about straying from your usual format. this is a great discussion video and I'm sure you could come up with other interesting topics if you allow yourselves the freedom.
I've been cooking for about 25 years, and have a friend who's my age but just started learning. He's been going out of his mind over the fact that so many recipes go by volume rather than weight, and this video couldn't have come at a better time; you've elucidated it far better than my efforts so far. Thank you and well done!
I've been cooking most my life and many internet and irl recipes (like grandma recipes) still make little sense to me 😂
Suddenly asking for weird tools/ingredients/forms and a cook has to be prepared for any crazy thing the recipe demands.
Or spend days looking for it.
Some recipes you can outright tell weren't put into practice
And some recipes are disgusting which makes you go "did I do this right?????"
And you read the recipe and know that no way it ends up delicious
I swear I have some tools I used maybe once/twice
And then there's tools I use regularly
I had a recipe call for a food processor because "you need to be able to short pulse"....
My blender can pulse so no point in buying the expensive food processor
My maternal aunt was one of the best cooks in the family. She made many delicious Filipino and Filipino Chinese dishes in the style of the Southern Tagalog regions but she never taught me, I just remember watching and helping her cook for family parties. When she passed, I wanted to replicate her recipes the best that I could. I used other recipes, my memories of how she made them, and how they tasted to make my own recipes based on my aunt’s that were true in spirit. Are they exactly the same? No but I’d say I usually get the essence down and I often feel like I’ve made appropriate improvements to them. I also write them down, even with imprecise measurements more as a set of guidelines for myself in the future.
Even when I record measurements by weight, I never really exact with them because “feel” is an important element of cooking that comes with experience. Anyway, very interesting video indeed.
Please write a cooking book for us! Or do you have a YT channel?
I love both this format and the sheer volume of information contained in this video.
That shot at the end made me laugh so hard, because it's so emblematic of Chinese cooking (or any historical recipe, really). I once tried to follow a recipe for ham sui gok where half the listed ingredient quantities were literally "some".
My mom (Italian American) is in her 70s and all of her recipes look like that. She never measures anything; it's all dumped directly into the pan. Everything is eyeballed and how she decides is enough of something is based on experience and like, vibes.
@@chrysanthemum8233 My grandmother was the same with her middle eastern fare, and that's how I do 90% of my cooking. I pull all the ingredients, throw them together till the color in the bowl (when making a spice mix) "looks the right shade of reddish-brown" and call it a day there, really. Then for the other ingredients it's always case of "would this look like enough on a plate" and that's about as far as I take most of the portioning really.
That said, when looking at recipes I do tend to prefer by weight (metric weight at that) simply because I find them easier to work with, espeically since later on I generally ratio my ingredients in further recipes I make, and keeping everything in grams makes figuring out those ratios super easy, and they're also in what is pretty much the lowest commonly-used unit as well to set up the ratios. On the other hand, if the recipe says "6 oz of orange juice, 3 teaspoons molasses, 2 pounds of meat, 2 tablespoons of pepper flakes, etc" I have to convert everything down/up to a common unit before I even get started, and we all know what a labyrinthine process converting units in Imperial can be.
@@Geredis089 Now I'm imagining a recipe that calls for 660 nm mix that you measure with some kind of camera!
I think one weakness the "by feel" approach has is... it needs experience, as you said. What if it's a dish I'm encountering for the first time? If I go by feel, it'll be similar to what I normally cook, whereas the other approaches give me a benchmark of "ok, this dish should taste roughly like this". After the first attempt I'm free to try adjusting it to suit my taste more, so it leans more into the "by feel" approach. And food being such a subjective experience, "by weight" is more accurate, but it's rarely needed for a home cook.
why would anyone cooking by "feel" be using a recipe? the whole point of a recipe is to follow a guide, not your own whims.
@@elio7610 You ever tried a recipe and went "that's too much garlic, I'll dial it back"? Technically that's cooking by feel. Though I'd admit the distinction only matters on paper, in reality we all make small adjustments that way. I'm talking about those situations where I try to adjust almost all the seasonings to my liking, I'll end up with something that tastes similar to my usual cooking.
