Irreducible Recipes

A lot of recipes have more steps and ingredients than strictly necessary, to optimize for flavor or texture, etc. I’m really impatient, though. If it has more than three ingredients, or three steps, it’s pushing the upper limit. I’ve sorta developed a habit of reducing recipes to their minimum core, shortcutting steps and omitting ingredients and being approximate where it doesn’t really matter. And sometimes where it does matter. (I’ve made chocolate bread by pouring in nebulous quantities of flour, sugar, cocoa, and a several-fingered pinch of baking powder, then mixing in water until it got doughy, then baking at some number between like 300 and 400 until it seemed done. Sometimes it’s come out like cake, sometimes like bread, sometimes possessing qualities of a rock, and once or twice I used too much baking powder and it was gross and salty.) Most of the recipes have at least rough measurements, though.

Candidate names for this have included speedcooking, speedrun cooking, approximate baking…. Still not sure what to call it. Baking by thumb (as in rule-of-thumb)? Anyway. Turns out pretty well a lot of the time.

I’ve developed a set of staple ingredients, some of which lend themselves to speedcooking, given here: https://hqiblog.com/2021/11/05/erhanniss-kitchen/

One thought on “Irreducible Recipes

  1. Pingback: Irrecipe: Chicken Goop | Highly Questionable Ideas

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