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Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

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141–150 of 215 posts

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#141

Is there any cooking content that takes into account cleaning up after? In my limited viewing experience the focus often seems to be prep and the cooking, ignoring the reality of the inevitable clean up. Is there anyone focusing on recipes and how to cook that minimises / reuses cookware and through to a reset clean kitchen? When I cook I enjoy getting into a flow where I’m ordering the prep or modifying the recipe s…

Ethan Chlebowski sometimes talks about this in his recipes. But there's not much to it really - you just have to get in the habit of cleaning while cooking. Most recipes will have a few intermissions where you're just waiting for something to cook, water to boil, some meat to brown/saute etc. I use those times to clean and usually only spend 2 minutes cleaning up after the cooking is done.

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#142
post #70

Is there any cooking content that takes into account cleaning up after? In my limited viewing experience the focus often seems to be prep and the cooking, ignoring the reality of the inevitable clean up. Is there anyone focusing on recipes and how to cook that minimises / reuses cookware and through to a reset clean kitchen? When I cook I enjoy getting into a flow where I’m ordering the prep or modifying the recipe s…

We all have our own journey. But one of the biggest improvements in enjoying to cook was to learn not to clean up after. It was a revelation to me and the big enabler which moved cooking from a chore to something I appreciate. Do not clean up after - clean during! Maybe annoying at first but it quickly turn into a habit There is plenty of time (as a home cook!) during prep to clean the knives, bowls boards etc. What…

My trick: while not everything is dishwasher safe, almost everything IS rinse cycle friendly (not wood).

I won't put my nice metal bowls through a full cycle, but a rinse during prep makes the later hand wash a breeze.

When we build our next home, I desperately want a pair/trio of those drawer-style dishwashers.

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#143
post #39

What I often miss is "the basics". After reading a recipe or following a video, I perhaps know how to make exactly that dish. But that's like a bootcamp programmer learning a single framework. I want to learn the concepts, how to apply them, how and when to break the rules, how to modify it and experiment with what I got. When I follow a recipe, and the result isn't pristine, how do I fix it? Should I add more salt?…

Give "Salt Fat Acid Heat" a try (the book, not the netflix show)

The Netflix show suuuuuucks, They completely disregarded the whole point of the book in favor of just doing a bog standard "make a pretty dish and eat it with some people" show. They barely went into any of the actually useful stuff the book talks about (it's in the name!).

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#144
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm a huge fan of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Serious Eats is my go to web site before cooking just about anything, nothing I've seen before or since beats Alton Brown and Good Eats when it comes to video based cooking education.

Have you checked out Adam Ragusea on YouTube? https://youtube.com/@aragusea He continues on in a similar, if more modern, tradition as Alton Brown, I enjoy his videos and I have learned a lot from his videos.

Another YouTube cooking personality I really like is Internet Shaquille (https://m.youtube.com/@internetshaquille). His videos are very informationally dense without engaging in many of the typical YouTuber nonsense. And the ads are always at the end.

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#145
I learned to cook in the '90s and '00s, so before cooking videos. I was mostly self-taught, from cookbooks and magazines. I absolutely would have benefited from some of the basic techniques type videos available now: the kinds that show what simmering looks and sounds like compared to what boiling looks like. The kind that shows how to soften onions until they're glassy, and how to sauté garlic without burning it.

My main mistakes back then were simply using too high a heat (though on rare occasion not high enough, like when pan-searing fish), cooking too long, and not using enough oil. All of these things could have been corrected with basic technique videos.

On a somewhat related note, a long time ago I learned how to make gnocchi from an elderly Italian woman. Her teaching technique was immersive: she simply made a batch of it with me standing at her side. There's an art to how quickly you knead the flour into the potatoes: if you don't knead it in rapidly enough you work it too much and it gets tough. You also don't want to overshoot and knead too much flour in. She would work a certain amount in, then have me poke the dough to feel it, and she'd comment on the consistency and where in the process we were; things like "this is what it feels like when you're almost there" and "now it is ready". These things were remarkably hard to put into words, it was a much more immediate thing, like she could detect and point out to me how different it felt from thirty seconds ago. These were things like resilience, just how resistant the dough was to being poked and how quickly it popped back. I can't see how this kind of thing could be conveyed in text or a video, or any way other than in person.