@@elio7610 As a chef, have recipe book with exact by weight measurements of ingredients for sauces, soups, marinades, everything. A lot of them you adjust a bit at the end, spices get less aromatic in time, garlic has small differences in how sharp/pungent it is depending on time of year/country of origin, there are many variables. Still recipe is a baseline that will get to very near to where you need to be.
@@elio7610 Because you wanna double check if you have the right ingredients. You can use the measurements on the recipe as approximates that you can eyeball without needing to make those measurements yourself
This video truly sums up my experience in the kitchen, having learned much of my Chinese cooking (despite being Chinese) from your channel. I start off with recipe suggestions for ingredient amounts, but then often add some (no such thing as too much garlic) or take away (black pepper isn't my thing) based on a feel and intuition from what I like and what worked in the past. It sort of ends at a middle ground of "by feel" and "by weight" where the recipe acts as a starting point to avoid too much trial and error wastage.
I loved this video. Like, so much. Recipes are great, but explaining broader concepts helps to frame peoples' mindsets much better. 10/10 please make more! Also your mug isn't ugly!!!
This is probably a good place to mention that the markings on measuring jugs often differ in actual volume by up to 30% between different brands. I've poured '500ml' from one jug into another one to find that it gave a measurement of 350ml in the second jug.
I've experienced this too and it's wild to me-- idk which to trust.
@@cameronschyuder9034 Simple. You get a scale. Put your jug on it. Tare. Pour in 500 grams of water. Reference with the markings on the jug. Either throw out the faulty jug or correct the markings.
One mililiter of water weighs one gram. Well, technically it weighs a tiny little bit less than a gram at room temperature, but that's too small of a difference for kitchen scales to catch anyways, so 500 ml of water should weigh 500 grams.
I grew up cooking with my mom; I just loved spending time with her in the kitchen. She was a great cook, and something I learned early on is that she never followed recipes. She used them as guidelines and then adjusted as she went, as if cooking was an adventure much more than a chore. It instilled in me a love of the adventure of exploring different foods- the reason I love this channel!
Aww what a nice story. Same for me, but with my father. I came home from school, did my homework, then prepared dinner with him. He taught me the mechanics of cooking.
My grandmother was his opposite, following every recipe to a T, still with excellent technique. It was nice to have both influences.
I bet you've been told this, but you strike me as potentially the best teacher of ANY subject that I've seen in awhile. You have a way to make us feel empowered to do what you do - by guiding us along the way. Thank you!
i LOVE this format of video. i love when you guys get into the history of things or the "why" of things. im a chemistry teacher and a baker and i love these sorts of discussions
I love this one. This channel is just Cooking Demystified (+ extra philosophy & history about Chinese cuisines specifically). Cannot explain how much I adore this approach and how much it tells me about the character of both of you.
Actually seeing you speaking the text does make it more interesting and compelling. Keep it going!
I really appreciated this breakdown! Learning how to cook a new cuisine can be daunting and your channel has consistently helped to bridge that barrier, so thank you both!
I enjoyed this "different" video. The background sounds especially were interesting. Your explanations were excellent, and as someone who's been cooking professionally for almost 20 years, I couldn't agree more.
I am new to this type of cooking, just got our first "real" wok and an induction wok cook top. Your videos on how to use a wok and techniques are fantastic. Just the right amount of explanation on how and why you do what you are doing along with a basic recipe that is easy to follow. Not only am I learning how to make that meal but more importantly seeing and learning how it all goes together. For me this video proves the reason why I am here learning! Can't wait for my skills to improve and work my way though your recipes! Thank you!
Been watching for a little bit. Great to see the voice in person! Love your recipes! My partner studied in Qingdao and Shanghai, but I'm the cook, so your videos keep a happy home for us! Thank you!
Man, Chris, I know I’m going to sound obsequious, but you’re a fiercely bright guy-and I appreciate that the humility and self-effacement with which you and Steph approach your lessons makes you relatable without veering into self-deprecation.
