I've had this conversation with people many times, a consequence is that some of them have no idea what caramelised onions actually are - they think it's the state you get to after 10 mins.
Thinly slice 10 onions, dump them in a big pot with some oil on a medium heat for 10-15 minutes stirring frequently. Then turn the heat down to low and cook for a further 45-60 mins, check on it and stir every 10 mins or so. When it gets dry, add water and use it to deglaze the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. It's finished when the onions are a deep brown colour and their volume has reduced to about 1/6th of what it was to begin with. Store in fridge, enjoy with every meal in the following few days.
The real issue is simply a vague use of the word "caramelize," not that they expect you to be at the stove a half-hour longer than they say.
The vast majority of recipes that say "caramelize" simply mean "cook until softened and sweet." No, technically the onions won't be caramelized after 15 minutes, but very few recipes actually want you to caramelize the onions.
Take an Italian pasta sauce. As an Italian who has cooked (and eaten) across Italy, I can say that there are nearly zero sauces where the onions are supposed to be caramelized. Yet people routinely use the word "caramelize" when describing cooking the onions for a pasta sauce.
The wrong reaction to reading that word would be to say "these damn recipe writers don't know how long that takes, dinner's going to be late kids, I guess it's going to be 45 minutes before I can add the next ingredient." The right reaction would be to cook the onions for the given time, until they are soft and translucent, and forget the word "caramelize."
The confusion comes in the color versus the process. I've seen some recipes call for "cook down onions until translucent and caramel in color". This is the most accurate definition of what most recipes want when asking for caramelized onions.
However the true use of the word "Caramelized Onions" are onions that have gone through the cooking process of caramelization. This process requires three things: sugar, heat, and time. Just like making candy caramels, you are performing the same process to onions. This makes true caramelized onions actually sweet, with savory notes throughout.
Most recipes bastardize the word "Caramelize". They tell you to caramelize onions, when in reality you don't actually want caramelized onions (which in many cases would actually ruin the recipe), instead they want softened onions with browned to a light caramel color, which is a completely different thing.
This is like a recipe needing turkey but asking for chicken. Like sure, it will probably work, but it is clearly different and not entirely substitute.
French Onion soup is the most common use of real caramelized onions, which is sweet and savory soup. It could not be made with browned onions, that would ruin it. Coq-a-vin is another popular recipe that uses caramelized onions, which complements the prominent wine flavors of the dish into a sweet, savory, gamey (usually made with game hens), and earthy delight of a meal. The caramelized onions are what pull that dish together and critical part of the recipe. This meal takes a long time to cook, similar to a gourmet version of American potroast.
Real French Onion dip, made with onions and not a prepared packet, is another nice dish with real carmelized onions. Alton Brown has a good recipe for the basic version: https://altonbrown.com/recipes/onion-dip-from-scratch/ Note he's honest about how long it takes ("Total Time: 2 hours", step 3 doesn't have a time estimate but it's about right overall).
It isn't haute cuisine, but for something you might serve for a Superbowl party it's at least pointing in that direction. It can stand up to taking a moment to savor and inhale it, moreso than most of the rest of what might be served up there. Pair with the bizarrely tasty Costco Kettle Krinkle Cut potato chips.
This sounds like the same problem as recipes that call for "browning the meat" which I tend to read as "sear the meat" because e.g. mince will brown up within seconds but the searing is what actually gives you the flavour.
I've found you really do need to use sweet Onions like Texas 1015s or Vidalias if you want good, quick(er) carmelized onions. Adding sugar is not the same thing at all as having the sugar grown into the onion itself!
Adding water early on in the cooking process to steam cook and soften the onions really speeds things up, too. (See Lan Lam's YouTube video on cooking carmelized onions. I use a slightly different method, but she got me on the track of adding water early, which really does help...)
They're not lying, they're just using the word in a more imprecise manner.
Recipe authors have probably been using the word "caramelize" to mean "soften and turn brown and sweet" for longer than food nerds have been nitpicking the exact definition of caramelize.
This irritates me (I know it's a silly thing to be irritated by). I'm far from a food nerd. I'm not a cook. I rely on following recipes to turn out decent dishes (I'm good at following recipes).
