An Engineer's Guide to a Recipe

If you’ve ever stepped into a Kitchen or a manufacturing plant or any process that is multi-step, you most likely have followed a Recipe. What is a recipe?

A Recipe is the sum total of all the process variations with systematic adjustments for failures while building on successes.

There are some key words: Sum Total, this one is most important. There are a lot of variations that have been evaluated before settling onto this particular recipe. This is the reason why taking shortcuts across steps listed in a recipe usually lead to, to put it mildly, unintended consequences.

Systematic Adjustments is another important factor. Not every combination of variables makes the correct final picture! Each variable has to be fine tuned for the

Whole to be more than just the sum of it’s Parts

That is what a recipe is, isn’t it? It transforms the ingredients into a final product which is so much more than just the sum of all that which went into it.

In techno, this phenomenon is called Emergence. This concept of Emergence has been around for a long time. An example is when, in Star Trek - The Next Generation, Q takes Picard back in time to that very instant when amino acids combined together in a gooey mess. Life as we know it had begun! Life is most definitely more than the sum of its parts. Emergence!

Everything I know, I learned from Star Trek!

Back to recipes.

I have had the pleasure of actually witnessing a recipe being developed from scratch! My dear friend Alak Vasa is the owner, proprietor and chocolaterie of Elements Truffles. I have seen her in action! In her home kitchen she would have a few combinations to evaluate. She would crowdsource the feedback from us and make the ever tiniest adjustments to get the proportions just right!

I remember one conversation with Alak; I was visiting them in Jersey City and just by the by she mentioned that lately she was running into problems while removing the chocolate from the silicone molds. As a ChE (from IITB to boot!), I asked her

What changed?

“Nothing!”, she said, “Nothing changed. We just washed the moulds and now the chocolate is sticking.”

It turns out, that insignificant step of washing the mold, changed everything! You see, tap water has dissolved inorganic salts in it. When the mold is washed with tap water and left to dry out, these salts precipitate out onto the surface of the mold. And, these precipitates act like nucleation sites onto which the melted chocolate adheres to and it won’t come out of the molds as efficiently anymore!

And, this went onto the Recipe. They now have a strict specification on how to wash the molds!

Trust the Recipe. It has many hours of labor behind it. Don’t discount that labor.

I made that mistake recently. In the #LetMenCook COVID-19 induced regime, my forays into the Kitchen have increased to above and beyond their normal scope. We’re now venturing into territories like baking Pound Cake!

This is the Recipe from Maa Beti Kitchen Star:

1/2 cup Malai (fresh cream) … whisk lumps out of the cream
3/4 cup Sugar … adjust as needed for sweetness
Mix the cream and sugar and set aside
1/2 cup buttermilk or yogurt
150 g Flour [I use Whole Wheat Flour]
1/2 tbsp Baking Powder
1/4 tbsp Baking Soda
Add the flour+baking soda+baking powder to the sugar and cream.
Add the buttermilk or yogurt to mix the batter to pouring consistency.
1/2 tsp Vanilla essence
[Could replace Vanilla or simply add Chocolate Powder for flavor]
Bake at 350 F for 25–30 minutes

The first time, I followed the recipe precisely. And the final product turned out just fine; Very Good in fact:

In a couple of days, I made this recipe again. Why? Because, you see, I forgot to cut the diagonals in the previous version. The answer to the How Many Triangles? question is trivial without the added complications of the diagonal cuts! Ya, what can I say

Geek Alert!

Anyway, in the second foray of making pound cake, since the previous process was fresh in my mind, I took undocumented shortcuts. And the result was far less perfect:

I got the diagonal cuts but the counting of the Triangles became much more complicated due to the surface cracks which appeared as a result of imprecise following of the recipe.

There you have it. Recipes evolve to their final form. Trust that evolution process.

Definitely tweak them. Sure. That is the adventure! Make them your own by carefully documenting the minute changes.

Create your Masterpiece!