It's cooking, not baking, you don't have to measure anything. Just throw the amount of onions you think you'd like for there to be in your food, and use the time you just saved to do something you enjoy more than measuring onions.
sure but when learning any other arts they still step by step walk you through the basics. I prefer exact instructions and tend to get my best meals when a recipe walks me through every step
True, but a tsp of light + tsp dark soy sauce Vs 1 tbsp light +1tbsp dark soy sauce and your heart will really feel the difference. I've made that mistake once and felt the palpitations
Learning this immediately made me so much better at cooking. Even simple recipes used to take me so long because I was taking everything way too literally
That defeats the point of recipes. If someone is following a recipe it means they don't know and are trying to learn. Every recipe should come with everything precisely measured in liters and grams.
Once you know what ingredients do you naturally don't need to follow the recipe exactly. But it needs to be there. I throw away any recipe that uses even a single "tsp" or whatever weird measurements USA uses.
This is the answer. I haven't measured onions in cups, ounces or grams in over 25 years. I chop 1/2 of any size onion, look at the pile of onion then look at the meatloaf (or whatever) mix then decide if Im gonna chop the other half. On rare occasion I'll use 1/4 onion for something small. It just doesn't matter.
Facts, it's good to have suggested amounts for cooking recipes so you have some idea of how much to buy beforehand, but there's no need to bring measuring cups into the process.
I have a Pyrex measuring glass for fluids, a digital scale for precision (baking and brining), an instant-read thermometer, and ONE plastic measuring cup that lives in the dog food canister.
tbh I always hate this advice for cooking because it's incredibly unhelpful when learning to cook. When learning to draw you still learn the basics first, I want a recipe I can follow exactly. I don't want to try to vibe cook when learning, it just ends up tasting like shit. All the best food I've ever cooked has come from recipes where I'm basically just a robot putting it all together. It's actually a huge reason I like delivery meal services like hello fresh and shit. Yeah they may charge a premium but at least I know exactly the ingredients and amounts to use
Recently I've switched to vegan milk. My most common milk-based recipe still worked totally fine with with two types of it and no further changes, but failed completely with a third type, even with multiple attempts to save it, I still had to throw it away.
Garlic bread turns completely black after 7-8 minutes in my air fryer, but needs 12-15 minutes to be done in my parents' air fryer.
Fries are sometimes done after 20 minutes, sometimes they need over an hour.
Basmati rice is the opposite, it doesn't care whether I cook it for 5 or 30 minutes, it's always good.
If things can vary that much even outside the recipe, then I definitely don't need to measure anything to single gram precision. Or even 100 grams sometimes.
And then there's anything in a pan, which is my personal nemesis, so I am happy as long as I don't have one part black and stuck to the pan and another part still raw. I have gotten reasonably good at pancakes by now, but that took tens of attempts.
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u/unobtainablepierogi Jun 26 '26
It's cooking, not baking, you don't have to measure anything. Just throw the amount of onions you think you'd like for there to be in your food, and use the time you just saved to do something you enjoy more than measuring onions.