It would have been nice if someone had clued people like me in to their special definition of the word before now. I'd have saved a whole lot of time and frustration.
But now I'm presented with the other problem: when a recipe calls for caramelized onions, how am I supposed to know if they mean caramelized onions or "cook until translucent"?
If you followed the recipe as written without overthinking it, you would have had translucent onions after ten minutes and a complete and tasty dish.
You aren't supposed to interpret a recipe. You are supposed to follow it. If you have enough skill, practice, or ability to order pizza, THEN is the right time to make decisions about whether this recipe actually needs REAL caramelized onions.
Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.
I do follow the recipes without overthinking them, because I don't have the skill required to make judgement calls. But also, I know that any time a recipe gives is highly suspect, so don't judge if something is done based on times in recipes.
So when a recipe says to "carmelize onions", that's what I do. To do anything else is to deviate from what the recipe is plainly telling me.
> Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.
True. But the fact that this is true means it's essentially impossible to follow a recipe without some degree of interpretation.
I'm just irritated that there was a secret definition to "carmelize onions" that nobody clued me in to.
All of this is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I'll get over this minor irritation. :)
Exactly. I'm no cook, I'm barely an amateur cook, and I have absolutely no idea what "caramelized onions" means. Turned into caramel? I'm pretty sure you can get onions brown in 10 minutes, though. It probably won't be caramelized, it might be burned, but it's brown. I remember brown, dry onions. I'm sure caramelized ones are better. In fact, I think my wife once did something with onions that made them very sweet. I guess that was caramelized? But that's not what most recipes need.
To be honest, there's a lot of these sort of words that are often used in recipes where I have no idea what they mean. A basic cook book to just explain these sort of things, would be fantastic. Just the different ways to properly cook onions, mushrooms, and other ingredients, and what those techniques are called. And warn for ways that those names might be misused: "If a recipe says to caramelize onions in 10 minutes, don't caramelize them, do this other thing instead." I think a book like that would be really helpful to a lot of people.
How to Cook Everything, I'm Just Here For the Food, and On Food and Cooking are my big three. The first one for the breadth of recipes, the second to learn a bit more about the physics and chemistry of cooking, and the third for the truly deep dive into everything we know about food.
Then Modernist Cuisine just for the pictures. Actually I learned a bunch when Mhyrvold spoke at my company- we talked about how to make BBQ ribs. His suggestion: sous vide, then immerse in liquid nitrogen, then deep fry.
Ruhlman's 20 was that book for me. From that one book I feel like I can dissect and understand so many core concepts that I very rarely follow recipes any longer, I just skim for the key aspects and wing it, substituting with what I have available, and a reasonable intuition for when I can't do so. Am grateful I made that investment (reading it, making most of the recipes).
You're probably right, but it still results in people not knowing what caramelised onions are - which is (or should be) a crime, because they're lovely.
I don't recall seeing instructions to caramelise in pasta sauce recipes, that's usually "until starting to brown", same with curries.. "Until translucent" for risotto.
What I'm really talking about is... Let's have a look... First result for "caramelised onion quiche" says cook onions for 15 mins. Doesn't work!
Luckily, in German, there are three completely different words for preparing onions in a pan:
1.) Anschwitzen, literally "sweating up", means putting them in a pan on low heat for around 10 minutes until they are translucent ("glasig", literally "glassy"). This is how to get a starter for many sauces, and is the standard way to prepare onions for many, many meals and sauces (e.g. a standard tomato sauce). They should not turn brown, as this would for example ruin the color and flavor of white or light sauces - caramelized onions have a kind of "heavy" flavor.
2.) Karamelisieren, "caramelize", which is the meaning described in this article.
3.) Rösten, "roast", which means frying the onions with a bit a flour until they are crispy.
I am sure that Germany has many more words on how to describe cooked onions. Likewise, we have at least a dozen words in the English language for how to cook onions, that also translate directly to the German oddly enough. Unfortunately people who write on-line recipes have latched on to the caramelized onion notation and are not particularly explicit in what they actually want. Having gone through four years of culinary training, I now look at recipes on-line with a very critical eye and much like how you can identify the copy & paste code and architecture of a junior developer, you can also identify the recipe borrowing and construction of people who are better at blogging than they are at cooking.
