Asklemmy

You should look for kitchen tested recipes.

Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook

I'd really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.

I've recently been experimenting with curing meats, I've done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.

And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.

And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren't dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.

I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it's a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and...

When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I'll ever work with, and also doesn't scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I'm not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.

Are your oven's thermometer and kitchen scale within their calibration due dates? Is that timer NIST traceable? The measuring cups ARE Class A glassware, aren't they? Please, at least tell me you're getting your ingredients from certified suppliers... No, the spices from the dollar store down the road are most definitely NOT on the approved list, no matter how cheap they were! Dear Lord, how are you going to blame the recipies when your kitchen is still operating in the Dark Ages?

Dependencies chart!

Also, putting the amounts in the directions and not just at the beginning.

At some point, food blogs stopped being about food and became personal memoirs with a side of seasoning. It probably started innocently enough—people sharing family recipes, adding a little background, a photo or two. But then came the SEO optimization, the Google gods demanding 1,500 words per post, and suddenly, every recipe for scrambled eggs begins with a story about someone’s childhood summer in Tuscany and how their Nonna taught them the sacred art of cracking an egg with one hand.

Now it’s standard: you search “how to make pancakes” and end up reading about a foggy morning in 2003, a breakup, a golden retriever named Milo, and how cooking became therapy. You scroll and scroll, dodging ads, autoplaying videos, and a pop-up asking you to “join the culinary journey.” Somewhere, buried like treasure, is the actual recipe—five steps long, could’ve fit on a Post-it note.

And yes, this is exactly that. This is the bloated preamble you didn’t ask for. You came here for temperatures and timings, and instead, you got this paragraph complaining about the very thing it’s doing. You’re now part of the cycle—scrolling, sighing, wondering when we collectively decided that roasting vegetables required a narrative arc.

Anyway, here’s the recipe. Probably. Keep scrolling.

not exactly an answer to what you ask but I wanted to share this knowledge: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/recipe

its a standard(ish) schema that many popular recipe websites use, so you can very easily parse them and do unit conversions

American here: can we please have measurements by mass not by volume and metric units. It would make repeatability so much easier.

• examples from professional recipes – measurements are given as weights (in grams) – no worrying about how much brown sugar in a “packed cup” or if your cup of flour has been sifted enough or what exactly is meant by a “cup of spinach”
• examples from baking recipes – measurements are given as percentages – allows easy scaling up and down

avoid rigid recipes and prefer cookouts

So you're basically telling chefs to research and write out for you all the variables?

Baking is a science, cooking is an art.

Every recipe handed down through generations has notes, changes, etc....that's what makes it beautiful.

I am lucky to have my grandmother's cook book with 3x5 index cards hand written, with the date and whom the recipe is from....but I don't use lard in her Ginger Bread recipe from 1932.

There is no exact science you're looking for, the garlic grown here won't be the same as the garlic grown there, your experience won't be the same as someone who has cooked for years saying 'fuck it, throw that in there and let's see what happens'.

....lol, amateur hour

Parametric recipes are great. The central ingredient is quantity 1 and everything else is a ratio by weight. You then scale it to your needs. So an equilibrium brine would be.

1 meat 1 water 0.03 salt Brine for 1 day per 2 inch of thickest section.

They don't work for everything. So when baking a loaf of bread time and temp are spefic to loaf size. It still works for a batch of bread dough however.

This also helps you think in ratios which help general recipe construction. Once you know what flour to egg radio you like for your bread you can alter recipes to your preference.

Ratios.

On thing that drives me nuts is weight measures for dry ingredients vs numerical egg measurements. Just give me ingredient ratios normalized to the egg mass.