I work in corporate learning and development, and, even before the end of the video, I had decided to share this my colleagues; this video is about much more than just cooking.
I hope you’ll make more videos like this. Your usual ones are great, too, but those can leave me ravenously hungry since I don’t get to eat the food I just watched y’all whip up; at least a lecture satiates my brain instead of sending me to the kitchen in goblin mode for a midnight snack.
Keep up the good work!
This video was extremely helpful! Thank you.
Also, the audio and looking at the script was something I hadn't notice. I engaged with the content.
Hey, I really liked this format! It's good to finally put a face to the voice. (Not sure if you showed your face in some other videos, haha!) You make a great point about how the recipe is written depending on the final user, for example, whether it's for a home cook, restaurant, or military (I've never heard about a 20-something-page recipe, super interesting!). You also mentioned that the feel for things is something to be learned. My non-cooking friends often say, "You are such a good cook, I wish I had this feeling around the kitchen," to which I always respond, "It's all about practice."
I started with meticulously weighed ingredients. If a recipe had volume measurements, I weighed them myself and made notes. I'm all about the scientific method ;) Nowadays, I feel more comfortable with cooking by feel because I understand what this final dish feels, looks, smells, etc., like. When trying anything new, I look for similarities with the things I've made before. Videos are beneficial for learning. It's almost like having someone teach that recipe to you in person. I can't imagine learning how to cook just from a text-based cookbook with no pictures! ;_;
This sort of information is excellent. Out of all our "regular" recipes (and we typically prefer weights as measurements) none are the same as what they started out as. They've all been tweaked. We usually write all this down, and then still follow the new recipe. That's just because we have trouble remembering what we've changed especially when it's a dish we don't make often. When watching your regular videos, I'm trying to read between the lines and see why you're doing things the way you are. It never hurts to have things that are not as obvious spelled out. Thanks!
Weight is a much superior way to measure. But in the end of the day, cooking is based on taste. So you must always taste, taste and taste your food and then adjust.
Absolutely! 😉
yes! Those cups, spoons it make me go crazy! I always go by specific weight and since then no fails! Especially if u bake
Yeah ultimately, once you learn to cook you aren't going to be measuring very much.
I actually find volume better in many ways myself. It's easier to intuit discreet volumes rather than weights
The only situation where I find weight to be truly superior rather than a matter of personal taste or upbringing is bread baking and spice mixes, or more accurately whenever I have to deal with things like hydration or baker's percentages and when measuring some kind of fine granular substance in bulk
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 The real advantage to weights for most items is that you can use the same scale to measure just about everything. Whereas you can run out of measuring cups and spoons if you're having to measure a bunch of weight and dry ingredients. I never had issues with recipes with flour prior to switching to weighing and I still don't have issues with flour after switching. I do it purely because it makes the preprocess easier, I can measure out as many cups of flour ahead of time as I like rather than having to count them as they go into the bowl.
Definitely not your usual type of video, but still a great one. Love how you guys always go the extra mile to correctly showcase and explain what you do.
Love this format ❤
Something this made me think about is how, as you become a more experienced cook, it is much easier to rely on ALL of your senses. With the dough example, you know how it should feel to the touch and even look. With a curry, you know how it should smell and taste at various phases of cooking it. Even sound can be useful to know what meat or veggies should sound like when hitting a pan heated to the right temperature. It's part of why I had a much easier time learning to cook by being taught in person (working in a kitchen) and watching videos than reading recipes... seeing how more experienced cooks use the resources available to them. A recipe can give me roughly the combination of components I will need to use, but it is very difficult for it to show the nuances of how those things come together, even if you are an experienced cook and understand all the words on the page
LOVE this video, even if it's a little more philosophy of cooking than a recipe video. There are so many people in my family who've been cooking for decades but never learned how to cook, just how to follow directions. I think it's so important to cultivate "feel", so I love that you talk about TEACHING and not just following instructions.
So glad to hear you talk about the "baking is a science" trope. I always just tell people to "add water until it sticks to the spoon", or "kneed until you can stretch it thin" -- giving exact measurements for such multivariable processes feels like it would set people up for failure.