In English we call these "sweated", "caramelised", and "frenched", respectively. I'm not sure why the phrase "sweat" doesn't get much use outside of pro kitchens, it's a useful term.
>The real issue is simply a vague use of the word "caramelize,"
The linked article gives a few examples where there was no vagueness: The recipes described the visual state that the onion should be in when caramelized, and it corresponded to the ~45 minute process, not the ~10 minutes the recipe claimed it would take.
I've had this issue myself with a meal kit service that said caramelized and showed a picture of the ~45 minute result but the overall prep & cook time for the entire meal, as stated in the recipe, was only 30 minutes. (In general meal prep kits seem to drastically understate the amount of prep time. At best, it might correspond to the amount of time it would take a skilled chef to chop and slice and peel everything, not the average consumer who subscribed on the basis of easy 15-30-45 minute meals)
The article confused things by talking about "caramelizing" but as you say that's a rare instruction in recipes. However, the point remains: what recipes much more frequently call for is to cook until "translucent" or "golden brown" and those times are wildly underestimated in published recipes.
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.
Yeah that works on my Viking stove with my competent pans, and is basically how I do it, but people with shitty stoves, i.e. the majority, have burners with hot spots and/or mismatched pan widths or even too thin pan bottoms. I suspect that's where the constant stirring/too short time business might originate.
I never realized how widespread this was until I brought dishes to group meals (as in Slow Food) and people complimented me for my caramelized onions.
Oh please, just stop! This elitism around caramelized onions is just absurd. I've caramelized onions on the shittiest of shitty electric stoves using the cheapest of cheap pans Walmart sells. It's not difficult and doesn't take any special equipment or skills - just time.
Most people don't want that though most of the time. In 99.9% of applications fully caramelized onions simply aren't nearly as pleasant as onions that have been cooked until soft and very slightly caramelized.
Yeah, same here - I've used the cheapest pans it was possible to buy when I was a student, on the worst ceramic stove it was viable for my university accommodation to provide. For something like this where precise responsive heat control is unnecessary anything is OK.
(Making actual caramel, OTOH, that's far easier on gas or induction.)
Let me tell you a story. If you go off road just about anywhere in Mexico that's dry enough and interesting enough, and it's possible to go slow enough to have enough clearance, you will find cheap 2WD rear drive cars that are already there. I have seen some amazing accomplishments from these vehicles that almost no US driver would dream of taking off road. Still, I wouldn't trade my 23 yo lifted 4wd truck for them at all. Over time, I'm going to come out ahead, there's simple no dispute.
I don't doubt that you could caramelize onions on the shittiest stoves possible, probably you could do it, with enough patience and care, with a magnifying glass on a hot summer day. But the OP was emphasizing that it's really no big deal, you don't even have to pay attention. I at least have great equipment, but I've stayed in dozens of AirBnBs that didn't have great equipment, same with friends and family. Got to pay attention then.
The idea that there is no difference is completely ridiculous.
Now I can cook some range of dishes reasonably well, but when I was a student long ago I was very much a beginner - and it still worked out alright.
If you happen to already have a big 4WD truck which you need for other things then obviously it makes sense to use that anywhere it might give you an advantage. Sometimes that advantage turns out to be pretty marginal in practical terms but for you, because you're used to to handling the terrain with ease, switching to a crappy 2WD car would feel like a massive downgrade.
Another kitchen analogy, some people spend their whole lives chopping things with a blunt knife. When I offer to help out and realise this state of affairs my first reaction is "how the hell can anyone chop tomatoes with this?!" ... but of course they can, it's just slower and more annoying.
I disagree completely! There are preferences of course but for instance US Southwestern cuisine with the burnt flavors ("charred") appeal to a wide swath of people and the French AFAICT from a lot of visits can't stand it.
If you read Julia Child she is emphatic that onions should almost never be browned.
Guess what? I brown onions in my French recipes (rustic, eh?), and I char my peppers. I would submit that la comida de la gente is likely more plebian than fucking elitist French cuisine, no?
Really? Our induction stove very clearly has two concentric circles of different radii that get hot, and nothing else. If you use cast iron and vary the power slowly you won't notice, but it's very obvious with thinner pots and when you control heat quickly (which is a delight to be able to do in the first place -- yay induction.)
