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Based Cooking

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Re: Based Cooking

#431

Post by 8note »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #160
hardwaregeek wrote: post #111

Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe: - There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it. - Pound with what…

On this subject, can an American please tell me what a spoonful is? There is a great video series on youtube, with his recipes online, but all measurements are spoonful: https://www.ethanchlebowski.com/cooking-techniques-recipes/p... Spoons can vary in size, so is it a tablespoon or a teaspoon? When dealing with spices you'll be adding 3 times the amount if you go with tablespoon interpretation so it'd be a pretty bi…

I would generally consider it to be a heaping teaspoon.

Teaspoon where you have a bit of a pyramid on top

Re: Based Cooking

#432

Post by 8note »

beeforpork wrote: post #245
tayo42 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really you just cook to your taste. Cooking isn't a science experiment. Like step 5 says, taste it and adjust. The foods already cooked by the time your adding the spices

Bad advice not only for beginners, but also for any dough recipe, because amounts often need to be exact for a dough to work properly. In this case, cooking really is a science experiment. Also, I do not like 'salt to taste', particularly for raw egg or raw meat mixtures. Just tell me the amount of salt, whynot?

The only problem with salt to taste is that you need to be taught how to salt.

An additional issue with salting to a specific amount is when you're reducing a sauce. The saltiness of the final dish will depend both on the amount of salt you add and the amount of liquid that boiled off

Re: Based Cooking

#433

Post by throwawaymanbot »

curtainsforus wrote: post #14
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #12

I was just looking up some recipes the other day and my goodness, does this website feel like a breath of fresh air. Today's web just utterly buries even the simplest content underneath a mountain of shit, whether it's ads or fancy banners or a long-winded speech about god-knows-what before getting to the point. Kudos to whoever made this.

It was made by a linux youtuber who occasionally (often) complains about bloat, the the point that 'bloat' became an overused meme by commenters on his channel. Looks like he practices what he preaches!

If you see some of the items on his personal peertube feed, I sincerely hope he does not practice what he preaches. looks a bit #alt-right to me.

Re: Based Cooking

#434

Post by userbinator »

andrepd wrote: post #294
userbinator wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what political positions have to do with cooking. Then again, I'm not a subscriber to this whole new-age identity politics wokeness mess.

Well surely the author is the one pushing identity politics into his videos about technology, complete with an obsession about "modernist degenerate marxist egalitarian values" (I'm paraphrasing)

I don't care what other things the author does. I came for the recipes and that's all that matters.

It used to be pretty common to find independent sites that had all sorts of interesting information and if you dug further you'd find the author has very extremist political or religious views, which you mostly ignored. Now it's all gone or replaced with a fake politically-correct "personality" out of fear of offending anyone.

Re: Based Cooking

#435

Post by UncleMeat »

jfengel wrote: post #410
UncleMeat wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see this both ways. For a lot of ingredients this can be false precision. That fresh thing of dried ginger is going to be 5x more flavorful than the jar that has been sitting in your cabinet for two years. Saying "1 tsp" doesn't actually produce consistent results and can actually discourage people from adding more if they need it. I think it is good to have these precise amounts but also good to tell people wh…

Halving or doubling is entirely feasible, though unless you're experienced go with 1x the first time you make the recipe. In this case the ambiguity is a factor of 3X, the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Or possibly more: given the quantities of the recipe he may mean some kind of personal dedicated spice spoon that could be around 1/2 tsp. In which case a tablespoon would be a factor of 6x, which is…

If I saw "spoon", I'd assume that they meant "the actual spoon I use to eat cereal in my drawer" rather than either tsp or tbsp. The point is that the recipe author doesn't know what the right amount of that spice is. They can't know because the spice sitting in your cabinet is almost certainly much less fresh than what they have in the kitchen.

Spices tend to be flexible outside a few exceptions. I'd wager that you can just wildly change almost any spice amount in almost any recipe before you've ever made it and and have any sort of calibrated taste it'll turn out fine. Salt is a way bigger risk here and not many recipes give precise salt measurements.