The "window pane" test is so much more useful in understanding gluten development than just telling people to keep kneading for 10 or so minutes etc. I often find the usual 10 minutes excessive.
I think that trope is mostly applied to cakes and pastries, where it's less about the flour.
When making bread the only ingredient I measure is the volume of water (water has same volume and mass because metric is cool). Everything else I do by feel and it works out just fine.
@@OmniversalInsect i measure the flour by volume and then add water until dough feels good.
but measuring water seems more accurate
I prefer to both have a rough guideline on how much i should need and a description of the intermediate result i'm supposed to achieve. Not a very experienced cook so every bit of information sometimes helps, but often times i feel comfortable enough to disregard the guidelines and do it how i feel like.
Videos like this one is needed from time to time. You explained everything well, and it came off as well thought out. Keep up the great work!!
I really really like this video. I think it put into words something I've been thinking about for a while but could never quite formulate. Especially the post about the 20 page brownie recipe. I hope to see more videos like this!
I really liked this video. It's a little bit different from the usual content but the intent feels the same. You people are going great. Thank you
Great video, thank you! It was a very perceptive reflection, and I always like it when Chris is on camera.
Thanks for all you do, Steph and Chris. I absolutely apply the concepts I learn watching your stuff to all sorts of dishes and cuisines.
More of this kind of videos, I think they're very helpful and I never knew restaurant periodicals exist! Also to reinforce what you said, ingredients in the kitchen are all natural products that vary by region, season, variety, and just luck. Your small onion may be equivalent to my large onion if you try to isolate the "active ingredient". I think the most important thing for anyone to take away is that the first time you try a new recipe is going to be your worst attempt no matter which format you follow, so don't obsess over inconsequential details.
Personally, I only scan the ingredient list for rough proportions and just make it up as I cook. I enjoy the process more and can always season to fix at the end.
One of the best cooking channels on youtube by far. Their advice has made me a significantly more intuitive cook across all cusines that i love! You guys are gems!
A good reminder to find balance with the steps of a recipe and to pay attention to how the recipe is developing. My younger daughter, when boiling pasta, will set a timer “because that’s the instructions”. She has moved past that and is now adjusting recipes and whatnot. I am so proud.
I am 54yo and I still set a timer ... But that is mainly because I have ADHD and I will forget to check it on time with other distractions.
I do think that even later on it's worth setting timers when it's more than a few minutes - not as a final decider, but more like a reminder to check.
Especially something like boiling pasta, if it's fresh pasta there's no need - but dried pasta that might need 12 minutes? Yeah, I'm going to put a timer on to remind me that it's about done. I don't think that it's something that needs to be 'moved past' to be comfortable adjusting the recipes.
i just set a timer to remind me when to start checking, though i have ADHD as well
I do not have ADHD and I still set a timer for pasta lol. As weird as it sounds, I can usually tell the difference between, say, 10 minute and 9:30 minute elbow pasta. But your point is still good and your daughter is on the right path!
Lol, boiling pasta is one of the few things where you really need to set a timer
Enjoy this format tremendously. You are telegenic ! It’s often pleasurable and educational to a look at different production formats. Otherwise, it will become too routine.
Once again proving that you are one of the best channels in the food TH-cam realm. Thank you ❤️
"We're teaching you how to think in the kitchen" - I really like this idea!
This was a really informative and clear video, thank you! I know you're not so comfortable in front of the camera but you did a great job! As a brit who has grown up with the standard Cantonese for westerners takeaway fare (which I adore btw no hate at all), it's been fascinating to learn so much about Chinese cooking. As much as I know you're not the biggest fan, the simplest and biggest delight for me was discovering tomato and egg on rice 😍 Thank you for all that you, Steph and everyone involved do for us here on the channel!
This was a wonderful video and very helpful. I often came across ginger in many recipes saying an inch of ginger. Thank you for clearing this up Makes total sense. Much love to you and your wife ❤. As far as your mug. Both you and wife have a really nice calming look and talk.
