Cooking is not a science part 2: But it's a lot like engineering

So the other day I went off about how it bugs me when people say cooking is a science because "it has measurements and it's, like, an experiment". Thinking about it some more, I realized that while those arguments don't qualify cuisine as science proper, they actually do put it somewhere in the neighborhood of engineering. Well, not those particular arguments, but the ones to follow. And I think the same mindset.

Again I'm not going to get too formal here because seriously who cares about this shit but I guess engineering is science applied to fulfill a need. To fulfill a requirement, if you will :wink wink: (only engineers should feel the need to pity laugh at that joke). As I mentioned yesterday, really everything we do in life is an application of science because the world is just sweet that way. Typing on this computer is an application of science. Digesting that milk I just drank is an application of science. Tapping my foot is an application of science. But engineering - like medicine - is thorough and in-depth, the key difference from applications like art being the predefined result. 

There is such a thing as success and failure in engineering: meet the need and you've succeeded, fall short and you've failed. You have to keep going until you fulfill the requirement. You can't fail at painting. You can fail to achieve your vision (ah, to be 12 again (ah, to be the author of this blog)), but you've still created a painting. Many of history's great works of art were considered pretty crappy by their authors - if I'm remembering my high school English correctly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wasn't too happy with the ending on "Faxanadu", but today it's considered one of the best poems and 2D adventure platformers of all-time. This is kind of a big hint that cooking and engineering have something in common - cooking can go terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly, beverly hillbilly wrong. "Oh whoops I didn't expect that adding an extra egg would make the oven turn into a goddamn mushroom cloud!" Etc. Key to observe here are two points: the aforediscussed replication aspect of cooking - that much of the work we put even into creating recipes is simply an attempt to recapture a past experience - and that there is a flat line where food simply becomes inedible. 

The latter, that cooking can outright fail to produce food, is something of a non-issue. While it's a valid failure scenario in the execution phase, if you're regularly churning out recipes that are producing inedible products... man, something's wrong, and you've got bigger fish to fry (try not to burn them) than classifying your hobbies.

The other, that effort in cooking can be driven by mimicry, e.g. "I want to create a recipe for a hamburger that tastes just like a Big Mac" (you fuckin' weirdo) we could think of as an example requirement for the cooking process. For those not from the engineering world, a requirement is exactly what it sounds like. It is what the customer tells you a product needs to be.

I guess Dilbert fans know requirements too. Part of engineering is accepting that there are unironic Dilbert fans.

Once you have a requirement, you then apply your scientific and culinary knowledge in an iterative process to hone a recipe as close as possible to meet the need. This is something art doesn't exactly have - we could make all the hilarious jokes we want about requirements being meaningless, imprecise, and airy fairy, but at the end of the day, there is some universally defined specific need that an engineering product is meant to fulfill, a "yes-or-no" process after work is complete to determine whether it succeeded (a test procedure, if you really want to be a dick about it). Likewise, if you are trying to bake dense brownies and the brownies come out not-dense, well, I think we can agree that's a failure. If you're an engineer-cook. If you're an artist-cook, you might take this opportunity to learn that you like not-dense brownies better after all.

And that's what it really comes down to. Completely a personal thing. Whether the cooking process falls into the engineering world really just depends on how requirements-driven you personally feel. Is there an exact end product you are expecting? Will you feel as though you have failed if you do not achieve it? Or are you just trying to make anything unique? For me I know it's the latter, and it's no surprise that, as I said before, I bake to express myself artistically. I'm always trying to make something different without regard for the result. And I can see where many people out there - and most I know - probably find themselves in the first group, holding themselves to higher expectations and pushing themselves by creating more and more challenging goals. It makes a lot of sense that they would compare cooking to engineering.

But, one last time, say it with me: what the hell does any of that have to do with science? You know engineering isn't a science either, right?

Okay. Philosophy 101 routine terminated. Next week it's finally back to video games in the main. 

