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

The biggest issue with their recipes is that they, to an extent, tell you to do things in the wrong order. Picking a random recent one we had there was a step to season the meat and then heat some oil and then cook the meat. Well, heating the oil (to the point you'd want to add the meat) can take a few minutes and should have started before you even got the meat out of the package. What you actually have to do with the recipes is read the entire thing to find all the meat and produce and spice prep steps and all the measuring steps. Do all of those first while the oven is heating and maybe the pan with oil (though this can usually be delayed until you put something in the oven since the total stovetop time is usually 5-10 minutes less than the oven time). Then you start cooking, usually, with the recipes we've had, by putting a baking sheet of vegetables in to roast. Then start heating the oil (maybe a few minutes delay) and then start cooking the meat.

If you do that, the prep part takes 5-10 minutes depending on your knife skills and then the cooking takes as long as the longest cooking step (usually a vegetable roasting step). You cannot execute their recipes as written in the time they suggest, but you can definitely cook the meals in the time they suggest if you read the recipe and execute it in a proper order.

It would be nice, for people who aren't used to parallelizing work (most of us are engineers and programmers here, it's kind of what we do) if they laid it out differently, with a timeline or something.

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Prep: List all prep steps (chopping, dicing, measuring, seasoning, mixing sauces, etc.)

            1    1   2    2
  0123456789012345678012345
  |-----------------------|
  1  3         4    5   6 7
  2

1. Put baking sheet of vegetables into oven

2. Add oil to pan and set to medium-high heat

3. Add onions to heated pan (stirring, etc.)

4. After 10 minutes remove onions, add oil, wait a minute and add meat (the pan will be so hot the oil needs little time to heat up)

5. Flip meat after 5 minutes

6. Remove meat from heat (have description and target temperature so people can know it's actually done), plate and cover with onions and herb butter mix (described in prep steps)

7. Remove vegetables from oven (include description of how they should look so they aren't over/undercooked) and plate

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That's how essentially every recipe ends up executing from what I've seen. If you read and parse the recipe steps into the actual prep portion (which they mix throughout) and heating portions (which they often list after they should be started) and cooking portions, the prep and cook times (more the cook times, prep depends on skill and focus) are pretty spot on.

the whole point of the internet is knowledge sharing. the web is the antithesis of knowledge sharing. the web is based around censorship[1] and monetization. you cannot know something as basic as how to caramelize onions because the natural way to spread this info would be to send each other an ebook on cooking or a quote from it, which would be copyright. blame the boomers who made it impossible to trade basic information because of the small downside that some company might lose some sales due to piracy. someone has to explain how to caramelize onions first. you could create an explanation from scratch, but it would be easier to just send a quote from whatever book you remember reading it in.

1. writers on the web who get paid to write know nothing about what they write about (was the same for magazines and such media before the web). they only get paid to get your attention, not to be correct. even when it comes down to being paid to be correct it only means being slightly more correct than the competitor, both of which were nothing near correct in the first place. it's literally a bunch of high school kids writing stuff they did 10 minutes of research on

2. recipe spammers want to make the most impressive recipes so you click them, but nobody will make them if they take actual work.

3. this is the reason why all recipes on the web are mostly garbage and deliver false promises.

3a. even the article in discussion is full of false promises if you enable ads:

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4. this is how magazines for morons worked in the 80s and 90s, the web is just an instantiation of that. it costs money to write and publish something on the web, due to the need to host it on an active server, which costs more as your website becomes more popular, so it makes sense that only money driven "advice" would appear more than anything terribly useful. (yes you can use some free blog site but your content will be removed for legal or "moral" reasons if it's actually useful)

5. the journalist will invoke plausible deniability, or try to weasel themselves back onto the high ground or change the subject when you hassle them on their knowledge / malpractice. as seen in the article: "I emailed Sam Sifton, the Times food critic turned national editor, to ask if the Recipe Writing Guild had some secret agreement to print false estimates of onion-cooking time. He wrote back: “I can reveal that onion caramelization takes longer than the Guild believes. But it need not take as long as you believe it to take! You can speed it up with butter, so long as you are careful not to burn.”"

6. you could just buy or download some good book on cooking, written 300 years ago, but you could not find such a book on the web because any discussion of this on the web is drowned out by corpo spam garbage. every recipe website is just a bunch of new things. you will not learn to cook from them, just to use the latest fad tool or ingredient

this is why stuff like napster and freenet should have become the norm 20 years ago, instead of this boomer dot com garbage. i still remember the day the web came out, it was just like when smart contracts came out - i could not imagine any real use case for it other than some boring commercial garbage like a fake journalist outlet.

1. because it naturally gets structured around large companies (due to the fact that the more readers something has the more money it costs to host) which are held accountable socially and legally for any slight misstep they take, as well as intentionally lying and censoring for their own benefit

Yet this act is a staple of Indian cuisine. The key is knowing what spices in what forms can take how much heat. Whole pods of cumin or peppercorns for example can benefit from browning without the entire structure burning.

Or as I like to say (especially when a friend is apologizing for serving slightly charred food): More colors more flavors!

230 of what kind of degree?

I was hoping that someone would post this! Lan Lam's recent youtube posts have radically improved my cooking (results or ease of execution) and I'd recommend that anyone who cooks frequently check them out.