I'm so sending this to my friend that complies about how I writte my recipes, thank you lol I've always been part of the team intuitive cooking mostly because I learned by trial and error, but it's been super interesting learning why you choose it and teach it, huge props
Love the format but maybe mention for everyone to go try a restaurant that makes the foods.
The way the ingredients were made in the Chinese cookbooks isn’t wrong - but I want that baseline of ingredients, just as you mentioned. It still comes down to taste, which is built on repetition of cooking the dish and knowing what is good.
So to summarize my thoughts, you have to know the flavor you’re going for. Going to the restaurant that actually serves the food helps. Tell people to improvise to suit their tastes but explore their palate.
Love the show and I think sichuan is seriously underrated in the states!
As soon as baking was mentioned, I was about to type the same message about the importance of feel. I've made plenty of loaves with my only measuring implements being an empty wine bottle and measuring spoons (measuring spoons for salt and starter, and then adding flour by feel) to greater success than many efforts with kitchen scales. Knowing how a well-hydrated dough should feel makes it easier to achieve consistent results than following recipes to the letter, but that knowledge only comes with a lot of experience of how results change despite using the same measurements.
10:38 don't be so harsh on yourself! I really like this style of video with the facecam, so much more personal!
I was pretty confused when I started cooking recipes that used "1-inch" of ginger. A video like this would have helped a lot!
I just found your channel but I really appreciate these videos. I think you've got a nice oratory style, I like your cadence, and I didn't notice your eyes wandering to the script if they did. I say keep at it when the format suits the content you're making.
I've only been cooking for 30yrs, and it's usually done by feel. Recipes for me are "what ingredients do I need"
It definitely helps for some sauces to know what the balance "should" be
As Chef John would say "that's just you cooking".
Love this format, btw. And you are great in front of the camera. 🥰
I really love videos like this, that explain the thought process behind decisions. I feel like they bolster the techniques I'm learning from the channel and provide a great insight into the "why" of it all.
I think this is also a good explanation of why cooking feels "easy" to someone with sufficient experience. We aren't following the recipes exactly, and we are making substitutions on the fly. If it is something we've made before, the recipe is mostly just there to remind us.
But for baking, I only tolerate by weight recipes. Even still: flour measurements are only a suggestion. That's why there is often a description of what consistency the dough or batter should have.
i got into cooking again because of this channel, and really started to learn about all the “but actually…” things in cooking. I really like these videos that explore a concept or method, because they can be more applicable to my daily cooking than a recipe that looks really tasty but has ingredients that are a bit out of reach. Can’t wait for the next one!
loved this video! it's a topic i often think about but never sought the specific answer to. on the one hand i always get frustrated trying to get specific recipes out of my grandma when she just handwaves everything as 'a bit of this, some of that', but on the other hand, i get frustrated when i'm trying to look at a regular recipe and it's calling for a really specific measurement of something like onions (because it's like, i'm not going to use 76.5% of this onion, i'll use half or all of it so just tell me which!) it's interesting to think about these preferences for delivering a recipe and their applications. thanks for all your hard work!
Love this format and seeing your "ugly mug" discussing topics in depth. Keep it up!
Ginger by inch had caused a problem for me once when I've scaled up a certain dish that I had made only once or twice before. It was an Indian dish (cannot recall which one), in which multiplying those inches of ginger ended up with excessively gingery dish (probably due to thickness of the ginger).
I ended up doubling an already tripled recipe to correct this error, which was still very gingery but acceptable. In the future, I won't make this error, but was still disruptive at the time. Cook and learn.
Having grown up in the States, I was very hesitant to switch to weights for cooking (dragged my heals for 15 years), then I decided to try my hand at baking - not only did I switch, I even use my scales to make cocktails. Part because I don't want to have to wash more stuff, but the consistency is off the charts. I've even got a good chunk of my immediate family in the States to make the shift. Thanks for taking the time to go through this - personally, I tend to follow a recipe until I decide to pivot and make it mine (more garlic today, more citrus, more spice, etc), jumping into the pool has been easier for me using weights, as I can dip my toe in for recipes that aren't in my inner repertoire. This was a great oversight for seasoned cooks or newbies, I think for the most part, we just find what works for us and go with that.
