User talk:DanielVonEhren~enwikibooks

use of tables and metric
The standard for ingredient lists is what you see everywhere. If really want to change that, please bring it up on the Cookbook talk page.

This would obviously be a tremendous effort.

The end result would be more complex to edit. I think lots of people are going to have trouble with tables. Sometimes the tables are worth the trouble (Cookbook:Fish and Cookbook:Smoke Point), but not for simple ingredient lists. This is especially so if there is no additional benefit, such as database lookups on the ingredients.

The standard for units has been to put the converted version in parentheses. This lets you know which version is primary and which might be a crude approximation. Since we can now link to the unit names, there is very little point in having the converted units. This is especially true when the primary units are Queen Anne (USA), because the conversion to metric is very easy.


 * Hi Albert,


 * I'd really like to use a standardized way of presenting the ingredients. It would be helpful if you could point me to a page that is laid out the way you think is best. I went over, for example, to Cookbook:Pasta recipes and went down the line; I didn't see anybody that followed the convention that I understand you to be talking about.


 * Some recipes used Queen Anne, others metric. I like the idea of showing both: it makes it easier, at least for me, to follow.


 * Just to make sure I'm being clear, I'm not pushing back on your revert (it was really just an experiment), but a model ingredient list for me to follow would be a good thing.


 * DanielVonEhren 14:27, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * There simply aren't too many recipes that supply both units, but Cookbook:Coq au Vin is one example. Despite being a "French" recipe, the Queen Anne units came first. Metric, being added later, gets parentheses to indicate that it is a conversion. Ugh, it should be "mL", not "ml". (there is no metric unit named "ml") Note the inaccuracy of the conversion. (20% more salt, 20% less pepper, 10% more chicken, 12% less wine)


 * So, if you really want to supply both, that's the existing practice.


 * A much more serious problem is amounts given by mass. Normal cooks in the USA can easily deal with Queen Anne volume, large metric volume (100 mL increments), °F temperatures, baking chocolate by the ounce, and meat by the pound (decimal or fraction, not pounds and ounces). Smart cooks can convert metric to Queen Anne to handle small volumes, and can estimate kg of meat by eye. Most cooks would give up. For non-meat items given by mass though, a conversion involving density is required! Households in the USA simply do not own kitchen scales. Probably a scale or balance could be had for $30 from an exotic cooking store. It is probably more common to own a zester, marble rolling pin, melon baller, springform pan, pressure cooker, 2-part angelfood cake pan... In fact my mom, an expert cook, does indeed have all those things and no scale or balance.


 * I generally keep things simple and easy to edit, with plenty of links. (examples: Cookbook:Saffron Rice, Cookbook:Jambalaya) There is a template recipe linked off the bottom of the main page that you can use if you want to get fancy, but it looks really dumb unless you know obscure stuff like the number of Calories in the dish. Be sure to delete the unused sections (often "Warnings") if you use this template. I find it easier to start from a recipe that is similar to the one I'm adding, especially if the categories will be the same.


 * Watch out for recipes using Imperial units, which are 20% larger than Queen Anne units. This is a common problem with UK recipes, and yet another reason for metric conversions to be seriously inaccurate. If you go through the cookbook converting recipes without great care, you might create some additional confusion.


 * AlbertCahalan 15:35, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Once again I find that the world gets so much more complicated as you look more closely at it. :-)


 * I'm not sure I'm convinced that the accuracy you assume (10% more of this, 12% less of that) is justified. Right now I'm looking at the nutritional label on a bag of sushi rice that I have. It says 160 Calories per serving; not 150 or 170? And the bag contains "Approx. 25" servings. What we're talking about here is the difference between a 'cook' and a person who follows recipes, and why the phrase "correct the seasonings" shows up so often in cookbooks. Of course, I'm not disputing your basic point.


 * My motivation was in part the link I put in the Wikipedia's Sushi page to this article. It's the old question of whether recipes should appear in the the Encyclopedia; my opinion is "Occasionally, but ususally not". This one is sufficiently complicated that I was using a 'one copy of a piece of information' theory. Perhaps I'll change my mind in a few days and copy it back. But in the mean time it's better for me to have one copy rather than try to keep up the changes in two places. Particularily because there's some weird war going on in History of sushi comparing sushi to pizza from Pizza Hut. I'm waiting for the rice dust to settle.


 * But the new link was also a motivation for the different units. I'm assuming that people from many parts of the world will look at it, and (I hope) make good adjustments.

DanielVonEhren 18:43, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Albert,

I adapted the recipe, trying to follow the Coq au Vin model. See what you think.

