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‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

theatlantic.com

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Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#31

Post by seem_2211 »

Nition wrote: post #19
tptacek wrote: post #15

I've read the book and watched the series. Both are fine. The series is in a weird place in between Mind of a Chef (which, in most of its seasons, is a significantly better show) and a more conventional FoodTV cooking show. I think they're trying to do too much in each episode, and also that the travel-show part of each episode works better than the cooking demos do. The book is better than the show. I have friends t…

In New Zealand that "one cooking book" is the Edmonds Cookery Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonds_Cookery_Book Tells you all the essentials of how to cook meat and veges and make basic sauces and all that, plus has a whole lot of relatively simple recipes that use common ingredients.

What's scary is comparing the old versions of the Edmonds Cook Book with the more recent versions and seeing how much more sugar we're putting in a lot of the stuff we're making.

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#32

Post by pkd »

papa_bear wrote: post #27
methodover wrote: post #25

Does anyone know of a cookbook that provides complete meals? The ones I’ve had recommended all assume you kinda know what you want to make. But I want someone else to tell me what to make, and I’ll just put it all together.

It's not really a cookbook, but check out my website https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories) and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)

This is very well done. I just wish there was a Google login instead of Facebook.

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#33

Post by dmos62 »

papa_bear wrote: post #27
methodover wrote: post #25

Does anyone know of a cookbook that provides complete meals? The ones I’ve had recommended all assume you kinda know what you want to make. But I want someone else to tell me what to make, and I’ll just put it all together.

It's not really a cookbook, but check out my website https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories) and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)

I love this! I'm having trouble balancing my diet, largely because I don't put in the time in research, and this does all these things. Great idea.

However, I follow a vegetarian diet (as in 95% of my intake is vegetables, legumes and grains), and the generator is having trouble composing meal plans. It says so if you click on Details next to the calorie target. The picked meal plans differ from the carb/fat/protein targets significantly, and the meals are all uncooked: salads, smoothies and deserts. So the vegetarian "menu" doesn't really work, unfortunately.

I thought that the database is severely skewed towards animal-based diets, but if I pick "anything" in the diet menu, I still get mostly salads, sandwitches, scrambled eggs, and stuff like yogurt, nuts, cheese slices, with some meat and eggs here and there of course. What stands out is that most things seem to require very little preparation. Is this tool oriented towards people unexperienced in the kitchen? Or maybe people who don't want to spend time preparing food? That's a nice option to have, but to only have recipes like that is a bit strange. Also, since I was told by a physician I should avoid raw vegetables and eat them well cooked (I used to eat raw or minimally cooked in the past), at least 3/4 of the suggested meals are no-go for me.

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#34

Post by z3t4 »

When it comes to cooking, we are still in the stone age. When will we see a startup that stir up the food market !? It's a really huge market, and something that would truly make the world a better place. Just an crazy idea: Teleporting dishes. You scan in the food, then send it over the Internet to a molecular printer that re-creates it. Or if you are a pirate you download recipes from the web.

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#35

Post by jboynyc »

shaklee3 wrote: post #23

Has anyone seen the documentary with the same name? It comes up on Netflix for me every time I load it. I'm pretty overwhelmed by the number of food documentaries out there, so this one didn't stand out for any reason.

I've been wanting to watch it since seeing it described as "a Marxist fantasy" in this essay: https://www.eater.com/2018/10/19/17995884/salt-fat-acid-heat...

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#36

Post by crispyambulance »

methodover wrote: post #25

Does anyone know of a cookbook that provides complete meals? The ones I’ve had recommended all assume you kinda know what you want to make. But I want someone else to tell me what to make, and I’ll just put it all together.

Well I don't know what you mean by "complete". That is very culture dependent.

But I think you'll want to explore cookbooks with two different approaches. I got 2 recommendations...

* Opinionated -- "The Art of Simple Food" by Alice Waters. This is a comprehensive cookbook covering many different recipes with words on technique and lots of background about the ingredients and how to use them effectively. It doesn't make assumptions or gloss over stuff.

* Ingredient-focused -- "Market Cooking" by David Tanis. This focuses on recipes using ingredients that one finds in farmer's markets. I like this approach because it is a smart idea to start with what is good/fresh and available in your location first, and then find recipes for it, than the other way around.

Both of these will give some guidance about what goes with what in terms of flavor and ingredients.

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#37

Post by ktta »

tptacek wrote: post #15

I've read the book and watched the series. Both are fine. The series is in a weird place in between Mind of a Chef (which, in most of its seasons, is a significantly better show) and a more conventional FoodTV cooking show. I think they're trying to do too much in each episode, and also that the travel-show part of each episode works better than the cooking demos do. The book is better than the show. I have friends t…

Might not be a "classic", but in my opinion, The Food Lab is one of those 'if you only own one' book. Though it might seem like it is for home cooks who aren't just beginning.

I remember you talking about serious eats somewhere so I'm interested why you didn't include this.

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#38

Post by Nition »

seem_2211 wrote: post #31
Nition wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In New Zealand that "one cooking book" is the Edmonds Cookery Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonds_Cookery_Book Tells you all the essentials of how to cook meat and veges and make basic sauces and all that, plus has a whole lot of relatively simple recipes that use common ingredients.

What's scary is comparing the old versions of the Edmonds Cook Book with the more recent versions and seeing how much more sugar we're putting in a lot of the stuff we're making.

Would be fun make the same recipes from different editions and compare. I've noticed some minor variations between my parent's copy and mine but neither are really old.

I remember my ANZAC biscuits recipe in particular has less butter and more sugar, like you say, and is clearly inferior. A bit sad. However we also have Edmonds: Best of Baking, which is newer than my Edmonds Cookbook, and prescribes more like the old recipe with more butter.

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#39

Post by papa_bear »

dmos62 wrote: post #33
papa_bear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a cookbook, but check out my website https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories) and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)

I love this! I'm having trouble balancing my diet, largely because I don't put in the time in research, and this does all these things. Great idea. However, I follow a vegetarian diet (as in 95% of my intake is vegetables, legumes and grains), and the generator is having trouble composing meal plans. It says so if you click on Details next to the calorie target. The picked meal plans differ from the carb/fat/protein…

Thanks for the feedback!

You're right that the default settings are pretty skewed towards simple meals. We need to make these options more prominent I think, but if you click the 3-dot menu next to a meal's title, you can change the allowed prep-time and desired "meal complexity".

The meal complexity has a huge impact on what recipes are available, and if you bump a couple meals up to moderate or complex, you'll get a lot more variety. Let me know if that improves things at all for you (I think a lot of the more interesting vegetarian/vegan dishes probably fall under a higher complexity setting).

Re: ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks

#40

Post by papa_bear »

riteshpatel wrote: post #30
papa_bear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a cookbook, but check out my website https://www.EatThisMuch.com/ You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories) and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)

This site is really well made! Nice job!

Thanks! We've been working on it for quite a few years, and steadily improving things bit by bit.
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