It's induction, not electric. This happens with all my cast iron pans. Easiest way to see it is to boil a thin layer of water mixed with a little hand dishwashing liquid in it. There are clearly two rings where cavities are formed more easily, thus there are two circles of peaking foam.
Oh neat. I have a thermador star burner gas range that makes a wonderful five point star shape oil pattern on a cast iron using a similar technique. I can produce this effect by applying a very thin sheen of high smoke oil point at high heat.
No idea if that’s better for cooking than concentric rings, but it looks really cool.
Are you sure that's an induction element? Induction elements don't get hot, only the pan does. Easy way to tell is - does the element switch only turn on when a pan is on top of it?
One minor clarification because it is important: the elements do get hot, but that isn't the mechanism which they use to transfer heat. The element gets hot because it is touching a super hot pan which will transfer some of its heat.
If you want to know how I found this out: I wasn't using my brain and touched the element after spilling something on it. I received a fairly bad burn as a result. I am saying this because saying "the element doesn't get hot" can put the wrong idea in someone's head.
Yup! I recently made some, and it had been a while since I had made them, and I had forgotten just how long it takes.
Also - if you like oninos, make sure to try 'creamed onions' (carmelized oninos in a creme sauce.
Also, if you like french onion soup - use a french onion soup mix packet as a rub on chicken and pork.
Finally, if youre anything like me - I typically never have to wear deoderant, unless I eat RED/PURPLE onions. If I eat these Ill have BO the following day.
Its also a good indicator when I eat something, if I have BO the next day its a signal that what I ate the previous day was made with red onions, even if it doesnt look like it. (Tikka masala is an example) -- I think its the sulfites in the red onions that cause this.
Well, I followed this method and the onions took 3 hours to get to deep brown. This leads me to “Hofstader’s Law of Caramelized Onions:” Onions always take 3 times as long to caramelize as you think they’re going to take, even when you take Hostader’s Law into account.
After looking at the recipes in question, I suspect that some of these writers are merely using the term Caramelized in a loose, informal (or, if you prefer, "technically-incorrect") sense.
When what they more-precisely meant is lightly softened, translucent - a state of onionhood used in no shortage of recipes as an intermediary step during the cooking process.
The writers are therefore perhaps guilty of casual syntax misuse, as opposed to deliberate or wilful mistruth.
I find softened onions preferably for a number of uses. Caramelized onions can be too sweet, and soggy/limp. I've even found that leaving a trace of crunch is better in many cases (eg beef bolognese).
But don't listen to me, I've never really figured out the difference between cooked yellow, white, and sweet onions, and just buy whatever is available and has the least mold and soft spots. Even red onions, once cooked, are pretty much the same to me.
I've very often made it with red onions (or half and half red vs white/yellow). It's delicious and always been a success.
I've used a version of this recipe [0] which explicitly says "red or yellow onions". It's also honest on the cooking time. I'd agree with its main warning, that making your own nice stock from bones really improves the flavour. Doesn't have to be beef stock. But I've also used stock cubes in the past.
Not even close - sweet onions (like Texas 1015s, Vidalias, or Mauis) may be whitish, but they have noticeably more sugar embedded into the structure/tissues of the onion itself. Sweet onions are not white (or yellow) onions, or vice versa. FWIW, Vidalias are a bit less crisp than the others, which helps if you're really after carmelizing, but I find 1015s are the "sweet spot", so to speak, of softenability and enough fiber to hold up so they don't turn to mush.
Red onions are a different flavor profile altogether, and best for some (not all!) Mediterranean or Mexican dishes, or smoked salmon (NOT lox - yuck!) on a bagel with cream cheese and capers.
they taste differently from each other. some are sweeter and some are less sweet, due to having less sugar. Some are sharper or more bitter than others.
This is so clearly true I wonder if the author intentionally “misunderstood” the situation so they could rant. Bonus points for commenters years later making the same “mistake”.
No, they don’t really mean caramelization. No, no one else cares.
It's not clear to everyone. Until I read that comment, I had exactly zero idea of that. When a recipe says "carmelized", I foolishly thought it meant "carmelized".