"not only did I switch, I even use my scales to make cocktails"
As someone who's used a scale in the kitchen for like 15 years...that sounds exhausting.
As an intermediate home cook and baker, I find weights really helpful both when learning and when experimenting with changes. They let me modify just one variable by a known amount and work towards a consistent personal recipe.
You are my favorite, most genuine feeling cooking youtube channel
This is a really good way to look at recipes! And I like the different video format once in a while. Personally I have a hard time following recipes and almost always just end up skimming the cooking instructions then mostly paying attention to the ingredients, putting in whatever amount I feel like at the time. I cook almost every day and there's only a few things I make that are exactly the same every time (japonica rice and miso soup, but even the miso additions other than wakame vary depending on the season and availability), everything else varies pretty wildly. I like variety and I don't tend to make meal plans, I just buy (or forage) what looks good and find a dish that fits or make something up. Weight or volume doesn't matter too much to me because I won't listen anyway 😂
This was educational. I knew most of your points but never had them put together before. Thank you!
Wang Gang DEFINITELY does some parts of his recipes by feel. What translates to “the right amount” shows up in his videos and for what I can gather from his written recipes very often, especially in regard to starch incorporation.
I usually cook by intuition now (and I still fail once in a while), but your videos helped me to get the experience to get the intuition in the first place. I love you guys!
I think it boils down to 2 philosophies:
Exact recipes (aka by weight) should generally be used in commercial or large batch recipe settings, since by feel will generally stop working or wont lead to consistent taste.
Forgiving recipes (aka by feel) are favored by home cooks as there is generally a lot of leeway in adjusting to taste. But that said, this usually is still suited to family sized portions, since the larger portions lend to its forgiveness. Single serve generally needs to go back to exact recipes.
In any case, i do believe that certain cuisines favor by feel more, chinese among them.
Ultimately though, recipe style preference i think is down to the cook. It does take some experience to work by feel, so it is not something a novice, especially without guidance or a baseline to go off, can easily go by. So an exact recipe is helpful in that way. On the other hand, it is intimidating to think you may mess up if the recipe is not followed exactly. So i guess in the end, everyone should just understand that cooking is a learning process and we should enjoy the failures as much as the successes.
I loved this video. it's cool to take a step back and deal with some theory and technique. Would love more of this kind of thing.
This is great. I used to be a cook/chef for about 8 years many years ago. And even now, I cook a lot at home. I always follow a recipe as close as I can when cooking a new dish for the first two times or so. After that, once I get the feel for the amounts, I just eye-spot it. If it's an old classic, I don't even need a recipe. I love your channel as it has helped me discover (or re-discover) new flavors, dishes, and techniques. I am from the US originally but have been living and teaching in S. Korea for the past 15 years. So I have really honed my Asian cooking skills to include East and Southeast Asian foods, as well as Indian/Pakistani foods.
Honestly, I think this is a great format to pair with your recipe- and technique-driven videos; it's very easy to lose sight of the philosophy and context on this stuff. Much the same way as Kenji's "the best chili" recipe was never meant to be made verbatim, knowing *why* we're doing what we're doing is as important as the technical process itself.
Kenji's recipes are definitely not meant to be made verbatim, as there always seems to be some aspect of whatever it is he's making that's either plain wrong or just a little off. He does an enormous amount of great research, but always seems to misinterpret something.
@@sparkeyjones6261 that's a different argument entirely - I was referring to the philosophy in his recipes, where often he wants to show the ways to maximize flavor and results and asks the reader to decide which ones they're willing to use - which "umami bomb", whether to whip the egg whites for pancakes, etc.
@@vagentzero Huh, I have The Food Lab and read nearly every article he ever wrote for Serious Eats, and I don't think that's true at all. Like 95% of his recipes he expects you to do all that stuff, and the only exceptions I recall are excessively fiddly process or stuff for like, picky eaters (leaving liver out of something) or people who don't have access to certain ingredients.
