Cooking Tidbits

General

Number one: stop using volume measurements!! get outta my face with these cups, teaspoons, fluid ounces bullshit. Cooking, like chemistry, is a mass-based skillset. You should be using a scale for every possible measurement, because it's accurate. Let me give you an example:
You have a bag of flour and you take some pinches and gently dust them over your precious imperial cup to make a cake with. Sure it'll take forever, but when it's finally full, weigh it. Now, scoop some in there and pack it down as tight as possible, hell, get a little tamper tool like pipe smokers like to use. Then weigh that bad boy. Ya think they're gonna weigh the same? Additionally, using a scale means you don't have to clean any of that crap up later, just the bowl you put stuff in. Maximum efficiency.

Bread

Bread is a tricky animal, but with the power of mass ratios, you have nothing to fear.
I found a great website by some vietnamese lady here that tells you pretty much everything you knead to know about bread ingredient proportions. They are as follows:

  • 100 parts flour
  • 60 parts water
  • 2 parts salt (max)
  • 1 part yeast
    • Ratios for some optional ingredients are:
  • 6 parts butter
  • 3 parts sugar
  • 1-5 parts other powders
    • A note on the "other powders": Garlic powder has organisms in it that naturally eat yeast, so if you want to put garlic powder in your bread, hold off on bombing your dough with it, lest it take days to rise or kill your rise entirely.