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After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

nytimes.com

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Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#131

Post by __turbobrew__ »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #88
AlbertCory wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually pointed an IR thermometer at it? On mine (which I sold), it was 900 at the back and 600 at the front. It was just too much trouble. A pizza steel in a kitchen oven, preheated, works very well; maybe not as good as a 700F oven but WAY easier. And 5 minutes instead of 1 minute is not a big sacrifice.

Hey, this is a great post. I have read similar complaints about Ooni pizza ovens, where it is very difficult to achieve the 900F temp and impossible in the front. Great point about 5 mins vs 1 min. Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)

You cannot get the same leoparding on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with a 5 minute pizza. If you are talking about normies than probably no, they cannot tell the difference but if you are detail oriented you can tell the difference.

My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Even with all that thermal mass I find the later pizzas take longer to cook due to the steel cooling off. You just cant put enough energy into a home oven to match the energy it looses during cooking.

Another tip is when the steel is maximally heated I find the rate of cooking on the bottom of the pizza is faster than on the top so I also turn the broiler onto max after I put in the pizza so the toppings get cooked at the same rate as the bottom of the crust. A delicate balance which requires continuous feedback.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#132

Post by swarnie »

quirino wrote: post #35
BariumBlue wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.

Can you suggest a couple of channels? I've never played RuneScape but those videos sound right up my alley.

Two "extreme one chunk" style accounts in which the creators are or should be heavily medicated.

Verf - https://www.youtube.com/@VerfRS

Limpwurt - https://www.youtube.com/@Limpwurt

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#133

Post by jononor »

greggsy wrote: post #78
shalmanese wrote: post #3

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

“… evaluated 67,391 burrito-selling establishments…” How does this even work? If a local or federal government attempted to do this type of survey, they would end up having to pay McKinsey seven figures just to plan the whole operation..

Hmm. If one spends just 60 seconds on each, it would be a 6 month full time gig. Barely enough time to look at info/photos on Google maps and make a few quick judgement calls. Of course one could maybe reduce this of them by setting a threshold on their rating, maybe also number of reviews added last 12 months, etc. But yeah - lots of labor to actually evaluate thousands of anything. Months possibly.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#134

Post by hoseja »

pbj1968 wrote: post #104
solveit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What went wrong?

Complete indifference to food and water that led to fainting and probable heat stroke. Extreme nausea. All mitigated now with medication and forced hydration. Not fun.

Doesn't sound too serious.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#135

Post by rightbyte »

UIUC_06 wrote: post #113
throwaway2037 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because you need a fryer What? There are many, many YouTube videos explaining how to make "fast food" style french fries (double fried, and all that) at home, without a fryer.

My air fryer makes decent fries, using only olive oil as a fat. It did take some practice to get it right. Are they as good as deep-fat fried? No, but they're crisp on the outside and tender on the inside. OK, you all want to hear this, you know you do: =============== Start preheating the air fryer to 400F. Slice the potatoes. Drop them in a bowl of water, swish them around and drain off the water, and fill the bowl…

For how long do you need to dry them? Are we talking hours here or like 15 minutes?

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#136

Post by rightbyte »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #114
xanderlewis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was at least all in cups, it’d be somewhat more forgivable. I’ve even seen recipes using amounts of flour measured in a combination of cups and tablespoons! Actually, maybe that doesn’t sound as mad to everyone as it does to me… Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.

Sticks of butter are also labeled in tablespoons here. One stick is 1/2c, and the paper it is wrapped in also has markings for 1-8 tbsp. So it's pretty common to see that in US recipes as well. As far as flour goes, it's incredibly common to have both cups and measuring spoons in a US kitchen. So if a recipe says "1 cup and 2 tablespoons" or something, it's really easy to measure that. By contrast, I hate recipes whi…

When doing sensitive receips like some breads you need gram level accuracy to get the right result. The density vary too much.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#137

Post by throwaway2037 »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #131
throwaway2037 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this is a great post. I have read similar complaints about Ooni pizza ovens, where it is very difficult to achieve the 900F temp and impossible in the front. Great point about 5 mins vs 1 min. Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)

You cannot get the same leoparding on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with a 5 minute pizza. If you are talking about normies than probably no, they cannot tell the difference but if you are detail oriented you can tell the difference. My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Even with all that thermal mass I find the later pizzas take longer to…

Real question: I see a lot of YouTube videos bragging about "leoparding" (spots on the bottom). Does it really matter? My point: Can you cook a pizza that tastes just as good _without_ "leoparding"?

    > My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour.
Sheesh. This is my second complaint about endless YouTube videos about the "perfect pizza at home": What is the carbon footprint per pizza? (Exception: I can forgive anyone who has a magical setup that is 100% electric and has solar panels / wind turbines to supply it! Also: Hat tip to any of the crazies that are producing their own green hydrogen at home via electrolysis for their hydrogen-gas-fired pizza oven!)

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#138

Post by throwaway2037 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #110
throwaway2037 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this is a great post. I have read similar complaints about Ooni pizza ovens, where it is very difficult to achieve the 900F temp and impossible in the front. Great point about 5 mins vs 1 min. Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)

Thanks, you know, I think the brick oven pizza IS better. Yes, you probably could taste the difference. Whether the 5 min is dryer: maybe, could be. My decision to sell my Ooni, after about 6 tries, was because my actual results were nowhere close to a pizzeria's, and way more trouble than my kitchen oven's. Since you can't just open the door as you can with the kitchen oven, you have much less tolerance for error. I…

Great follow-up. Thanks! I never saw anyone comment like this: "you have much less tolerance for error". That is the key to understanding Ooni vs kitchen oven. Brilliant.

Have you tried Adam Ragusea's NYC pizza recipe? He gives a lot of sensible advice about how to get a great pie from a shitty kitchen oven!

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#139

Post by throwaway2037 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #87
carlosjobim wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paradoxically, it's the fast food staples that are most difficult to do at home – because you need a fryer. Haute cuisine is no problem making at home, because fine dining is not based on using fryers. It can't be made with restaurant speed nor quantity, but you can get the same quality at home.

> because you need a fryer What? There are many, many YouTube videos explaining how to make "fast food" style french fries (double fried, and all that) at home, without a fryer.

LATE EDIT: To be clear, I mean frying using oil -- not air frying.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#140

Post by superhuzza »

MeImCounting wrote: post #119
Workaccount2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also why I don't like eating out much anymore. Every restaurant just leans so hard on heavily salting fats to make their food taste good. I'd rather cook myself now where I can actually taste flavors and feel good, rather than just having the primal "mmm good food" button bashed in my lizard brain and feeling like garbage afterwards.

This comments and many of the others on this thread strike me as written by people who have either never worked at a real restaurant and/or tend to order bland and fatty food (eat like a toddler) by default when they patronize restaurants. This is fine but really not reflective of good restaurants and the majority of the food they serve.

What do you mean? Even in the linked article, the food critics consistently pointed out that restaurants make food very rich so that it's more appealing. And how they suffered from eating so much rich food.
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