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#146
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also taught me something pretty critical - you don't need a huge fancy kitchen to execute great food. Most of the work he does happens on a large cutting board, the sink, or the stove. When I moved into my current place with a tiny kitchen, I wasn't nearly as freaked out about it. I knew I would be able to work in it just fine.

I was humbled and inspired by the creativity and resourcefulness of some prison inmates. There's a Youtube channel[0] where they recreate "dishes" that can only be sourced from the commissary or leftovers from a provided meal. Ones I saw included: Laffy Taffy, ice cream and a breakfast burrito. I now look at my small kitchen in a different light. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nWOkoNQWM

Constraints raise creativity and sometimes new things are born

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#147

What I often miss is "the basics". After reading a recipe or following a video, I perhaps know how to make exactly that dish. But that's like a bootcamp programmer learning a single framework. I want to learn the concepts, how to apply them, how and when to break the rules, how to modify it and experiment with what I got. When I follow a recipe, and the result isn't pristine, how do I fix it? Should I add more salt?…

The basics never end. There is no strict vertical. When you stir-fry vegetables, salt the oil before adding the aromatics. That's basic. How many years was it until I figured that out? How many pro chefs have never figured that out? What's pro? What about mincing your meat with one cleaver and one chef's knife? Not two cleavers. Not two chefs knives? That's basic. For a certain type of mince. How many people figure t…

> When you stir-fry vegetables, salt the oil before adding the aromatics

Are you sure? What is it for, evenness, or are you playing with the chemistry? I never got this memo and a search suggests otherwise:

https://magnesol.com/six-enemies-of-oil-salt/ https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#148
post #25

The absolute pinnacle of cooking video chefs today has to be J. Kenji Lopez-Alt[0], in large part because of his use of first person view. He straps a go-pro to this head and you see what he sees while he cooks. There's no cuts or retakes (unless he's waiting for something to cook or gets interrupted by his kids). There's no swaps. And it's all real- he's cooking dinner for his family. And it doesn't always go perfec…

I watch a lot of cooking YouTube and Kenji is great, but I'd also put Chef John's Food Wishes and America's Test Kitchen up there.

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#149
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure what else you expect? Cooking takes a long-ass time, it is a day-long full-time affair. You can hide the real time by doing prep, outright fully preparing parts of dishes agreed of time, having multiple people or buying premade but someone is putting in those hours somewhere.

Me and my wife cook meals with fresh ingredients every night and it takes between 20 and 40 minutes. Do you order takeout for every single meal? Did your family spend every day cooking all day growing up? I'm curious how someone can have this take.

It really depends what you’re making. For example, some cuisines like asian food can take a very long time if you make it from scratch. Then there’s also a matter of balance, cooking a steak and sautéing some veggies can take minutes, at the same time if you’re trying to get a healthy balance of protein, carbs and veggies in all of your meals, then it can take forever unless you meal prep.

An added component is how many meals we are talking about. Making breakfast, lunch and dinner can be very painful unless you meal prep or get quick and easy items (readymade salads, overnight oats, frozen food etc.)

Re: Are cooking videos making us better cooks?

#150

Most cookbooks tend to be like the meme about drawing an owl [0]. Mostly because the people making the instructions make assumptions about Stuff One Should Just Know and skip those bits in the instructions. On video you can actually see the consistency of things as they are cooked and maybe even hear what the process sounds like (frying spices in oil has a distinct sound if the oil is at the correct temperature). You…

> Most cookbooks tend to be like the meme about drawing an owl [0]. Mostly because the people making the instructions make assumptions about Stuff One Should Just Know and skip those bits in the instructions. You may wish to look at cookbooks produced by America's Test Kitchen. They try to create instructions that are clear and easy to follow. This is done via a 'beta testing' program which you can join: > As a recip…

Watch their videos. Read their magazines. Happily pay them a $100/yr for the education. But throw their books (especially their "every recipe from the show for the past X years" books) in the trash. Honestly, their books are horrid. There's a marked qualitative difference between the writing of the recipes in the magazines and the writing of the recipes in the books. Dan Souza is editor-in-chief of the magazines which explains why the magazine is so good. I swear they outsource their book writing recipes and photography to failed college essay writers & photographers they found on Fiverr. An individual recipe in the books is all over the place. You'd think by the 12th edition they would have nailed the formatting or the writing style but it seems to just be a terrible copy & paste job from one year to the next. Their digital editions are even worse with broken formatting, unsearchable indexes, and bloated images.
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