Frankly, it's a bit much, I think all his recipes with a thousand steps and ingredients are pretty bad and miss sight of the spirit of the original dish.
@@SatchmoBronson I have no problem with fiddly processes, in fact I quite enjoy preparing foods that require a great deal of time and effort. Kenji details these processes fairly well, until a point... then he'll blow it with one or more aspects of the process that are just plain wrong or slightly inaccurate. It's like he's following tried and true methods passed down for generations... and then suddenly makes stuff up because he thinks it will work better. And, I get the impression that he's often making some of these foods for the first time himself. I'd much rather take instruction from people with more experience.
I love your channel and have learned so much over the years as a subscriber. These videos are great. I’d enjoy seeing one about all the starches, how they are prepared differently, and best uses.
First, your content is amazing! You guys are doing such a great job! All your videos taught me soooo much! Keep doing it!
Second, I agree 100% with your explanation, I'm a chef myself, and cooking you need both, precision ams feeling and also connection with your dish, your ingredients your equipment, it sounds romantic but is the reality. I wish the best for you guys, can't wait for your next video 🥰
An outstanding video. Very clearly presented. Would love to see more like it!
I think this was a great video not only for Chinese cooking beginners but just for beginner cooks in general!
this video was awesome! The philosophy of cooking makes me want to cook even more than recipes! Instead of being rote or repetitive, I can think about deeper things while I attempt the recipes
Great video. Also worth pointing out that if you work in a professional setting where prep is done in bulk, it makes perfect sense to call for x grams of ginger or onion because you're not measuring the unpeeled, unchopped stuff! I totally agree with your philosophy of having approximate measurements as a starting point, it reassures beginners while experienced cooks know they can fudge it.
I really appreciate how Internet Shaquille does a lot of his videos, where he tries to emphasize a process or reasoning behind why certain decisions are made, then gives an example recipe using those rules. In the later case, I think by weight w/ specific ingredients used makes the most sense so you have (1) the general idea, and (2) a *specific* execution of it.
Y'all have also definitely done this on occasion, which I also appreciate
He's got a great video about building intuition in the kitchen that is my go-to explanation of my process for cooking. I've been cooking a long time, so I know what tastes good. This isn't because I'm more talented than a friend, it's simply because I've taken the time to develop my intuition.
This video does a great job explaining the concept of different recipe types and the advantages and disadvantages of them
Superb Chris. I use by weight for recipes that require it, and go by feel for other recipes.
I really enjoyed it and I think that it's a good learning point for the neophyte.
I enjoyed this video. especially the end on how to adjust the taste of the final product. "if ts flat, maybe some vinegar" I..never thought about it that way!
this was a great video essay and would definitely welcome more content like this.
As a young bride I took some cooking courses designed for the home cook but instructed by professional chefs in a commercial kitchen designed for teaching. We were taught "method" cooking and measured everything by volume which we then had to taste after each ingredient addition so that we understood why the product/recipe turned out the way it did. Measurement bty was mostly volume in the palm of the hand and we were taught to add in small increments to taste until you liked it except for liquids, (measuring cups here) which were added slowly and again tasted after each addition. So a recipe was really just a guide. Baking otoh was taught by weight. I thank my lucky stars now that I took these courses as it freed me up to be able to experiment freely with all recipes instead of slavishly following a recipe developed for the taste of someone else.
Hey, as long as the recipes don't go away, I LOVE this sort of video.
Amazing vid. The lesson at the end of the day is use recipes as a jumping off point, trust your own tastes and cook cook cook until you figure it out. A chef friend once told me “recipes are guidelines, not commandments”
I loved this video ❤ you are a great teacher and I could not find any “ugly mug” at all! I appreciate the effort both of you put into your work.
in my experience in professional kitchens in America, a lot of people I've worked with get upset or confused when they execute a recipe and I taste it and ask it to be modified slightly, because the recipe should be correct of course!
my solution has just been teaching how to taste, what to taste for and building that confidence to change things even if its not gospel. I love getting to teach that simply just a squeeze of lemon juice or pinch of citric acid makes peoples faces light up on how good it tastes suddenly
another great video chris
Good video on a neglected topic. I think it's an important point to focus on the result rather than the process since preferences, ingredients, and equipment vary so much 👍.
this video actually helped my brain quite a bit when it comes to cooking. i felt something click, and i feel i understand things better now
Ok, this is the first time I see the face on the channel.