This is exactly it. We don't have a short snappy term for onion where you have fried it just enough to burn off the harsh chemicals, so recipe writers went for "caramelize" instead of a clunky construction like "lightly softened, translucent".
There is a term for cooking onions like that: it is "sautee". That specifies the method cooking bbut the "lightly softened, translucent" level is what everybody assumes.
The solution to confusion might be contact everyone using "caramelize" to verify they mean that or sauteing.
I'm just sad that they spoil perfectly good fresh, juicy, crunchy onions.
They call it 'caramelized' but don't even put any caramel in. Which is probably good because actual caramelized onions would be gross too. But why not just be honest and call them burnt onions? Or "onions with all the flavor and texture removed"?
Personally, I find those recipes quick enough because I simply opt not to ruin the onions. They don't need any cooking. Just chop 'em and drop 'em on the finished product for a zesty flavorful crunch that you'd be missing out on if you actually followed the recipe directions.
This is different. If you learn enough about Linux, you can install Arch in 15-20minutes no problem. Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.
You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim. It's just not possible to have a good outside temperature and a good inside temperature no matter how you cook it if you only have that amount of time. They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.
You simply aren't going to speed up the chemical reactions that happen during cooking. Even if you do find a way, your result will often be different or the result of using ready-made ingredients at the store. (I can buy frozen caramelized onions, for example).
it also depends on the cut and what you cook too. If you only stir-fry chickens that has been diced small with high heat, (I think?) you can achieve it 3-4 minutes, however that requires extreme precision and I think also require good utensils with precise heating. Cooking it longer, ex 7-8 minutes with lower heat usually bring better result and far easier.
Deep-fry or boiling? I'm unsure. Steaming one? Surely you can't
> You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim. It's just not possible to have a good outside temperature and a good inside temperature no matter how you cook it if you only have that amount of time. They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.
Some of this is probably a difference between home and commercial kitchen equipment.
I know my stove doesn't have the same kind of heat output that a commercial stove would, let alone specialty equipment like pizza ovens or wok burners. And lots of home range hoods are awful for ventilation, which makes it even more impractical to cook at a high heat.
It's not just about the heat output, although that does make a difference (cooking edit: thin* steak on a weak electric stove is hell). There is no amount of heat that will penetrate the inner part of the chicken while not burning the outside cooking only 3-4 minutes per side (unless you reduce the thickness of the chicken via butterflying, as another commenter pointed out, but you don't want to always to do that).
I'm mostly thinking outside the scope of just this one example. Even good recipes have a lot of variability in cooking time. The differences between how hot people cook at home and how hot they cook in commercial spaces is one of the ones that's hardest to control for (unless you want to remodel your kitchen...)
OK, I'll admit butterflied chicken can be cooked that quickly. But basically all other forms of chicken take longer. For curry for example, even though I cut it into small pieces and it could be cooked only 8 minutes since you're going to cook it in the paste later, it's just not going to brown properly and the flavour is not going to be as good. Normal breasts or thighs take longer as well.
It's been a while since I made a meat-based curry (vegetarian now), but from when I was cooking with meat regularly there were a few things that helped hugely with that - hot pan (common theme, heh), and cooking in batches/not overcrowding the pan. You _definitely_ can't brown chicken for 6 portions of curry in one pan in 6-8 minutes, but you _can_ brown it in 2 (maybe 3) batches in 6 minutes per-batch.
Honestly though, by the time you're accurately gauging browning vs cooking meat, and eyeballing batch size vs pan size, you've moved well past the point of relying on cooking times from recipes.
Preheating the pan is part of the cooking time, IMO. In your recipe I would heat my pan for a good 3-4 mins to be sure the temp stays high after the chicken goes in.
I don't agree, in the same way that preheating an oven isn't considered part of the cooking time, or vegetable prep isn't considered part of the cooking time.
Fair enough. We have our opinions. For me the cooking time starts when I enter the kitchen and finishes when I serve the meal. It's the time I spent cooking the meal.
Your thinking is what enabled a generation of '20 minute meal' recipe books that actually take closer to 40 mins.
It's impossible to give an accurate estimate unless you're starting from the same place (and even then it's hard to give an accurate estimate when you're starting from the same place - how long does it take a pot of water to boil?)