Re: Based Cooking

#436

Post by hnick »

Frondo wrote: post #349
hnick wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking is definitely one place that I think the saying "strong opinions, weakly held" is a great motto. Like I have my way of doing things... and it's the best because I have my own taste profile... but I'll try your way to see if I'm wrong.

Maybe if such comments were heavily moderated (or edited in-place a la the exile ) -- cooking is one of the things where even otherwise very reasonable people I've known have gone off the deep end over what seems absurdly trivial to me. Things like a bagel "toasted" vs "just warmed," dishes that have a variety of regional variations (e.g. a lot of slavic dishes like borsch or stuffed cabbage rolls where I've gotten y…

Yeah the authenticity thing especially gets a lot of people going online. I check in and catch up on r/cooking once or twice a week and there are some very strongly held opinions. The funny thing is, the one that gains traction in a post can be either side of the issue depending on the time of day that it's posted. Reddit's voting system carries so much momentum.

Re: Based Cooking

#437

Post by dmitriid »

throwmamatrain wrote: post #394
cgriswald wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing at obtuse instructions with no prior knowledge when there are many variables in play is not experimenting and learning from it is nearly impossible. You have to have some baseline knowledge to draw on, whether you’re a total beginner or just new to the dish. Imaging cooking was putting raw food in a box and a meal comes out of the other end. Imagine that box has a series of dials each ranging from 0-100. You…

I guess it's a good thing that cooking is nothing like this painful thought experiment! :D Failure is ok.

I'm an adult with a busy life. I literally don't have time for failures with food. Except on a weekend. And even then I'd prefer not to fail.

Recipes should have all the ingredients in measurable quantities. All steps should be laid out in proper order, with proper technique, times and temperatures explained.

Sure. Once you're past the beginner stage, you can just glance at the description and figure out what you need. But you have to pass that beginner stage first.

Re: Based Cooking

#438

Post by bourgoin »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #257
bourgoin wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, the stroganoff recipe simply says to cook 'strips of beef' in a skillet. There are some cuts which you are not going to be very happy with the result if you do this with. I don't see how REMOVING information benefits either a beginner or an experienced cook.

To many people, myself included, the point of cooking isn't about producing a particular end result as consistently as possible. It's a unique form of expression, like painting or writing. Of course, it's useful to see what other people are doing so you can expand your own skillset and create your own twist on what they were doing, and this is where recipes come in handy. But I don't _want_ to be told exactly how to…

I understand your perspective. I love cooking as well and I like to tweak recipes and try to never make a dish exactly the same way twice.

There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will.

I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence.

Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.

Re: Based Cooking

#439

Post by eyelidlessness »

UncleMeat wrote: post #334
eyelidlessness wrote: post #153

What is “based” cooking? It’s not explained on the site. A web search obviously leads to [something-]based cooking. I was hoping that there was something to this about minimizing nonsense around online recipes, but the first one I read (stroganoff) had ingredients in the instructions not included in the ingredients list. I’m not trying to trash this, I just don’t know what it’s trying to accomplish.

It is a "hide your powerlevel" thing. "Based" is a term that is often used in alt-right circles (and 4chan, and some other places too). It isn't exclusive to these communities, but using it signals to readers what one's political beliefs (or at least community associations) are. The author of this page has some... questionable beliefs. And the use of this term is part of signaling that without sticking "a fascist-adj…

Oh got it! This is actually helpful thank you. I’m usually quick to recognize their code but it was so inundating the last few years I couldn’t keep up.

Re: Based Cooking

#440

Post by brobinson »

SilverRed wrote: post #129
brobinson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_B#Artistry

This is not at all what the OP link is using the word to mean. "Based" has become a meme word to mean good, agreeable, against the norms, and often controversial.

Imagine disagreeing with The BasedGod about his own word. lol
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