Eli5: How do secret food recipes stay secret if the ingredients have to be disclosed?

Question

Eli5: How do secret food recipes stay secret if the ingredients have to be disclosed?

In: 2

Answer 1

The ingredients for a cake are: flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, shortening, eggs, milk, vanilla extract.

But just knowing that list of ingredients doesn’t mean you know how to bake a cake. You also have to know the exact amount of each ingredient, how to mix them together, what temperature to set the oven to, and how long to bake it.

Imagine if you just grabbed a random amount of each ingredient, threw it all into a pan without mixing, and then baked it at a random temperature for a random amount of time. You used all the right ingredients, but the end result isn’t going to be a cake you would want to eat.