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Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

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401–410 of 454 posts

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#401
I love this idea. It occurs to me that the category of non-shelf stable, just add water meals is really interesting. You are going to be able to produce something more high quality and authentic. And I'd guess that large companies who like to focus on shelf stable products to minimize inventory/supply chain costs will be averse to producing something like this. If I was in the US I'd buy it immediately.

I am in Thailand and this approach would be very interesting for a number of Thai foods as well. The king of ready-made or easy-prep meals here is 7-11. They even microwave, toast, add hot water, etc. in the store for you. This would be a direct upgrade to many of the Thai meals they offer.

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#403
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience non-westerners tend to underestimate the level of spiciness that westerners can handle (particularly westerners who are culinarily adventurous), and overestimate the average spiciness of their cuisine. If it's too spicy for me, it's too spicy for 99% of the population of any country, but it's damn near impossible to convince servers of that.

A bunch of us Westerner looking types went to a Thai restaurant in Mountain View. This was many years ago and I don't recall the restaurant. We ordered some shared dish and were asked how spicy we wanted it, 1-10. We said 10. The whole "are you sure?" thing a few times. They brought the dish out. We said "this really isn't 10 spicy." The server said, "next time say you want it 10 on the Thai scale". Sigh. I live in N…

Same experience here. Learned to order "Thai-hot" while working in Frankfurt (Germany) and frequenting a Thai food truck. Nearby was "Best Worscht in Town". Try it when in Germany - http://bestworschtintown.com They sell sausages and fries. You have to choose a flavour and the level of spiciness for the sauce/relish. Latter ranges from A to F. I can manage D (333,000 SCU according to web site). For F (short for FBI or Fking Burning Injection, 1,200,000 SCU) I heard that they require to sign an indemnification agreement.

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#404
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may be a thing with Thai restaurants in general; it's not just spiciness but also level of fish sauce and even the way the dish is prepared. There's a thing in Chicago about "secret menu" Thai restaurants, which are often written in Thai language (food nerds in Chicago have translated and published them). It might be possible to order things "Thai style" in any good Thai restaurant and get a different, b…

Anecdote: Had a (caucasian) friend who spent a four-month co-op term as a student in India, and when they came back they also had to insist to the local Indian restaurants "yes, I want it extra spicy, like you would serve to an Indian person". (Like, I realize this is frustrating, but how is the waiter going to know -- from your appearance -- that you spent four months eating Indian food in India?)

Indians are caucasian, too.

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#406
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting question. Answer: The former. However, there is another product loosely called buttermilk by some, here. It is just curd (Indian term for yoghurt) diluted with water and maybe stirred or whisked a bit to mix up the water well with the curd. If you can't get the former, you can easily make this with curd you have at home. The real buttermilk is usually salted slightly. The one made from curd can be had eit…

It would be fun to taste. The buttermilk I have tried in USA is bitter and tastes acidic.

You might get this in some Indian stores.

http://www.amul.com/products/amul-pouchbuttermilk-info.php or try this https://www.amazon.com/Amul-Masti-Spiced-Buttermilk-1Liter/d...

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What fraction of Indian immigrants spend over 10 dollars on a meal The very first product they feature on the homepage, the "Out of Office" pack, is $23.50 for 3-4 meals.

First, you forgot shipping, which is $5.95 (for my location), bringing our total to $10 dollars per meal. The shipping conveniently says $0.00 until you actually proceed to checkout... Second, each "meal" is 340 calories, which isn't even enough calories for a teenage boy. A teenage boy should be eating at least 700 calories per meal, and that's on a bad day. So, correcting for real life, these meals come out to abou…

I'm going to have to give an upvote for this because I agree that calling 340 calories a meal is misleading

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#408
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) I don't get your branding, especially the company name, and especially as all of your meals are vegan. As I mentioned downthread, I was planning to skip this completely because of the name until one of the founders happened to mention in a comment that the meals are vegan. I don't normally associate "buttermilk" with anything that I eat as a vegan. This might be a tricky marketing issue, because a huge amount of…

That's a great point about the branding. Why we're called Buttermilk: Buttermilk is eaten at the end of almost every South Indian meal to "cool down" the stomach. As a South Indian myself, this is one of my go-to comfort foods. The aim with the company is to provide authentic, comfort foods which is how we came about to using it for the name! Plus, it's a known and easy-to-say word. We didn't actually launch with the…

Hi Mitra,

Great initiative. But even I don't understand the use of this name as Branding. As ideally "Buttermilk" is a Drink consumed throughout India, and ironically your company is not selling it. :-).

Also its a name of the Drink and you are selling ready to eat food items which also make this name a little inappropriate, as for any Indian it gives the impression of Drink selling site rather than Food selling site. (Even i was not planning to look at it, if I have not read the comments).

Anyways all the best and have a great success.

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#409
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why haven't we started calling out this racism and shunning it? It's better if everyone is on the same page for spiciness levels and judging peoples' tastes based on their skin color is inaccurate and offensive.

Please don't needlessly jack up the flame levels here. Restaurant workers trying to figure out what their customers will be happy with is hardly "racism" that needs "calling out". Moreover the online trope of "calling out" is something HN can do without. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your account was created August 18th 2007, you are soon at eleven, Sir.

Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you eat more than 5 dishes per day? How are you going to get your daily sodium dose?

Since most people are overshooting by huge margins, that'd be among the least of my worries.

The evidence suggests most people are not overshooting their salt needs and especially not by huge margins.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th...

>With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death... Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/we-ea...

>People tend to consume about the same amount of sodium no matter where they live, and this amount hasn’t changed much in decades. Those facts hint at the biological basis of our sodium appetite.... “Over the last five decades, salt content of commercial food in our food [in the United States] has gone up. But if you look at people’s 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, you see that the amounts of salt people consume have been constant,” he says. Irrespective of age, sex or race, between 1957 and 2003 Americans have been eating on average 3.5 grams of salt a day. “This suggests that we are somehow regulating the amount of salt we are eating,” Breslin says.... In one of Leshem’s studies, babies who had low concentrations of sodium in their blood in the first weeks of their lives grew up to be teenagers with a penchant for salt, even salt that is seemingly hidden in processed foods. “Even if you can’t taste the salt, apparently your body does. It’s working on an unconscious level to condition a preference for sodium,” Leshem explains.

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