I like recipes with wiggle room, but I hate when one calls for a medium "something" like an onion! What makes an onion (or other items) small, medium, or large? Seems it's all perception to me! I love onions though!

for cooking, i do what i want.

for baking, i do what the recipe says. i have veered off recipe, and it has been at my peril.

Except for baking, I like recipes with wiggle room. Making a few of my own decisions during the process makes the product more of my own!

I follow measurements pretty loosely. A lot of what I cook I like to season to taste.

I'm the same as hmo, I keep to the recipe pretty strictly when I am baking because I ruin cookies, but if I am just cooking dinner I am much more likely to veer off the recipe (even if I've never tried it before).
If there is a spice or an ingredient that I don't have and probably won't use the rest of (like fresh parsley), I make substitutions.
I do get confused by words like the 'Zest' of one lemon. A couple times I've run into a 'handful' of nuts/dried fruit. As a 5'1" woman (sometimes I still wear children's gloves) I don't think my handful could be considered a standard 'handful'.

Wiggle room! I can't measure straight, plus I'm not happy with a recipe until I've changed at least three key ingredients.

But I don't do traditional baking, and I think we can see why.

I pretty much only bake, and I like precise measurement. I despise "6 cups of flour". Call out how many grams you need.

Serious baking is done by weight, not by volume.

As I've become more comfortable and accomplished in the kitchen, I tend to give myself more wiggle room than what I had previously. The one exception to this would be when I am baking something for the first time-in that instance, I follow directions and measurements pretty closely.

I usually stick to the recipe pretty severely when it's my first time trying a new complicated dish. I get especially rigid with new recipes that call for a lot of different spice varieties (a terrifyingly authentic lamb vindaloo had be up to my eyeballs in measuring spoons). Otherwise, I wiggle with it.

To add to my previous comment, one of the other things I don't like is "bake until golden brown". Even though my oven runs right at temperature, it seems that cooking times are ALWAYS longer.

Internal temperatures with a fast probe thermometer, please!

what hmo said, which is why i'm not a great baker (i'm not bad, i just don't enjoy it as much as the freedom of cooking).
i feel much more comfortable having made something once, to substitute or replace things the second time i make it - i.e. chard for kale, almonds for walnuts. this applies only to cooking, though, as i feel i never know with baking if i want to substitute honey for the sugar, how that effects the rest of the water in the recipe. totally ruined a batch of almond cookies i was trying to make once by doing this, even after consulting the internets for replacement strategies.

precision for baking, wiggle room for cooking! Although with the recipes I've been making these days, I need a kitchen scale!

Confession time - I a wiggler, EVEN when baking and with first time recipes. Not too many disasters, but I wonder some times if more patience (i.e. careful measurements) might have given me better results.
C'est la vie

When it comes to recipes, I prefer recipes that are fairly specific and call for specific weights and measures. THEN I know if I can afford to wiggle if I want. What I find most annoying is recipes that aren't specific, so I'm not really sure what the writer intended. I usually end up omitting one ingredient or subbing something, and I like to have a feeling whether it's a "deal breaker" that will wreck some key method (i.e. omitting an ingredient that has a great deal of moisture in it and thus it won't take as long to saute the remaining ingredients). Generally though, I've learned to go with my gut when I find a recipe isn't written very well.

I like wiggle room in recipe, but I also like sticking to the tried-and-true methods of cooking. I feel like you can play with what's in a recipe a lot more than how you put the recipe together.

wiggle room!

I prefer recipes that are precise. However, I will wiggle when using them for the most part. Even when baking.

Basically, I like to know what exactly worked for them. That way I'll have the choice to wiggle it or not. If they just give you an estimate, then you have no choice.

LOTS of wiggle room. I use recipes more as suggestions rather than instructions. I look at the ingredients list to get a general idea of what's in it and in what proportions, and maybe glance through the prep directions if I'm not familiar with the methods needed. But I rely on my own experience and knowledge of my (and my husband's) taste preferences to wing it. It kills me to see instructions like "saute 3/4 cup diced onion with 2T olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until the onions begin to brown". I guess just got tired of that and stopped bothering to read it all.

