111–120 of 747 posts
Sifting flour. Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more. Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home. “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat. Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.
Sifting flour. Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more. Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home. “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat. Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.
Yet, "sifting flour" was a thing years back... not the one bought in the store but the one stored in large sacks, and ground in the local mill. The amount of lumps sifted out was non-trivial.
Sifting flour. Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more. Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home. “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat. Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.
sauteing spices makes a noticeable difference, according to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsYzWK3cxOM&t=840
Recipes are terrible when it comes to time. I have this one open in a tab so I can try it soon: https://www.seriouseats.com/lamb-biryani The first step is the prep step, which it says takes 5 minutes. In that step, I have to: - trim the fat from, and cube (1in) 2 pounds of lamb - peel and chop 6 cloves of garlic - peel and grate 2 inches of ginger - mix with yogurt and salt in a zip lock bag That looks like at least…
No, that is not the prep step. The prep step starts with all of these done and is mixing all of these together in a zip lock bag and putting it in the fridge. So 5 minutes seems even a bit high. The time for recipes is always "with all ingredients washed, peeled, chopped and set ready to go in a bowl. Start!". Also note that step 2 is to put the onions into the pan (but no step says to cut onions) and that the ingred…
Then they shouldn't label it prep.
> And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
This is a recipe for home cooks not professional kitchens. Both cook time and prep time are always going to be estimates. Labeling a step as "prep" and excluding all of the actual prep tasks isn't useful for someone trying to plan their day. This 5 min step ads nothing of value to the recipe as far as I can see.
Recipe writers routinely lie about how long a recipe takes, too. Most reporting a time requirement much under 30 minutes get there by ignoring how long it takes to process & prep the various ingredients. "15-minute meals" often take 10-15 minutes of prep before you can start them.
Yes. My favorite is quickie salad recipes. Their times are correct, as long as you happen to have a refrigerator stuffed with containers of chopped vegetables for some reason. I've seen youtube videos where they "make" such salads. It's really not far off from "cooking time: 10 minutes. 3 to pick from the menu, 2 to call for delivery, 5 for it to reach you."
Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason. You might not like this convention, but it is pretty universal.
So your complaint sounds like "3 minute angel hair pasta?!?! My water won't even have started boiling by then." Totally understandable misconception for someone who just started cooking, but you should learn pretty quickly what 3 minutes actually means.
Sifting flour. Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more. Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home. “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat. Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.
Restaurant quality is real and it’s because high end restaurants usually buy the best produce at wholesale and pay for stuff a grocery store can’t. For example they get much better blackberries in top restaurants because they need to be handled extremely gently when ripe: a grocery store can’t put that stuff out on shelves or it would get destroyed.
One of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen, is closing soon. Their menu costs about $800 per person, but even at that price the business barely turns a profit and runs largely on unpaid interns who put in the endless hours of manual labor so they could have the famous restaurant on their CV:
https://www.ft.com/content/6377b292-d825-4b3a-8527-04d147551...
The best way to carmelize onions is in a slow cooker. I used a cheapie one for years that I bought at a goodwill for $5. Chop up enough onions to fill the vessel 1/2 to 2/3, leave it running overnight (8-10h), wake up next morning to perfectly carmelized onions. Now drain the juice, portion them out and store them in the freezer (store the juice too for onion soup). Now any time you need carmelized onions, take a por…
For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice about unitaskers is terrible, except for the first time you start cooking at home and don't know what you need. Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buyi…
From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it.
[1] How slow cookers work, or cooking in general.
When you are good at something, you don't realize how much you do anymore.
This article is unrelated, but has a good explananation of the problem in one section :
Why not tell people to simply use x
https://bitecode.substack.com/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simpl...
The best way to carmelize onions is in a slow cooker. I used a cheapie one for years that I bought at a goodwill for $5. Chop up enough onions to fill the vessel 1/2 to 2/3, leave it running overnight (8-10h), wake up next morning to perfectly carmelized onions. Now drain the juice, portion them out and store them in the freezer (store the juice too for onion soup). Now any time you need carmelized onions, take a por…
I would wake up with a ravenous hunger as the smell would have permeated the house! What a delightful problem to have!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re right but that flour would have to be out (unsealed) for a while. Boy, weevils!
flour here is sold in paper bags, which are glued shut but not waterproof or beetleproof i have not had weevils in a number of years but I have recently had red flour beetles or confused flour beetles they suck
For anything long term I pour the flour out onto long trays, let it reach 0°F/-18°C in my freezer and keeping it there for 3 days, then storing it in food safe 5-gallon buckets with bay leaves and oxygen absorbers, though some also use dry ice. [2]
weevils/beetles all absolutely suck.
[0] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096708797229040?...
[1] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096708799227950
[2] - https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...