Baking is very suited to ratios, cooking less so. Bakers commonly talk about percent hydration, which is how much water there is compared to the flour.
This is only because most recipes are incredibly imprecise. Chefsteps have gram measurements for almost everything, baking or not, and have a scaling tool built into their recipe view. It's incredibly useful.
At a certain point you run into physical realities of living, growing things. You can use ratios to make homogenized items (mashed potatoes or sauces or caramelized onions or sausage). But even if you had two chicken breasts of the same mass they'll need different amounts of sauce or coating since they'll have different surface areas, and different cook times since they'll have different volumes.
I think any recipe for roasted vegetables has to be by volume of the chop/dice fwiw. There's lots of ways to chop carrots into 20g chunks, but they won't all cook well or evenly, so a 1/4" dice is what you'd call for (even if you call for 600g of carrots)
One problem with cooking is that your pans and heat transfer do not scale. So you cannot just arbitrarily scale up/down recipes, even if you take precise measurements. The result may be way too watery or dry, for example.
My wife makes sourdough, and this frustrated the hell out of me when she started. I asked her what hydration meant, and she said how much water was in it. So of course I told her to do water/water+flour.
Nope, apparently it's just water/flour...which doesn't make sense to me, as it allows 'hydration' to go over 100%.
Why water/water+flour and not water/water+flour+salt+starter? Because water:flour is the key relationship - that's what dictates the outcome. I think some people who do a lot of enriched doughs will give everything as a percentage of the mass of flour, pretty convenient.
Really it's _just_ the ratio, normalized to 100 for convenience
You're right, I meant water+flour+starter denominator. Didn't figure salt would matter enough.
My math brain wants everything as a percentage of a whole, but I see how it's simpler the way it is. Especially since the starter also has some relatively unknown amount of water and flour inside itself.
Once you're going for consistent loaves eg selling them to people who expect them to be the same every day, you do have to factor in hydration of the starter. Usually you keep it the same as the dough for simplicity but there are reasons why it might make sense for them to be different.
Kitchen scales start to have this feature built in at around the $60 point too. Dramatically simplifies bread baking, pickling, and a couple other pure ratio projects.
When I started baking, the precise measurement was the first thing that I threw out. When I did things “by eye” I got better results. I think it’s because the person writing the recipe doesn’t have the same water, flour, starter or salt as you. I take the measurements as “very general guidelines”, now.
Serious American bakers mostly use Diamond brand kosher salt. Serious bakers universally will specify if they're using kosher or table or some other salt, because they pack differently and provide different effects.
You're going to be much closer following mass measurements than volume ones - your flour may have different moisture and protein levels than the author's. But those are minor compared to the >25% variations in flour when measured by volume.
I started using ratios for seasonings and sauces and then using taste to add it to the meat/veggies/whatever as needed and it's been very good at recreating 'good' recipes. So I wouldn't discount it. But it definitely has a bunch more skill because you're playing with more variables than baking.
only if those ratios are defined by weight not volume. a "cup of brown sugar" is a useless measure. For example: I can give you three different cups of brown sugar with the same volume but radically different quantities of sugar in them. "Packed" vs "unpacked" isn't much help because i can do the same thing with both of those too...