Well, video games and Gojira. Come on guys! It's still meeEEE!

Listen guys: Baking is not a science. Cuisine is not a science. Deal w/ it.

Okay I know yer all out there throwin' yer arms in the air screamin' atcher monitors yellin' "GET BACK TO FUCKIN' VIDEO GAMES ALREADY" but I had to overhear a conversation at work today about how "baking is a science because it is precise and requires measurements and precision". This is my blog where I get to vent about things that I am too polite to say in places where I get paid to be civil, but measurements and precision != science. Frankly I don't even think coding is a science (surely if you'd seen some of the code I've seen, you'd agree with me). Music is extremely measured - Beethoven couldn't even fucking hear and he was composing. Painting is measured. There are many recipes to make great film and video games - if you're okay with making the exact same film or video game as someone else. The fact that something can be reproduced does not make it a science. I don't even have to define the term "science" to get us that far.

The main difference between cooking and other arts is that we eat the product of cooking. I've tried to eat "Livin' Lovin' Maid" dozens of times, but unfortunately it comes back up every time. Anyway, cuisine is created and summarily demolished, beautifully transient, so it's important for any idiot to be able to replicate a work. Naturally, the art form has developed around concocting recipes rather than around the crafting of individual pieces (TV pastry chefs in recent years have sorta turned that on its head, not that I would call their work "cuisine"). By comparison, we no longer have to perform a song to listen to it, so we don't think about the details of how it was performed or the distinction between composition and recitation. On an 8-track tape, improv jazz makes the same aural impression as heavily rehearsed orchestral symphonies. Likewise, except in extreme cases like the work of Jackson Pollock or Georges Seurat, the methodology of a painter doesn't overtly occur to us. So it's actually a bit weird that anyone would bother to distinguish baking from regular cooking, especially so far as to call one an art and the other a science, because they're the exact same medium - they both produce food. It's really recipe construction that's the art form, in the same sense that you could say musical composition (including improvisation, you retarded jazz idiots) is the art form. Music just has a much better recording format. 

Science is dedicated to uncovering objective truths. You can argue about objectivity all you want, but I'm not getting into that philosophical debate here. Feel free to look up qualifiers like universal, testable, and reproducible. Next time you discover an objective universal truth of natural law while fixing up a batch of brownies, you phone me up first thing. You could say that you discovered "the best way to make brownies", and even make that a somewhat objective truth by qualifying it as "the best way to make brownies to my tastes", but, uh, how is that any different from art? That's subjectivity, my friend. Unless you're ready to assert that taste is objective (or at the very least, more objective than musical or visual preference), the process of devising a recipe cannot lead to universal truths. It's a subjective process with a subjective result. 

As for executing a recipe... I don't feel like that's really art, or science, or anything. That's just following instructions. That's the equivalent of playing from a songbook or doing a Paint-By-Numbers. Nothing wrong with it, and you're damn right it often takes skill, but of course putting certain ingredients together under certain conditions will always produce the same dish, the same way playing certain notes in the same sequence with the same timing will always produce the same song. That's not science, that's, um... determinism. 

Certainly I realize that yes! indeed! cooking employs scientific principles! Alton Brown told me that sugar molecules break down into lazer beams at temperatures above a million degrees! If that's enough to classify a medium as science for you, cool, everything ever is science. Which is a great mantra - after all, everything is governed by natural law - but I don't think it's a very precise use of the word. It's ignoring the distinction between the culture of art and science, that artists stimulate our creativity, emotion, and humanity, manipulating our existing knowledge in unique ways - they expand how we perceive, while scientists seek to redefine our knowledge and understanding of the world - they expand what we perceive. Perhaps they often use the same experimental methodology, perhaps at some level there is no way to distinguish "objective" and "subjective" results (as everything is inevitably victim to our personal perception - you psychotic solipsists, you!), but for me personally, there is a massive difference in mindset and expected return between inventing cheesecake and writing an AI algorithm to reveal traversal patterns in JRPG dungeons. 