Even though I never actually cared, now I feel the need to check back on older videos when that happened.
... I'll get to it eventually.
I liked the video for, uh, basically confirming my opinion. Thought of the baking example pretty soon, remembering a conversion during foreign exchange where I made a dough and was asked "how you're doing that?" and I answered "I dunno, I just go by feel", to which he responded "then you're good". It always takes experience, so the weight measurements are really helpful before I have acquired a sufficient amount of that. I like recipes that give specific amounts, then quantify that with examples, like "it should have this consistency, add water if it does not".
The unspecific recipes do remind me of older recipes that might've been common at the time, but aren't anymore, like "add the usual amount of *spice mix that no one knows what it contained anymore*", or spiced wine that meticulously lists all the spices to the 1/10th ounce, but fails to mention the wine.
But, I gotta say, the way he's subtly looking off-camera is a bit distracting. :D
I loved this video. I really do appreciate you taking the time out and explaining things so very well. It makes me feel good that you follow Kenji, and King Arthur, and all the same people that I follow and watch religiously. As I do you.
the one that always gets me is when a recipe specifies a volume of oil for sauteeing or panfrying, despite the huge impact that pan size has on the amount needed
looking at the comments and finding paragraphs, I just wanted to say I really liked the video, hoping for more of these!
I like this format a lot. Lots of helpful information I will definitely be sharing this video with my friends just starting out cooking. :>
I liked this video, would watch more like it.
I like to learn a recipe enough to internalize it, so I can keep the recipe to remind me of what goes in, but once I know it, I usually end up riffing on the recipe, adjusting, trying things out, swapping ingredients, or adding additional ones.
I want measurements to start, so I can learn the steps and taste as I go along, and I'll cook it that way more than once, until I know how I want it to finish, then I can cook the dish by feel.
I learned to cook from recipes as a teen, so that's why I like to learn new dishes from a recipe, its familiar. Sort of related, my job after high school was fixing electronics in the military, we had step by step troubleshooting guides, but we also learned to look at how the device worked, it's theory of operation, to guide you to finding how and why it was failing. I take the same approach to cooking, I want to know how the dish works, which i learn by recipe and following steps until I grasp how it develops and the desired end state, then I can cook freely.
What this means is that I'm not a good impromptu chef, I want to have time to think it through, to have all my ingredients on hand. And I'll freely admit I am terrible at juggling multiple dishes so everything is ready at once, unless I can farm out some of the work to devices (rice cooker, pressure cooker, crock pot, my little 2-cup deep fryer).
Loved this style!!! As much as I love recipes, I find these bits of wisdom and theory are incredibly helpful!
Great video, really well thought out and articulated.
I think you two have extremely specific, labor/measurement intensive recipes that feel like they take a long time to make.
However, I literally could not have started cooking Chinese food without this. I really agree with your take on as a new/intermediate cook, specific amounts are needed to develop the feel.
Now that I know a thing or two, I NEVER read the values you prescribe for your seasonings/sauces/chicken weight. I just buy a chicken, getting 400g of chicken is impossible/impractical.
Keep up the good work. Maybe it would be helpful to mention in your recipes the sentiment in this video.
Really appreciate this in-depth explanation of context... makes so much more sense to me now!
I think something important that you didn't really mention is that if you're following a recipe that's not perfectly laid out, you're still very unlikely to find yourself in this-food-tastes-disgusting territroy. A couple of grams of ginger, or seasoning, or whatever may take you into 'imperfect', but whatever you end up with is still going to taste wonderful.
I suppose my point really is, don't let perfection stand in the way of great. Don't be scared to be slightly out by your measurements, whatever you make it still gonna taste fantastic. And the tweaks to take it to perfection will come with practice.