America’s Test Kitchen / Cook’s Illustrated / etc. is what I had in mind, and Serious Eats, yes, as you say. (I invite you to read through The Dessert Bible—my single favorite cookbook of all time—and then tell me that Kimball’s approach is not scientific!)
but even that probably wouldn’t fly in academic journals
You might be surprised—or, perhaps, dismayed—at what would, and wouldn’t, fly in academic journals.
Regardless, although some chefs can be Bob-like, I suspect that most chefs are Alice-like, and I think that in using a phrase like “science like a chef”, what matters is what most chefs are like (or, arguably, just what the popular perception of what a chef is like). It sounds like you are more familiar with the domain of cooking than I am, so do you think that most chefs are very Bob-like, to the point where “science like a chef” is a strawman? Or just that some minority of chefs are Bob-like, and the phrase misrepresents what they happen to do?
A little of the latter, and a lot of something else entirely: most chefs (or at least, most cooks—or did you mean to imply that Alice and Bob are trained professionals? that would cast the claims of the OP in a different light) are not like either Alice or Bob. Most cooks—even those who are very experienced—use a more intuitive and/or more standardized approach than even the one you describe Alice as using.
For example, one of the best cooks I know is my grandmother, who has been cooking for over twice as long as I’ve been alive, and who is a trained pharmacist besides; and yet you would struggle in vain to get from her an explanation of how she prepares any given recipe that is even half as coherent as the one Alice gives in your example. Often it will boil down to “because that’s how it’s done”. (Which is to say, the evolution of the recipe has taken place across generations, not across iterations over one cook’s career.) I would not recommend that you “science like my grandmother” (although you would obviously be quite foolish to dismiss the knowledge gained by that approach—a fact of which I am reminded every time I have a taste of her cooking).
Of those cooks who do explore recipe-space, I think the Bob approach is much more common and more fruitful than you give it credit for—precisely because no one with any sense would think that they must recapitulate the entirety of food science, from scratch, all by their lonesome.
America’s Test Kitchen / Cook’s Illustrated / etc. is what I had in mind, and Serious Eats, yes, as you say. (I invite you to read through The Dessert Bible—my single favorite cookbook of all time—and then tell me that Kimball’s approach is not scientific!)
You might be surprised—or, perhaps, dismayed—at what would, and wouldn’t, fly in academic journals.
A little of the latter, and a lot of something else entirely: most chefs (or at least, most cooks—or did you mean to imply that Alice and Bob are trained professionals? that would cast the claims of the OP in a different light) are not like either Alice or Bob. Most cooks—even those who are very experienced—use a more intuitive and/or more standardized approach than even the one you describe Alice as using.
For example, one of the best cooks I know is my grandmother, who has been cooking for over twice as long as I’ve been alive, and who is a trained pharmacist besides; and yet you would struggle in vain to get from her an explanation of how she prepares any given recipe that is even half as coherent as the one Alice gives in your example. Often it will boil down to “because that’s how it’s done”. (Which is to say, the evolution of the recipe has taken place across generations, not across iterations over one cook’s career.) I would not recommend that you “science like my grandmother” (although you would obviously be quite foolish to dismiss the knowledge gained by that approach—a fact of which I am reminded every time I have a taste of her cooking).
Of those cooks who do explore recipe-space, I think the Bob approach is much more common and more fruitful than you give it credit for—precisely because no one with any sense would think that they must recapitulate the entirety of food science, from scratch, all by their lonesome.
Upvoted. That all makes sense. Thanks for the input! I really question whether this is a good enough analogy to have published the article now.