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Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

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Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#561

Post by jbaber »

escapedmoose wrote: post #530
henrikschroder wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections. Everyone who is interested in cooking should do themselves a favour and buy a proper cookbook. Something that starts with the basics, and works itself up to full meals. It should have cheat-sheets for basic ways to cook all your staples, here's all the ways you can cook a potato, with times and temperature. Here's all the ways you can s…

This is why I use The Joy of Cooking and virtually no other recipe source. It’s a giant book because in each section it describes the mechanics behind whatever the section is based on; e.g. the poultry chapter starts with 10 or so pages describing how to select a chicken depending on how it’ll be cooked, how to cut it apart, what different poultry terminology means, etc. It teaches you what it means to “braise” or “b…

Knowing to just have a copy of [The Joy of Cooking] and [Better Homes and Gardens] takes you very far. The recipes are full fledged you're-a-homemaker-with-time-to-do-this level, so sometimes you can simplify them down -- e.g., there are some pancake adjacent recipes that have you put the yolk of an egg in first, followed later by the frothed white -- I skip that.

The only time I need to stray from those is for various kinds of ethnic cooking, in which case, a cookbook devoted to them serves a lot better than a website with a bunch of machine generated boilerplate at the beginning.

[The Joy of Cooking]: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Cooking-Fully-Revised-Updated/dp/... [Better Homes and Gardens]: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Homes-Gardens-Cook-Book/dp/069...

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#562

Post by naravara »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #494
dbspin wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're leaving out the extent to which cooking is an analogue process. Your particular ovens temperature envelope, the rate at which your pan or wok heats (due to its thickness and composition), the specifics of the varieties of plant or cuts of meat you're cooking, the quality or specifics of the spices or oils you're using. I'm no chef, but it seems like these can all make quite substantial changes in cooki…

> I think you're leaving out the extent to which cooking is an analogue process. The main difference between cooking and process chemistry is that the latter actually cares about quality of the end result. There is some unavoidable variation because of the inconsistency in ingredients and lack of access to tools that would mitigate it. However, the typical kitchen tools are also just bad by design , with any kind of…

> The main difference between cooking and process chemistry is that the latter actually cares about quality of the end result.

Do home cooks not care about how the food tastes? This seems like a strange take. People started cooking by roasting or boiling things over an open flame or searing them on a hot rock. Most of the techniques learned and passed down are about how to ensure good results under contexts where the inputs are naturally inconsistent and hard to control.

I don't know why we'd have an assumption that people have or want to work with precise scientific instruments all the time.

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#563

Post by balderdash »

bruckie wrote: post #110

Recipe writers are still lying about cooking time in 2023. I signed up for a Hello Fresh promo recently to get some new meal ideas, and it's making me feel like the slowest cook on the planet. I reliably exceed their stated prep and cooking times by 100-200%. Tonight's "40 minute" recipe took about 70 minutes, and that was with a family member helping out with some of the prep and cooking. I wonder if they collect an…

Don’t disagree that some of the recipe times are very optimistic, but watching friends cook gives me hives at how inefficient they are, handful of things to think about about that will massively speed up your cooking time:

1)read the recipe and spend a couple of min visualizing the steps, what you’ll need and writing out the timing and grouping chores.

2) do some mise en place[a] (buy $50 of small duralex glass bowls for this, they’re great). E.g. do all your dry good measuring, then wet measuring, vegetable chopping in groups.

3. Set up efficiently (mise en place above), watching someone go to the cupboard 15 times and then the fridge 8 times for things in their recipe is a huge waste. Use a trash bowl so you’re not running to the sink or garbage all the time.

4. Learn knife skills (a lot of cooking schools offer a stand alone class). The right way and the wrong way to dice an onion or Julianne a pepper are like 80%+ reductions in time spent on a task…

5. Clean while you cook.

You’ll be shocked at the time savings if you combine these elements.

A. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#564

Post by pcthrowaway »

krisoft wrote: post #355
jterrys wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really surprised. There's a youtube channel called Chef Jean Pierre. He is a retired Chef that used to run a restaurant since the 1970s, has cookbooks, was featured on PBS, etc. (Some say he has a more colorful past with his cooking school/restaurant business in Florida, but I don't know much). Either way. He's got the consistently longest cooking videos on youtube. He explains that long videos don't do well.…

> He explains that long videos don't do well. But it takes time to cook. This is not a mystery. People don't "cook along" with videos. People watch cooking videos for either to get inspired or for a vibe, most often for both. A stew might take hours to be ready, but the core idea of it can be expressed succinctly in a few sentences. Totally made up example: "We brown beef, and then simmer it with potatoes low and slo…

Perhaps a stew doesn't need to show all the steps.

