You Need A Kitchen Slide Rule
owl writes:
Entropic Thoughts published an interesting article about the uses of slide rule in the kitchen:
Kitchen work is all about proportions: sometimes the recipe is for four servings but you need six; maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g, so you have to adjust the other ingredients to match.
We could use an electronic calculator to figure out the rescaled amounts, but a slide rule makes it so much easier.
Once the slide rule is set to the constraining proportion, in this case 2:3.3, we can instantly read off all other amounts from it with no additional manipulation. If the recipe calls for three cups of flour, we'll find 3 on the C scale and look what's below it on the D scale: seems like we need 4.95 cups of flour. The recipe says 25 g of butter: we'll take what's under 25 on the C scale, i.e. 41.25 g. Having set the slide rule once, it then serves as a custom scaling table for the rest of the recipe.
Kitchen work is all about proportions, and nothing beats the slide rule for proportions. The reason I write this article is I just found myself in someone else's kitchen and they didn't have a slide rule. Only then did I realise how much I take my kitchen slide rule for granted.
Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour. This makes it easier to compare recipes, too, because when they are normalised to the weight of a common ingredient, it is easier to see which recipe is sweeter, saltier, umamier, etc.
Everyone should have a slide rule in their kitchen drawers. I'm honestly surprised it is not standard equipment. Once set up, it's a mess-free, multitasking-friendly way to achieve instant calculations with almost no work.
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