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Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you cook the tomato too long you lose the tomato flavor[1]. My Italian-American neighborhood has a sauce competition at the community center every year, and the winners never do an all day cook. [1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-ame...
Interesting! I’ll have to try a cooking the recipe for shorter. I am a bit skeptical since my family’s sauce is the best in the world already :)
Forever soup isn't new, of course. Poor families do it to cheaply make long lasting meals. My late maternal grandmother used to have a pot of forever soup on the stove, and she would put whatever she had on hand in. Spare ribs, check. Leftover veg, check. McDonalds fries, gross, but check.
Of course, my grandmother was a farmer all her life before I was born, so she was always making far too much food (nobody ever left hungry was a mark of pride) but it took some growing up before I really contemplated the kind of life that joke would have come from.
And yes, always had soup going.
This was something I was genuinely excited to try while in Bangkok, took a Grab across town to make it happen, but it was it is honestly not good, the Google reviews seem to coincide with the consensus that while the concept is cool, the execution isn't and it tastes very meh. I do wonder if there’s some pluralistic ignorance going on, where travelers convince themselves it must be amazing because everyone else seems…
I would eat it out of respect for the craft and the values that are being preserved.
Sure, the soup is good ... but is it the best they could have after 52 years? By committing to maintaining one pot for so long, they pay the opportunity cost of not being able to explore related long-lived methods. If there's a different recipe that surpasses this one after only one year of simmering, they'll never find it.
At first I thought this might be related to the secretary problem, but of course if after 50 years of recipe B, you have the option of switching back to recipe A if it's better.
Forever soup isn't new, of course. Poor families do it to cheaply make long lasting meals. My late maternal grandmother used to have a pot of forever soup on the stove, and she would put whatever she had on hand in. Spare ribs, check. Leftover veg, check. McDonalds fries, gross, but check.
One of my grandfather's favorite jokes whenever we visited was to yell across the house that guests had arrived, and to add some more water to the soup. Of course, my grandmother was a farmer all her life before I was born, so she was always making far too much food (nobody ever left hungry was a mark of pride) but it took some growing up before I really contemplated the kind of life that joke would have come from. A…
One of the speculations as to how life was created on this planet: stable environments hosting hydrothermal vents over long periods of time. Could perpetual stews over decades act in the same manner?
Maybe! Let's try it in a sterile environment, a few million of such stews over a few millions of years.
I've gone without a fridge for 8 years now and do something kind of like this usually - I'll cook a pot of food and then steam or boil it again after ~24 hours to reset the clock on it rotting. It's handy for things like eating a whole chicken or other large soup. I switch between being home and on the road a lot so my pot just comes with me and can be re-cooked on my car stove or my home stove. I tend to cook or re-…
I guess you've been doing this for a while, and presumably it's been working, plus I know that historically this is how people lived. But be aware it's not risk free.
A suggestion: A pressure cooker - not for the pressure, but because they can be sealed. Heat the food, then let it cool without opening it. Kind of a less secure form of canning.
I think there is an optimization question buried here. In tech lots of people have experience with A/B tests, which function on the assumption that you have a stream of fresh sessions which are independent. Multi-armed bandits, Thompson sampling etc give us frameworks for generalizing this towards finding the best option among a finite set of candidates, if goodness is fixed over time. This is kinda the opposite end…