> The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science.
Cooking is a science. If you fail to evaluate your ingredients beforehand, then you're just not doing the science particularly well. Writing recipes and interpreting recipes are arts.
I remember hearing once that baking is a science and cooking an art. If you mess a step up while baking, your product is generally destroyed. Do the same while cooking, and you're often left with something that just tastes a little different (and may even become an updated twist in the recipe).
"Ingredient evaluation" as you call it is the art. While it's technically possible to quantify every tomato, in practical terms it's a waste of time, which is better spent learning how to adapt on the fly.
