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Based Cooking

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Re: Based Cooking

#381

Post by dragonwriter »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #366
deanclatworthy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this subject, can an American please tell me what a spoonful is? There is a great video series on youtube, with his recipes online, but all measurements are spoonful: https://www.ethanchlebowski.com/cooking-techniques-recipes/p... Spoons can vary in size, so is it a tablespoon or a teaspoon? When dealing with spices you'll be adding 3 times the amount if you go with tablespoon interpretation so it'd be a pretty bi…

I would say teaspoon size which is about what's in your regular eating spoon if it were bigger they'd say tablespoon which is obviously a lot bigger than what most people use to eat their dinner with. Unless it's mac and cheese and then tablespoon would make sense.

> I would say teaspoon size which is about what's in your regular eating spoon

A “regular eating spoon” is usually a tablespoon, hence the name. A teaspoon is typically used for adding sugar to, or stirring, coffee or tea, or eating desserts.

Re: Based Cooking

#382

Post by thaumasiotes »

dpcan wrote: post #133
hardwaregeek wrote: post #111

Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe: - There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it. - Pound with what…

I learned to cook a lot from the 3x5 cards my mom has in a cupboard. They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter. Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway. I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or…

> They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter.

I don't understand the complaint here. A stick of butter is half a cup, 8 tablespoons. The standardization is more ironclad than pretty much any other product you can get in a grocery store.

Re: Based Cooking

#383

Post by SamBam »

Niksko wrote: post #60
SamBam wrote: post #13

Maybe I'm in a minority, because everyone always hoots and hollers about how they hate modern recipe web sites -- and I get it, 6 pages of memories of trips to grandma or whatever is ridiculous -- but I can't see myself ever using a plain-text recipe with no clue as to who the author is and no reason to suspect that they know what they're talking about. At that point I would probably go to SimplyRecipes, where at lea…

I'm on your side. I need the author of a recipe to explain why their recipe is interesting, different, or better than others. And I need that to match with my own culinary reasoning and knowledge. Otherwise it's likely to be bland, boring, both, or worse. That said, we are in the minority. Most people just Google the recipe they want to make and use the first result. This very very very rarely produces a good result.…

> There's definitely some skill to cooking, but 80% of why I'm considering a good cook among my friends is because I only use recipes from people I trust

I strongly agree with this. I consider myself a fairly accomplished cook, I've been cooking since I was tall enough to see over the table, but one of the big things that helps is that I will take the time to find the right recipe, mostly by looking at the recipe itself and being able to visualize and taste the food before I make it, but also but reading what the author writes and deciding if I trust them.

Re: Based Cooking

#384

Post by s_dev »

schwartzworld wrote: post #250
jamiequint wrote: post #185

Kenji Lopez (MIT grad chef who is reasonably famous on YouTube and for writing for Serious Eats for years and for writing this amazing cookbook https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0... ) gives the exact opposite advice of this blog for salt where he recommends using large flake salt for finishing and "table salt" for cooking.

I can't imagine it matters much in any situation where the salt is going to dissolve, so the cheapest option (table salt) makes sense. Kosher salt is a fine compromise for most situations.

Both table salt and kosher salt are perfectly fine for seasoning or decorating -- michelin starred restaurants use both for each purpose. The only important thing to note is that they have different saltiness grades. Table salt is finer and thus saltier. Real problems emerge when not distinguishing between the two -- either a dish is far too salty or completely under seasoned.

Just specify what you're using and how much and the person using the other one can adjust. 3 parts kosher is about 1 part table salt.

It gets way more confusing if you go to Japan -- instead of 3 or 4 salts. There are 00s. The Japanese are big in to salts.

Re: Based Cooking

#385

Post by SamBam »

derefr wrote: post #363
deanclatworthy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm European. There is no issue here in what a teaspoon or a tablespoon is. A tablespoon is three times the size of a teaspoon and I have dedicate measuring spoons for each size. The issue is what a "spoonful" constitutes. Check the link to the recipe.

A tablespoon is called a tablespoon because table spoons — the medium-sized spoons that come in flatware sets — have a mostly-standardized capacity, and this capacity comes out to around 1tbsp. Why? As it happens, a 1tbsp basin on a utensil, with loose food (e.g. rice, corn, pudding, whatever) heaped atop the basin to its sloughing point, constitutes pretty much exactly a “mouthful” of food (for almost all human skul…

You're not answering the question, the question was simply "what is a spoonful?"