I do love cookbooks, but I really only use them to get ideas for new ways to combine ingredients and flavors ... or to reference when I need to come up with a few different ways to use the same ingredient. I'm not very good at just inventing new combinations, so I find recipes really helpful there. But even then, I generally just glance at the list of ingredients and I'm on my way.

I do measure for baking, because there is slightly less flexibility there when it comes to proportions ... but even then, I'm pretty relaxed about it, and generally have great results. But I admit I'm not making incredibly intricate pastries or anything.

I wouldn't last five minutes in a test kitchen.

Oh, I'm a wiggler. I really just like to use recipes as new flavor combination ideas....I cannot be bothered to measure out anything!

Even my favorite baking projects are ones like crumbles or claflouti where you work more by texture than by measurement.

It's sheer laziness though. I should probably work on it. I bet we would eat a greater variety of things.

I'm going to have to agree with all the above posters who commented that baking requires precision while cooking can stand some wiggle room.

I like precision; I come from a family of lousy cooks and learned to cook from cookbooks, so I never really learned the "cooking by feel" thing. I'm finding, though, that as I become a more experienced cook, I feel more confident in adjusting recipes, even new ones. For example, I almost always decrease the amount of meat in dishes, increase the amount of vegetables, and substitute a healthier fat for butter. In baking, I find you can often cut the fat in half, and I almost always substitute whole wheat flour for half the white flour called for in recipes.

Like many others... I'm precise for baking. Wishing someone would/could standardize receipes with WEIGHTS! I hate 2 cups of this, a half cup of that. Maybe it's my OCD coming out, but seriously... my half cup and your half cup could weigh significantly different amounts!

Wiggle room for me. Perhaps a new name for the room where I cook - 'Wiggle Room'! Kind of goes with the other rooms... Bathroom, Living Room, Dining Room, Bedroom, Wiggle Room....

Exactly what jcwren said. Why can't books put the grams in also, for the people that want them? Baking should always be done in weight for the best results.

However, for cooking I never follow recipes exactly....I absolutely love Jamie Oliver's books where he calls for things like "a glug of olive oil."

Both! 90% of the time I like lots of wiggle room and see recipes as loose suggestions. I even like "recipes" with no amounts at all, just a list of ingredients and how to cook (saute onions, garlic, zucchini, add tomatoes & fresh herbs, toss with pasta).

But I also love cooks Illustrated for learning the why and how of accomplishing something specific in the kitchen.

All recipes need adjusting. Having an imprecise recipe is what takes away your 'wiggle room'.

It's easy to adjust a precise recipe. Making something precise out of a recipe full of 'pinches' and 'hand fulls' is what's hard.

Precise recipes, if nothing else, massively cut down the time wasted during 'trial and error'.

I like both, but as I've gotten better at precision, I've figured out how to wiggle within that.

I wiggle! When I'm cooking, I only use recipes as inspiration or guidelines. When I bake I keep the main ingredients the same, but often stir in extras like zest, nuts or dried fruit.

Biggest pet peeves:
- exact measurements of ingredients that resist measurement (herbs, leafy things, etc...)
- recipes that use qualifiers like small, medium and large for ingredients when exact measures or weights would be more useful.

I should mention that I graduated from culinary school, so I'm perhaps more comfortable relying on basic technique, experience and instinct than the average home cook.

If I'm reading a recipe I want a list of weights and measures. I'm looking at a recipe for a reason, usually wanting to duplicate something that someone else has already done/been successful with. Wiggle room should be inferred in any recipe though.

Baking I try* to be as careful as possible, but I usually have a lot of other things going on and a lack of ingredients (hey, we can always cut the flour amount in half and just substitute whole wheat flour, right? ha...?)
Generally for cooking I just read the recipe for a little guidance and then improvise.... except for this:

The only time I don't wing a dish is when it's a complicated spice blend that I don't have my own taste for yet... like when I made a lamb stew, moroccan-style. Literally had no idea what to put in there to make the flavors balance. One time i tried to make a curry without a recipe and once I had put stuff in and it didn't taste, right I couldn't fix it! It was an ultimate kitchen failure-- I kept adding things and yeesh, nothing good was happening. Boyfriend wouldn't even say it was good. Learned my lesson right quick.

