Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

There's also another classic, this time leavened - the oven-baked pancake, which is a little closer to the American pan-fried, but with pieces of salted pork, served with lingon berry jam.

Eggs, milk, flour, baking powder (ratio to taste), salted pork; bake in a tall container at 180-220C (again, to your preferred crispiness and colour). In the end, you should have something almost akin to a pudding, Fluffiness depends on baking powder, of course, and temperature.

> " Ovalbumin coagulates irreversibly at 80°C (Weijers et al., 2003), permanently setting the foam structure.",

and the paper by Weijers et al. says:

> "A strong temperature dependence on the reaction rate was observed. At 80°C, half of the protein was denatured and aggregated in less than 2 min (half-time, th), while at 68.5°C this took approximately 6 h."

So, the citation is generally true-ish although a little bit imprecise.

At which temperature range Ovalbumin coagulates seems quite irrelevant for the whole article, however. To me it's unnecessary fluff, others might like that kind of detail.

(This does not imply anything regarding the article as a whole - it's just one thing I checked.)

- First, take a look at the other articles. There are 30+ articles all with the same author published this week on topics from cooking to home appliances. Either he's extremely prolific or had help.

- There's so much click-baity LLM language: "The radial gradient: why edges undercook on every hob" "What “crispy” actually means: acoustic fracture mechanics" "What Actually Matters"

It's clear to me that at least some of this is LLM generated, so all of it might as well be.

The browning claim is the contested one, so it is worth pinning down. "

Is classic Claude-speak.

[0] https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework

[1] https://pizza-calculator.the-bread-code.io/

I don't want them to say "I wrote it." They're still responsible, but it's helpful to know they weren't deeply involved in its creation.

So maybe that cabinet wouldn't exist without the human element but I think it's fair for other humans to feel that's not quite the same as building it yourself.

i won't eat pancakes that are not crispy, or that were but were stacked up steaming in a pile till there were enough to serve to everybody at once: nope.

pancakes should be served individually as soon as they come out of the pan, round robin till nobody wants any more.

mouthfeel is everything.

https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=soy...

Here's a thing: a given measure of flour (by any means, volume or weight), a single one kept in a cupboard, not remeasured, is going to have a different weight on different days that have different ambient humidity levels.

The tools of the kitchen are imprecise. The environment is not well controlled. And human taste is robust against micro variations.

Look, this is arm chair, YouTube cooking. There is so much variation in recipes that 10% here and there is not going to make or break any recipe.

There is zero ability to make a "universally better" version of a recipe by micro optimizing ingredients. For one thing, you can't easily control temperature and humidity variations on your environment. If people think 2% difference in flour content is going to make or break their bread recipe, then daily humidity variations will definitely have an impact. But it doesn't, really. It's the sort of thing people blame when they don't have good process or good technique.

For another thing, there is no way to evaluate the outcome as "better". Better for you, perhaps, but even then, it's mostly psychosomatic. I've doubled the amount of baking soda in a recipe before and it has had zero impact. I've never measured flour by weight and my cookies come out exactly the same as my wife's when she breaks out the microscale

I've been cooking for a long time. I have family members who refuse to come to Easter Dinner unless I'm the one cooking. I barely measure anything, ever. Even when I'm baking. It matters to have things in the right ballpark, but 5% variations don't matter.

Seriously though, it's a good format! It works!