But a lot of recipes require you to multitask between several parallel workflows of ingredient preparation and combination, keeping you active in cooking until either the final step ("put everything except the garnish into the oven for X minutes") or until the recipe is complete.

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#565

Post by bluGill »

Larrikin wrote: post #83
throwaway2037 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP wrote: bought at a goodwill for $5 The person made no other claims about this slow cooker except caramelizing onions.

My point was >Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are…

I have used a number of different slow cooker brands over the years. Most were Crock-pot brand, but I've used others. I've never been able to tell the difference.

Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can.

Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#566

Post by giraffe_lady »

ip26 wrote: post #540
marak830 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are spot on. Ex chef here(quite experienced), and without notice (while watching a tv show), I'm at least twice as fast as my wife at prep. When I'm focused I'm even faster. Even then I'm probably on par if not only a touch faster than these recipes XD

How long did it take you to get that fast? Any training, or just on the job?

I'm not the person you asked but I also am a very fast home cook due to professional cooking background.

The job is the training in that kind of work. No one comes out of culinary school particularly fast and even most serious cooks don't go anyway. Cooks change restaurant often and every restaurant is a completely different set of foods and techniques.

Training may teach you how to do something but doing it for hours a day months straight is where you learn to do it fast. A skilled cook at the prep table is looking at it like an F1 pit crew basically. What physical motions am I about to perform, what can be set up in advance and where should it go to reduce extraneous movement, what are the intermediate steps that can be batched together etc. There's never enough time for all the work you need to get done in the kitchen, so every day is a challenge to optimize your efficiency more than the previous one.

Basically you can teach someone the right way to dice an onion but they won't be truly fast at it until they've diced a few thousand onions. Apply that to every task in the kitchen over a decade and you're pretty quick by the end of it.

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#567

Post by isaacremuant »

isaacfrond wrote: post #131

My sister in law writes recipes. She has a recipe column in a newspaper and wrote a few high quality recipe books. I saw them in a bookstore. So she's reasonable successful. Her pieces are charming, her recipes inspiring. The thing is. At a birthday party when I was talking to her, she confessed to me that she never actually tries her recipes. When it's time to do a new piece, she sits down at her computer and makes…

Top comment of something that is probably a lie or a misrepresentation.

If this story is true, she absolutely cooks it once. She might not consider the right quantities and such but sounds off.

> What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this.

This is demonstrably bullshit.

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#568

Post by hk1337 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #528
hk1337 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am convinced they add red and yellow bell peppers strictly because they think the dish needs more color. I _hate_ bell peppers. I can tolerate them in big chunks where I can pick them out but if you dice them up and mix it in, I won't eat it.

For what it's worth, I found the best way to make them is to cut them into very thin slices. My rule is bell peppers have to always be "bite sized" because of how tough they are. If you make the pieces to big, you will have to "bite into" the pepper rather than eating it whole and I think that's where they get a bad rap since they can be very tough to bite into.

While not preferred, I could tolerate slices. I could pick them out a lot easier than diced up small.

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#569

Post by quadrifoliate »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #552
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this. Books have a much higher production value than content farm material like your sister writes. They also rely heavily on reviews, which is incentive to invest the effort to do it right. Modern recipe books have photos of the dish, so obviously they made it at least once. It would be unreasonable for them to invest all of the effort into wr…

I have extensive cooking experience both professional and at home, and have written published recipes and also been a tester for published recipes. I have very low trust in online recipes in general, and always evaluate the source of them first. But books are not, overall, that much better! Whatever testing was done was often done ad hoc or in professional kitchens, or on a much larger batch that was arithmetically s…

Are there any specific markers you for books that can be trusted?

All these comments are making me think that I should never trust any proportions in a cookbook again. I guess that leaves experimentation and keeping notes, which I already do -- but curious if there are existing published recipes tested in home kitchens that I can rely upon a little more.

Re: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

#570

Post by giraffe_lady »

conductr wrote: post #518
bruckie wrote: post #110

Recipe writers are still lying about cooking time in 2023. I signed up for a Hello Fresh promo recently to get some new meal ideas, and it's making me feel like the slowest cook on the planet. I reliably exceed their stated prep and cooking times by 100-200%. Tonight's "40 minute" recipe took about 70 minutes, and that was with a family member helping out with some of the prep and cooking. I wonder if they collect an…

Mirrors my experience. Prep work is the most underestimated part. I think they start with everything out on the counter and unpackaged and with necessary tooling lined up and ready. But those things take time. For me, something like mincing garlic cloves takes a solid 5-10 minutes alone and is one of the things that consistently stands out as they must have started with minced garlic to get to this time estimate.

Nah that's a perfect example of how experience & technique can speed things up dramatically. Here watch ole JP do it in about 90 seconds even while slowing down to explain it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y5h1pDHhzs
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