Hi everybody, we have a question on Meta which has been waiting for an answer for the past few days

it was about me closing a question which I consider very subjective, or at least very broad

I could write an answer, but it is better if a different person writes one.

@rumtscho, I'm not finding the question. Can you provide a link to it?

@myklbykl hi, and welcome to the Frying Pan!

this is the question

you are relatively new here, do you know about Meta already?

No. I clicked on the meta link on the top right of cooking.stackexchange.com and it brought me here: meta.stackexchange.com, which is where I was looking.

Oops... this happens when a community has existed for so long that it doesn't realize how foreign its structures are for new users :)

to explain the situation

the whole Stack Exchange network started with a single site, Stack Overflow, for programming questions only

and because it made no sense to mix the "how do we run this community", "what is in scope", etc. questions with the programming questions, they made meta.stackoverflow as a companion site with questions about the site itself

later, they added more sites dedicated to a certain topic - Cooking is actually the oldest one that was not IT-related

and each of them got its own Meta, related to only that site (so on Cooking meta, it was possible to discuss things like, are recipe requests on topic, which make no sense on a programming meta site)

but the programming site was always very central to the network, it has a huge volume of users and traffic

so people kinda continued using the Meta of the programming site for questions which are relevant to all sites on the network, independent of topic, such as "should we change the number of reputation points given per upvote on a question"

and people who were not programming-interested protested, so they created a common umbrella Meta which is about the network, not attached to any of the topic-speicific sites

the company also uses it to communicate important points or changes to the community on all sites, and "pins" questions from that meta to be visible on all sites

this is the kind of link you clicked on - it brought you to the network-wide Meta site

the question which I am speaking about was (properly) posted on the Meta of our own site, cooking.stackexchange

you can reach it when you go to the black top bar, choose the rightmost icon (a grey Stackexchange logo - kinda like a speech bubble separated in horizontal layers)

on top you see a link to our own site, below it a link to Cooking meta

and after that a link to all sites of the network on which you have created an account.

This is the help page for Meta, but it doesn't seem to discuss the relationship between "our" Meta and the networkwide Meta

cooking.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta

Thank you for the detailed explanation, @rumtscho. I used stack exchange years ago on the programming side and only recently joined the cooking forum. I remember the original question when it came through. It was very weirdly worded and wasn't clear what the OP was after so I moved on.

That too, about the unusual wording

(and by the way, it is absolutely fine to move on for any or no reason at all - don't feel obliged to answer questions just because you came across them :) )

the point is - and that has been bothering me for a while - people sometimes don't even realize what is objective and what isn't.

The second part of their question is, in the first place, not so much subjective as too broad: there are different interpretations possible of that question

and some of them are answerable. For example, if the question was "what is the difference in the density of a whole apple and an apple smoothie", then this is an objective question which we could, in theory, answer.

In practice, I doubt that we have a user who knows where to look up such numbers, so it would likely stay unanswered, but that's not reason to close it.

But when a question about "the difference" is asked without clarifying difference in which criteria, that opens a whole philosophical can of worms

without wanting to go deep into the philosophy and psychology part of it, the question silently expects that out of all possible criteria for comparing the two ("the difference is that the store around the corner from my cousin's friends house sells whole apples but not smoothies" is a valid comparison criteria when none is specified!) it asks us, the answerers, to define which criteria should be used for measuring the difference

and to pick the ones which are important

but that assumes that there are universally important criteria, which is not the case, people do such comparisons based on situationally important criteria

and this makes the question either subjective (the answerer will have to choose the criteria based on the subjective opinion of which criteria are important to the answerer) or too broad (an answer will have to include all the millions possible criteria for comparison)

and that makes the question formally closable

also, based on the history of the question, there is a good chance that, if the OP is pressed to define some very specific criteria for comparison, he will not come up with anything beyond "differences in taste" that interest him, and that's not really an answerable question - people can readily perceive the taste difference between an apple and an apple smoothie, but they cannot describe it precisely.

but that last part is conjecture for now.

hi @ash!

sounds tasty!

@rumtscho, OK. I posted an answer. Hopefully it is helpful.

@myklbykl thank you for stepping in!

@myklbykl nice post! Thanks!

@Ash Cool! (Bad phrasing with regards to dough, possibly?) I was able to get my hands on some yeast - not easy these days, but luckily consumers raid larger supermarkets and not so much my small local organic grocer - so I predict some yeasty baking towards Easter.

I found a new quick fix for sweet cravings. Apple oat muffins, made completely in a food processor. I don’t even grate the fruit, I just zap it in the food processor, then add the rest of the ingredients and blend again.

Bonus: The recipe fits my tin precisely. Not enough or just a bit too much batter is a pet peeve of mine.

They are pretty forgiving - I used various oats and even part other flakes, you can skimp on the oil to cut a few calories, or use some veggies instead of or together with the apple. Today I dumped a small zucchini in. Not sure how many batches I made in the last weeks, but probably more than five. And they keep well, three days isn’t a problem, except that they tend to disappear before that.

Next time I will probably try parsnip, pear and some citrus.

There is such a cooking concept as thinning agents, right?

Bare bones vegan ice cream, frozen bananas, require plant milk and other thinning agents...like what?

I haven't yet read about the chemistry of coconut oil, milks, etc. But I suspect one of them acts as a thinning agent.