Thing is, I like to bake (and to cook in general, but specifically to bake) and when said tidbit inevitably comes up in conversation the reaction is always "oh that makes perfect sense, you're, like, a science guy!" Well, no, guy. I like cooking because it's a form of artistic expression and I like baking because I'm obsessive compulsive and feel the need to clean up messes as I go, and that's really hard to do when you have to deal with the strict threat of burning that comes with sauteed wok-fu, so baking is a more appropriate outlet for my deficiencies. Think of baking as tactical turn-based role-playing cooking. Plus I like sweets.

Anyway, I guess I'm not saying that cooking isn't a science - even though the title does say that, for drama's sake. I'm just saying that none of the arguments listed above "prove" that it's a science, for me it certainly isn't one, and, moreover, I'm illustrating that the scientific movement isn't about numbers and measurements and experiments. It's about discovery. As Indiana Jones once said: whether anything feels like an art or a science, or what art and science are, or whatever, is up to your own special little heart. 

Yum, brownies for the heart (A recipe review?!)

Hey out there, bloggendarmerie [blog readers; France, 19th century], here's what definitely won't be a new feature because it's boring to read and so far out of my realm of qualification that, well, never mind, I'm not qualified for anything I do or say here in even the slightest. But what does qualification really mean...?

[cue speculation, contemplation, meditation, soul-searching, brain-searching]

Huh, turns out I did all those self-journeys for nothing; "qualification" is right here in the dictionary.

My friends and robots know me as a bit of a cookery and bakery; I am as exploratory within the culinary arts as I am among games, music, and literabooks. These days, thanks to the Internet (thanks) and the Food Network, literally anyone can cook literally anything ever. The only barriers to entry are literacy, a few cheap kitchen supplies, and access to a grocery. If you can literate, you can cook.

That puts a fresh batch of brownies only a midnight craving and a browser's click away, and hit with such an imperative on this very night, with no particular recipe in mind, I landed on a thinly veiled Genesis reference, Alton Brown's Cocoa Brownies [AB[A]C[A]B (Abacab)]. In the past and future, I've found dear old Alton's recipes to be somewhat lacking in personality - a positive to my mind, leaving customization to ME, the cook - and all too often reliant on some ridiculous contrivance to bestow a dish with "perfection" (for Sweet Baby Ray's sake, just look at what he goes through to make a grill). But I did spend many of my would-be formative years as a would-be professional chef hinging on every word he said, and this here brownie recipe lacks his trademark gimmickry. So I said, "okay. Make a brownie."

........................k brownie monsters

If you didn't read the linked recipe, it's basically a handful each of sugar, eggs, cocoa, and butter, and a lil' bit o' flour. It calls for more eggs (four) and a bit more cocoa than your daily dessert deity might demand, but doesn't further deviate from the beaten path except to incorporate affirmative action in the sugar department: 1c sugar (white) and 1c sugar (brown).

The results were deceptively plain. Brownies are brownies, meaning they're a treaty bird no matter how well or poorly composed, and this particular batch is certainly a chocolate delight just waiting to bring the children back home. What's lacking is anything to stop immediate dissolution into the collective memory of "brownie". They're just normal, probably better than the ones in the Betty Crocker box, but not noticeably so. The texture, possibly thanks to the four eggs, is a weird middle ground between the ever-polarizing "cakey" and "chewy". They're dense as a doornail and moist as a middle fingernail, yet crumble and refuse to stay in carefully measured aesthetically pleasing golden rectangles.

One can't review a recipe without giving lip service to the lurking omnipresent paradox: does the recipe suck, or is it just the cook? I neither desire nor intend to answer this question, because honestly I feel like I'm never going to write another one of these. Oh while I'm at it, I guess...

I give Alton Brown's Phoned-in Cocoa Brownies a: This is a recipe I could spout out off the top of my head out of 10