Parametric recipes are fun idea. I almost want to try them, but the sheer volume of content by one author gives me no reason to trust this will be any good.
Did the author actually try these recipes? Unless the author was cooking and writing 24/7 or just had a massive backlog of publishing, it's hard to trust anything here (although I'm sure most people will.)
The picture provided doesn't inspire much confidence in their ability to make pancakes, especially after "25" years. They are burnt, sad-looking pancakes.
The inclusion of references without hyperlinks suggests it wasn't thoroughly checked: they were probably put there by Claude, and as they aren't links the author probably hasn't read them (they could possibly have read them in hard-copy at a library, but given the rate at which articles were produced this seems very unlikely).
(One such reference is 17 - "Weijers, M. et al. “Heat-induced denaturation and aggregation of ovalbumin at neutral pH described by irreversible first-order kinetics.” Protein Science 12(12): 2693–2703, 2003")
> " 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.)
> "Cast iron and carbon steel have nearly identical thermal conductivity (~52 W/m·K), which surprises most people."
is unsourced. And the precise "~52" is quite misleading - Wikipedia and online sources report thermal conductivities in the range of ~30-50¹.
Also:
> "Critically, whipped egg white foam drainage follows a hyperbolic saturation curve: v = V × t / (B + t), where V is the maximum drained volume and B is the drainage half-life (Lomakina & Mikova, 2006)."
As far as I can tell, the article² (cited twice for this claim) does not contain any equations modelling drainage over time, and especially not this equation or the term "hyperbolic".
So, it seems that you cannot really trust the sources the author's LLM included.
For me, that means that I cannot trust any of the other claims in the article (or the author in general).
What models are you using? This looks incredibly similar to the outputs I get from Claude with default system prompt settings.
- 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.
This was my immediate thought too. The same website has at least a dozen similar articles written over the past week, all with this same AI tone.
In the same week:
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/grilled-meats/ http://absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/brisket/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/french-fries/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/miso-salmon/
Parametric recipes are fun idea. I almost want to try them, but the sheer volume of content by one author gives me no reason to trust this will be any good.
Did the author actually try these recipes? Unless the author was cooking and writing 24/7 or just had a massive backlog of publishing, it's hard to trust anything here (although I'm sure most people will.)
The picture provided doesn't inspire much confidence in their ability to make pancakes, especially after "25" years. They are burnt, sad-looking pancakes.
> it reads like Claude output
Yep. From the site's about page:
> This site is produced with substantial help from large language models: they assist with the literature search, the drafting, and the arithmetic.
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/about/
> how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy?
The inclusion of references without hyperlinks suggests it wasn't thoroughly checked: they were probably put there by Claude, and as they aren't links the author probably hasn't read them (they could possibly have read them in hard-copy at a library, but given the rate at which articles were produced this seems very unlikely).
(One such reference is 17 - "Weijers, M. et al. “Heat-induced denaturation and aggregation of ovalbumin at neutral pH described by irreversible first-order kinetics.” Protein Science 12(12): 2693–2703, 2003")
FWIW, the author writes:
> " 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.)
Addendum:
> "Cast iron and carbon steel have nearly identical thermal conductivity (~52 W/m·K), which surprises most people."
is unsourced. And the precise "~52" is quite misleading - Wikipedia and online sources report thermal conductivities in the range of ~30-50¹.
Also:
> "Critically, whipped egg white foam drainage follows a hyperbolic saturation curve: v = V × t / (B + t), where V is the maximum drained volume and B is the drainage half-life (Lomakina & Mikova, 2006)."
As far as I can tell, the article² (cited twice for this claim) does not contain any equations modelling drainage over time, and especially not this equation or the term "hyperbolic".
So, it seems that you cannot really trust the sources the author's LLM included. For me, that means that I cannot trust any of the other claims in the article (or the author in general).
¹) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thermal_conductivities
²) https://www.agriculturejournals.cz/pdfs/cjf/2006/03/02.pdf
1 reply →
We’re using vastly different models, then, because it doesn’t read like any generated text I’ve seen before.
What models are you using? This looks incredibly similar to the outputs I get from Claude with default system prompt settings.
- 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 three effects are not separable knobs. You cannot dial in one without moving the other two.
The browning claim is the contested one, so it is worth pinning down. "
Is classic Claude-speak.