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.
Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
401–410 of 454 posts
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#402Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#403Earlier 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…
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#404Earlier 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?)
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#405What would also be cool is if the consumer could possibly know the people or story behind each recipe. It would create a nice connection with each meal prepared, maybe adding it on the back of each pack...
Just a thought..
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#406Earlier 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.
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
#407Earlier 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…
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#408Earlier 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…
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
#409Earlier 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
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#410Earlier 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.
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.