One other thing to note. It's important to be careful when reverting articles. :-) As a side effect to removing the table, there were also formatting bugs introduced back into the article (there were two sections in the ToC marked "1" because the '===' had been incorrect), and two or three other improvements were lost.  I fixed that by reverting the reversion, and then making the measurement changes from there.

DanielVonEhren 13:47, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

That looks good. I like the way you adjusted the larger metric conversions to match the "2 mL" one, keeping the error under 5%. Probably this trick should be documented somewhere.

As for the other changes reverted, they didn't seem significant. I generally find the ToC to be ugly and useless, so I didn't notice the double occurance of "1". I only saw minor font changes and the addition or removal of the lines that go with 2nd level headers, none of which seemed all that significant. Disabling the ToC (with at the top of the page) would have solved the problem.

User:Redlentil and I have been going around lowercasing ingredients as we edit pages. It's some sort of pet peeve for him I think ("my bete noire" he says), and a minor aesthetic issue for me. If you really think it looks better the other way, then that's another thing that ought to be discussed on the Cookbook talk page.

AlbertCahalan 17:19, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

sushi instructions
Problem with the new instructions:

The rice is in a colander to drain. I add konbu to a pot (the one with vinegar dressing?), along with some saki. I boil water. (in a teapot I guess) For some reason, I remove the konbu from my pot as the seemingly-unrelated water boils. This leaves me with either a pot of saki or saki+vinegar+sugar+salt. Something simmers for 20 minutes... but I have two pots and a colander full of rice now, so I'll take a guess that you mean the water. (nothing else is cooking)

The 2nd and 3rd steps now must be read together. If they are not, the dressing might need to be transferred from a mixing bowl to the saucepan.

I think you should revert that and try again.

Leaving the hangari link would be a good idea too. Probably both spellings are good, given the difficulty in making up romanized versions of Japanese words.

AlbertCahalan 15:30, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * I added some extra pointers in so that people won't get mixed up, boil water in their teapot, and endup eating all that dry rice.
 * Honestly, I'm still lost. Suppose I put my rice in the colandar to drain. Now, I wish to boil the konbu. Is it optional, required, or prohibited that I use the water from cooking the rice? Must I add the rice back into the pot before or after dealing with the konbu? (perhaps it does not matter?) AlbertCahalan 23:29, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * As for hangiri: you know, I've asked around on the Wikipedia site, and what I'm hearing is that it is not just a transliteration error. Just as 'sake' seems to be misspelled in the Cookbook as 'saki' (see, for example, the disambiguation page in the Wikipedia). I need to say that I don't speak a word of Japanese, so I'm relying on people who either are Japanese or have lived in Japan for extended periods. Could be there are different ways to transliterate it.
 * Example: Japanese has several sounds that map onto the English 'L' and 'R'. It's sort of a different axis though, so one Japanese speaker could say all of those Japanese sounds in a way that would be 'R' while another might make them sound like 'L'. This is why Japanese natives struggle with the L-R distinction. AlbertCahalan 23:29, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

DanielVonEhren 19:34, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

egg sizes
The sushi omelet recipe (at Cookbook:Sushi, but perhaps should be separate) specifies "4 extra-large Eggs". Well, wouldn't you know, this differs from country to country.

The "USDA Large" egg is about the same as the "EU size M" egg. (both being the common choice AFAIK) So, for normal recipes, it is best to avoid specifying egg size. I hope you know what you need. USDA eggs are specified as the minimum weight of a dozen. EU eggs are specified as the weight ranges per 100, plus a per-egg minimum.

EU weight standard SIZE            PER-EGG        PER-100-MIN XL-very large   73 g and more   7.3 kg L-large          63 to 73        6.4 M-medium        53 to 63        5.4 S-small         under 53 g      4.5 USDA weight standard CLASS        MIN NET / DOZEN   CONVERTED TO MIN GRAM/EGG Jumbo        30 ounces         70.75 Extra Large  27 ounces         63.675 Large        24 ounces         56.6 Medium       21 ounces         49.525 Small        18 ounces         42.45 Peewee       15 ounces         35.375

I hope you aren't using a Japanese standard, because I don't know what that would be. Same as USDA, because of World War II maybe?

Assuming you mean "USDA Extra Large", this is 255 to 283 grams of egg. (probably 255, if the producers are being cheap) This is about 4.5 regular (USDA Large) eggs. It is probably about 5 EU size M eggs. (4.71 if both parts of the world are being cheap, and closer to 4 if the EU producers are generous)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called DanielVonEhren. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name DanielVonEhren~enwikibooks that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:07, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 04:51, 19 April 2015 (UTC)