It really depends on if you're "right brained" or "left brained" just like some people are engineers, and some artists. I just happen to be someone who uses both sides pretty well. Pastry is my profession because I'm a precise and often ordered/organized person. But, I also love to cook, which allows for "correcting" a recipe (adding seasoning, liquids, etc as you taste). So, my baking recipes are by weight, but I can't tell you how much of something I add in my soups or sauces because those I cook to taste. If it's something I've never made before, I'll follow exactly to see how it is supposed to turn out because it's all about science and balance. Even if you consider "wiggle room," adding too much of anything will end in disaster.

I find wiggle room only works for cooking. If I'm baking, if my measurements aren't 95-100% per instructions, I find myself with a botched mess.

I find I'm a mixture of both. The better I know a recipe, the more wiggle room I can dance into it. Of course, we are talking about cooking and not baking. That said, I can modify a lot of baked goods to change the flavor profile (add lavender, zest, or spice to shortbread, for example), but this has to be done judiciously and with knowledge (replacing half the oils with applesauce).

And, as I find myself more comfortable and competant in the kitchen, I find myself winging it more often. Leftovers have to be "reconstituted" into new dishes for the partner to eat them, so I get a bit creative, odd, but creative.

I hardly ever actually measure anything, but just scoop and spoon and eyeball. Too lazy to bother with precise measurements, and it always works fine.

Except for baking. I've had too many disasters there to count. So now I stay to the straight and narrow when baking - measure exactly, weigh ingredients, sift if needed - the whole ball of unbelievably precise wax...

Like other commenters, I follow recipes (more or less) when it comes to baking, which seems to be more of a science unless you REALLY know what you're doing. That's why I don't bake much. I hate the back-and-forth between stove and recipe...constantly checking my measurements...it is such a boring, mindless hassle. totally uninteresting (except for the eating part...which I still love enough to occasionally bake some things).

I much prefer cooking and dishes where I can do my own thing. I do read lots of recipes, but they are for inspiration and to learn techniques and ideas.

I think there is a consensus of baking v. cooking in terms of precision, but I really try to pay attention to the ratio of ingredients in recipes more than anything else.

I'm more of a baker than cook, although I'm starting to cook a lot more lately and I love it. My favorite scenario is when I'm comfortable enough with a recipe to know what wiggle room works and when you have to be precise. With baking, I tend to stick with the recipe pretty religiously if I've never made it before; if I have, I usually know what I can get away with.

I don't tend to cook with recipes at all - I just put stuff together, so I have infinite wiggle room there!

"wiggle room" is really a bad idea, honestly. recipes are written so that anyone can, with knowledge of the specific techniques and after reading it, make the exact same thing that anyone else made from the same recipe. so seeing stuff like "add a small fistful, not too much, but not too little, of flour" is absolutely worthless. yeah, it's a great ego exercise, and fine if you're just writing your own recipes for you and nobody else, but in the end it's bad habit.

Well, I prefer recipes that do not list the quantity at all. In fact, unless I am baking, which I rarely do, I never even look at the column that lists the quantities. I only use the ingredients and than mix them approximately in the same way as described in the recipe. If I do look at the quantities, it is to get an idea of the proportion. I don't think I could follow any recipe down to the last teaspoon if you held a gun to my head.

And frankly, it does not matter whether you add a small onion, a medium onion or a very large onion. The amount of onion you should add depends on how much you like or dislike onion. It is perfectly possible to make dish that requires onion to be cooked without any onions at all if you do not like onions.

Only new or inexperienced cooks with slavishly follow recipes. For me a recipe is just a way to find out the basic idea of a dish, after that I make it using my own likes and dislike, what I have at home, how many people I will be feeding etc.

As someone who usually cooks from scratch, (any more from scratch and I would be amish), I do not even own any measuring spoons or a thermometer. I do have measuring cups in the four standard sizes but I use them only when baking.

The only place where I do use some kind of measurement is for cooking rice, which really infuriates my mother who can get a pretty good perfect rice with perfect proportion of rice and water by just looking. I could too do it (and have done it at times), I just do not feel confident. I guess that is why most American cooks need such precise measurements. Because they do not feel confident.