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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)

#571

Post by [deleted] »

ridgered4 wrote: post #467
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…

I remember Rachel Ray's 30 minute meals usually featured her pulling some ingredients she'd already chopped up or soaked in something the night before out from the fridge. Apparently the time spend yesterday didn't count against the clock.

[deleted]

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

#572

Post by astura »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #72
explaininjs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder to what extent it’s attempts to game the auto-nutrition facts. That said, is anyone actually measuring a tablespoon of oil? I just pour a glug of a size proportional to the ingredients and adjust as needed.

Everyone has to start somewhere. If you take a university student who has just left home and never cooked for themselves and tell them "just pour a glug proportional to the ingredients"...that's pretty close to useless for them, especially since they don't yet an intuition for what things you can freehand (and how much you can freehand them) and which things you shouldn't. After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say…

>After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.

No, but you do, almost universally, say "salt to taste." Which is a different way to say the same thing.

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

#573

Post by giraffe_lady »

naravara wrote: post #559
giraffe_lady wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 scaled down to home sizes. This often works fine but not always, and usually needs some tweaking. It tends to be especially true of cookbooks affiliated with a well known restaurant or chef, but certainly not limited to that. When the pandemic l…

Yes! Exactly the sort of detail I look for when evaluating recipes.

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

#575

Post by savanaly »

balderdash wrote: post #563
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…

Biggest thing for me is your #5. When I watch others cook I see a lot of downtime. 30 seconds here waiting for oil in pan to get hot, 30 seconds there chatting with me while their water boils, it adds up to minutes and minutes that could have been spent washing dishes and cleaning surfaces. For me the perfect cook is when the last thing comes off the heat it's the only dirty dish, I can plate it, wash the dish in the sink, then leave the kitchen with the food and the kitchen cleaner than when I went in.

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

#576

Post by grvdrm »

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…

I almost never look at recipe timing, but anecdotally, I know I'm slower.

That said, I spent time as a line chef in a kitchen, and it gave me some useful skills in kitchen: cooking lots of things at the same time. These days, I'll fire up my grill, have something on the, and maybe something in the oven, and have done it enough times to know when to start/stir/turn-off to make sure everything is done right around the same time. Very much like a restaurant.

Also, some things are just easier when you let the tool do the job for you. I never cook rice any other way than in an Instant Pot, for example.

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

#577

Post by danaris »

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…

The Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker cookbook were the cookbooks my parents taught me to cook from.

I've since added the America's Test Kitchen cookbook to my collection. (Others, too, of course.) It's very explicitly a cookbook developed by chefs testing out recipes and fine-tuning them to get them just right.

Unfortunately, I rarely have the time & energy to cook from scratch these days, and the majority of the recipes I actually make come from Blue Apron—but they're also a pretty good source, and make some damn good dinners in a very practical amount of time.

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

#578

Post by class4behavior »

naravara wrote: post #559
giraffe_lady wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 scaled down to home sizes. This often works fine but not always, and usually needs some tweaking. It tends to be especially true of cookbooks affiliated with a well known restaurant or chef, but certainly not limited to that. When the pandemic l…

Rather, I assume, they probably think that since they earned that experience now, they may as well profit. These "actually realistic recipes" are apparently an unexplored market after all.

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

#579

Post by devchix »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #533
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…

> 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'm not disagreeing with you, but there's substance to what the sister-in-law is claiming. I've had a few (not many, but frequent enough) mistakes from very highly produced books, from high-profile celebrity chefs - case in point Thomas Keller. As I was measuring out the ingredients I thought no way this could be right, I'm an experienced home cook and baker. Went with the recipe against my instincts anyway and it turned out quite bad. Especially when the recipe is adapted from a pro kitchen, they make gargantuan portions of stuff, and when reduced for the home cook, the portion and ratio don't necessarily get tested. There are also egregious substitution advice blithely thrown in, for example the Bouchon Bakery cookbook tells you to heat river rocks (but not sedimentary rocks! lol wut?) in your oven and throw water on them to create steam. If you follow this advice you're likely to ruin your oven when one of these rocks explodes. The pros use steam-injected ovens, the test kitchen uses steel chains, but this "use river rock" thing was probably thrown in there by a non-baking intern and I can promise you they never tested this.

Except for rare pockets, the state of Internet recipes is utter garbage. Get a good foundational cookbook, cook and learn from your experience, which no shortcut can substitute. The people who do test their recipes as far as I know, are Cooks' Illustrated and America's Test Kitchens (they're the same company I think).

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