While I continue to fiddle around with making videos that don’t suck, let’s talk about recipes, specifically diet food recipes. They’re going to be a little weird until you get used to them as they really aren’t formulated for preparation so much as they are for calculating calories, portion size and calories per portion.

Naturally, I will acquiesce to giving instructions on what to do with the quantities provided lest this site be as useless as the hours of video I’ve recorded trying to get the technique down. I mean shit, people produce really decent videos in third world fish markets and yet for some reason, very little of what I do is something I would watch. What the hell? I digress. Back to recipes.

It comes down to the numbers. Everything gets weighed. In grams.

If you’re like me, you love knowing. Not guessing, not getting close, but actually knowing. I love to quantify. It satisfies something deep down within me. As such, I despise volumetric measuring because it only ever gets close. I’m a mass guy and I love specifics. Particularly when every calorie counts.

Home cooks, armed with boxed mixes and Aunt Ida’s Big Book of Church Social Recipes rely heavily on volumetrics. Neither Ida, nor the standard home cook are ever overly concerned with calorie calculations or portion control. This isn’t to say volumetrics don’t have their place, particularly in dark side of portion control, but when it comes to the math side of food, mass is the way to go. Why?

It’s very simple. Cooking changes food. That’s rather its purpose. When you get down to it, cooking is water management, nothing more. When something cooks, water leaves. Water weighs in at 8.34 pounds per US gallon at 62° F. Now most home cooks know that there are 128 ounces in a gallon. Wait a minute. 8.34 pounds is 133.44 ounces (16 X 8.34). What the hell?

There is a difference between dry ounces and fluid ounces. So the bromide “A Pint’s [16 ounces] a pound the world around.” Is total bullshit. A pint of water weighs in at 16.68 ounces. What about a pint of peanut oil? (15.36 ounces at 60° F, if you’re curious.) Now a pint of corn syrup? (16 dry ounces = 22.08 fluid ounces) And just FYI, an Imperial gallon of water weighs in at 10 pounds at 62° F. Confused yet? I wrote it and I am.

“Yeah, but didn’t the metric system do away with that?” you may ask. Of course not. Metric volumetric measuring, while more specific, did not change the specific gravity of any given fluid (anything that flows, including dry goods) at any given temperature. Or atmospheric pressure. Or humidity.

Atmospheric pressure? Humidity? Really?

Seems a bit extreme, sure, I’ll admit that. Maybe. Unless I’m cooking in the mountains. Or baking bread down by the coast.

Volumetric measuring is the shifty eyed brother-in-law of quantification, always trying to cut corners and get away with something and I just don’t trust it. Not when food cost, recipe development, and nutrition calculations are on the line. Not on my watch, buster!

Hopefully, the above explanation has either convinced you or confused you to the point of acquiescence. I can live with either so I’m going to jump to the conclusion that you have been dazzled by my words and are now in full agreement.

When I’m dieting, almost everything gets weighed. There are exceptions, of course. Boxed mixes, if I use them, require me to follow their directions. Blue Box Mac & Cheese doesn’t give me the weight of the half a stick of butter to put in it, just 4 tablespoons (2 ounces). The instructions are formulated for home cooks, but I guarandamntee (the Southern Word of Assurance) you when it’s formulated at the factory, all the ingredients are handled by weight. Food cost and nutrition you know…

I’ll even convert the volume of water to grams, which is tedious, but if I’m serving something that inflates (rice, quinoa, pasta) and I need to know my portion size, by weight, I have to account for the water weight. It goes the other direction, too. Unless I specifically use a cooked protein (utility chicken comes to mind) I’m going to give the raw weight and subtract out the water cooked off in my portions. It’s tedious, but dieting by “managed starvation” requires it.

Now, I can go back and forth on Imperial versus Metric units. I like grams for the most part, particularly for nutrition calculations as that’s usually what it comes down to on the packaging, but I’m American and I still think in terms of ounces because that’s how portioning works. When you’re in a restaurant, you don’t order the 453.59237 gram rib-eye, you get the 16 ounce one. And McDonald’s doesn’t sell a 113.3980925 grammer with Cheese. Not even in Europe.

The other downside with how I document recipes is I never focus on the steps. Just the ingredients and techniques. The lexicon of the kitchen has specific meanings. To “sweat mire poix” means to cook equal portions of chopped onions, celery and carrots until the onions and celery become translucent and the carrots begin to soften. That sentence is wordy and, if you are inexperienced in the kitchen, does not give you the steps required to sweat mire poix.

The lexicon of the kitchen is a sort of professional shorthand for the tools everyone in a professional kitchen should know. I never really understood this until I was gifted a very tiny book, in French, by my mentor back in cooking school. It’s called “Le Repertoire de La Cuisine” and is utterly useless until you understand the descriptions of the dishes and techniques in those pages are recipes. It’s basically a codebook or cipher. And that’s how I document my recipes for personal use. Just what’s in the dish and what kind of dish it is. I never needed more.

Obviously, that’s not going to play well here. So when I do present recipes, as individual blog entries, not scattered across stories of sitting at my Mamaw’s feet, (listening to descriptions of frontier birth control methods while she cooked salt pork for my Papaw), I will present the ingredients up front and then document each step of what I do and hopefully why I do it, if relevant. For a while, those recipes will be focused on calories and calories per portion.

I’m not going to use the recipe plugins for WordPress even though I really like the formatting of them, but the data entry is clunky and the nutritional info is not reliable. Open source diet web sites used to be really decent but have become as pointless as the rest of the internet over time as they allowed the untrained public to enter data with no oversite to ensure accuracy. I can’t afford the inaccuracy when I’m limited to 1300 calories per day.

What I use instead is a really bitchin’ spreadsheet I developed and my son made useful that allows me to quickly add new ingredients and the relevant nutritional information, then equally quickly use that info in a recipe, generating the calorie counts and portion sizes I need. What that means to you is if you want a printable recipe, you’re probably going to be getting a link to a PDF with the recipe and my notes and it’s probably going to be a lot more utilitarian (unattractive) than what you may be used to. I may change that as time marches on.