The answer is that a "spoonful" is not precisely defined. "Tablespoon" and "teaspoon" are defined measurements, but "spoonful" isn't.

The answer from another comment is that the author meant "tablespoon."

Re: Based Cooking

#386

Post by triceratops »

DC-3 wrote: post #316
anentropic wrote: post #304

What is "Based cooking" ? Is it a pre-existing phrase with its own meaning, or it's just the name of the site? Is this a meme meaning of the word "based" that I am too old to be aware of?

I'm not 100% sure this is what the author intends but 'based' has been used for quite a long time on imageboards as an adjective describing something that is unpopular or contentious but nonetheless correct. > J.K. Rowling is actually better that Hemingway > > based From here it spread to other communities (largely non-mainstream political communities on both the left and right). Its strongest assiociation is still w…

Thanks for explaining "based" - I didn't know what it was. But I don't understand how your example is actually an example of that. "Rowling is better than Hemingway" is a matter of opinion, so it can't be "unpopular but correct".

Re: Based Cooking

#387

Post by lorenzhs »

sp332 wrote: post #339
dpcan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned to cook a lot from the 3x5 cards my mom has in a cupboard. They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter. Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway. I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or…

A stick of butter is standardized though. It's a quarter pound.

In lots of countries, butter isn't sold in sticks, and using measurements like "sticks", "cans", or "packs" of something is annoying if the unit sizes differ between the author's and the reader's country. I can deal with cups or ounces - they're not intuitive for me, but they can be converted. But "cans" or "packs" are just plain guesswork. That makes it unnecessarily hard to try new dishes where I don't already know what the result is supposed to look or taste like.

Re: Based Cooking

#388

Post by DC-3 »

triceratops wrote: post #386
DC-3 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not 100% sure this is what the author intends but 'based' has been used for quite a long time on imageboards as an adjective describing something that is unpopular or contentious but nonetheless correct. > J.K. Rowling is actually better that Hemingway > > based From here it spread to other communities (largely non-mainstream political communities on both the left and right). Its strongest assiociation is still w…

Thanks for explaining "based" - I didn't know what it was. But I don't understand how your example is actually an example of that. "Rowling is better than Hemingway" is a matter of opinion, so it can't be "unpopular but correct".

When I say 'correct', I mean correct in the eyes of the person using the word 'based'. It's worth bearing in mind here that imageboards for the most part have a wilful cultural neglect of the difference between 'my opinion' and 'objective truth' :-)

Re: Based Cooking

#389

Post by SamBam »

Ekaros wrote: post #210
deanclatworthy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this subject, can an American please tell me what a spoonful is? There is a great video series on youtube, with his recipes online, but all measurements are spoonful: https://www.ethanchlebowski.com/cooking-techniques-recipes/p... Spoons can vary in size, so is it a tablespoon or a teaspoon? When dealing with spices you'll be adding 3 times the amount if you go with tablespoon interpretation so it'd be a pretty bi…

Also if we aren't talking about measuring spoons is it heapful or flat? Also 30 cranks of black pepper? Are the pepper mills standardised? What is a crank full 360 degrees or less? Or some back and forth motion, but again how large motion? How does this even work with my electric grinder?

> Also 30 cranks of black pepper?

Yeah, that alone is nonsense. Very confusing, coming from someone who is touting himself on the website as a "food science" guy.

Re: Based Cooking

#390

Post by spaetzleesser »

flal_ wrote: post #180
spaetzleesser wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of myself as a pretty decent cook but without some rough measurements I don’t find the recipes very useful. When I look at the gnocchi recipe I have no idea how much flour to take for an amount of potatoes for example . It is a little like watching my mom who just seems to throw things together until it’s right. Every time it’s perfect but she can’t explain what she does. You need a lot of experience for this…

The thing is that cooking, as it's (usually) based on products that have some intrinsic variability in them ( plants, dead animals... ) hence the recipe cannot be made fully deterministic. I know for gnocchis for example, the amouny of flour needed depends on the moisture content of the potatoes which depend on the variety uses, and how long they've been stored... Also depends on the flour you use. Until you get the…

It’s pretty much a given that in most recipes the quantities are a rough estimate. But at least you have starting point. With gnocchi I have no idea where to start and I have never seen them made so I simply don’t know what’s “just right”.
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