Number one: stop using volume measurements! Get outta my face with these cups, teaspoons, fluid ounces garbage. Cooking, like chemistry, is a mass-based skillset. You should be using a scale for every possible measurement, because it's accurate. Let me propose a thought experiment:
You have a bag of flour and you take some pinches and gently dust them over your precious stainless steel imperial dry cup that you got from crate and barrel or some other overpriced outlet to make a cake with. Sure it'll take forever, but when it's finally full, weigh it. Now, empty the cup, scoop some more flour 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? The mass of a powdered or granular medium is not always 1:1 related to it's volume. In grain science they call this the void space ratio, which just means out of a given sample of some stuff, how much of it is air?It can vary quite a lot between mediums and it is also dependent on various other factors. 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.
One last note on scales: Be mindful of the weight of the vessel you use to weigh proportional to the mass you are weighing. Think about it: Should you place on your scale your 8lb dutch oven full of potatoes that almost maxes out your scale so you can measure out .5oz of salt into it? absolutely not. At that weight, your scale has a harder time discerning between .1 and .2 oz at 8lbs than it does at 0-1 lbs.
I cannot reccomend Ethan Chlebowski's videos enough. He does great deep dives on individual ingredients to help the viewer get a more intuitive understanding of HOW to cook things. Check out his videos.
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:
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.
People want to act like sourdough starter is some big deal. It's literally flour and water in a jar that you let ferment. What's the big deal? It's always nice to add to bread even if it's not very active at the moment, because it adds a tangy character to the bread that I personally like, and I supplement my bread with store bought yeast anyways.
I think the most confusion people have is how much starter to add. Well, if you use 25oz of flour as your baseline for a loaf of bread with the ratio above, add 10 oz out of 20oz of prepared starter to the bread.
A last piece of advice I'll give on starters is: weigh your empty vessel beforehand, and write that weight down on a piece of tape and slap that baby on the jar. This way you know how much your untared jar weighs and can calculate how much starter you got in there. For kicks you could even write the +20oz (or whatever volume you want to keep) weight and the -10oz weight as well, so when you go to mix or pour starter you don't have to do math in your head every time and can just hit the numbers.
Are you cursed to make bad rice every time? well I'll tell ya the secret boyo: you've been reading the back of the package! turns out that is the biggest disinformation campaign ever waged against the public. But, more accurately, for US cooks at least, rice companies like to put the quantity of water and rice needed in "cups". Now, a dry cup and a wet cup are very different things, but when us american children are reared, we are taught that dry things are measured in dry cups and wet things are measured in wet cups. The rice companies did not apparently get this memo, and instead decided to confuse the hell out of a lot of innocent rice makers. Here's the real ratio:
1 part Rice (by weight): 1.25-1.5 parts Water(by weight)
That's it. That's all there is too it. First, lots of rice brands seem to reccomend 1.75-2 parts water which is way to much. second, this ratio is thrown further off when you decide to use wet cups for water. Remember that tirade above about scales and mass measurements? It's messing with your rice too! Now, there are some exceptions like red rice which require more water, but for most rice types, just weigh it out with the ratio above, and you will get some nice textured rice that doesn't look like oatmeal, ready to make good fried rice with.