My parents are an absoulte disaster for organising their kitchen, they have a fridge that is absolutely _rammed_ full with no order whatsoever, and a single pantry cupboard that contains cereals, vinegars, and everything else in one. On the contrary, my kitchen is organised very loosely by meal, while still structured and categorised. I can dice/slice veg for a full meal in the length of time it takes my partner to get the ingredients out of the fridge.
> Your thinking is what enabled a generation of '20 minute meal' recipe books that actually take closer to 40 mins.
Nah, that's just people lying about cooking times, like "caramelize the onions" in 3 minutes, and not measuring how long it actually took them to do the recipe.
I don’t think any chef (or recipe author) would agree with you. If only because they have preheating pans all the time.
Also the actual pan matters, if you have a thick-bottomed cast iron pan that’s been fully preheated it might not even notice that you dropped produce on, whereas a thin teflon-coated aluminium pan will drop through the floor.
An other huge factor is overcrowding, especially pans.
Just FYI you can easily cook a room temp chicken breast or thigh (or lots of them) 4 minutes a side directly below a broiler on a broiler pan, letting them rest covered for 5 afterwards.
Add a minute for the genetic freak 2+ inch thick ones.
You will need to pat the moisture off them first and brush with oil.
You may have changed the color of the meat and killed off the bacteria to make it safe to eat, but you didn't make good chicken. It takes time and lower heat to cook through, create good flavor, and get good texture. Sure you can put any food in an incinerator for 2 minutes and it's "cooked", but not really.
> It takes time and lower heat to cook through, create good flavor, and get good texture.
This is true of dark meat like chicken thighs, but chicken breast is the exact opposite. Cooking at slowly at low (but still conventional stove or oven temperatures) will give you either juicy chicken with little to no browning or dried out chicken with sufficient browning. A chicken breast is like a single-serving steak - it requires fast cooking (although not as fast as a thin steak) to achieve proper browning without overcooking the interior.
The exception is non-conventional very slow methods like sous vide where the the meat is cooked for over an hour in a medium that is more or less the target temperature of the interior of the meat. Although this provides no browning so you'll still want to sear it very quickly over high heat.
By butchering the breast so that it's very thin and cooking it 90% on one side you can get delicious browning and juicy meat genuinely in under 5 minutes. It's a pretty great hack.
How do your want to define cooked then? cooked != tasty
it just means it's no longer pink and will kill you with salmonella inside. Doesn't mean it's not dry or bland or any other implications
Well, if we're getting into semantics we could maybe say cooked vs prepared, I'm not sure. There's obvious physical differences between burnt onions and caramelized onions. Similarly, there's obvious physical differences between scorched, dry, but safe to eat chicken, and chicken that has been prepared properly and is tender and juicy. In the context of this thread, we've been talking about cooking things as part of recipes, so the end result and quality is obviously important.
> They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.
Doesn't make sense to me. I certainly don't choose a recipe based on the estimated time-to-complete.
In fact I generally click through a bunch of recipes, and pick and choose the ideas that sound as if they'll work. Felicity Cloake does this, in her "How to cook the perfect..." series. She consults a bunch of top cookbooks, tries several mash-ups, and feeds the results to a tasting panel. At least, that's what she says she does; I'm inclined to believe her.
Does make sense to me. I don’t want to combine recipes rely on my creative cooking skills, because I don’t have those skills.
If I want to make a certain dish I look for recipes, pick one and follow that. If a recipe takes 2 hours to prepare and I don’t want to spend 2 hours in the kitchen, I pick something that doesn’t take as much time.
I would be surprised if that isn’t the way most people use recipes.
But I usually pick a recipe from a cook book I own. Searching for recipes online is a shitty experience.
Not familiar with Felicity Cloake, but as a non-professional home-cooking enthusiast, mash-ups are my go-to when I'm trying new recipes that I'm pulling from online. Results are usually pretty good! Did a Greek pasta salad a couple nights ago that turned out really nicely.
Have been thinking about signing up for, or self-hosting some kind of recipe app to make managing it easier... as-is, I have a "recipes" bookmark folder, where each recipe gets a sub-folder with a bookmark for each referenced recipe. However, this approach suffers from linkrot, recipes are often poorly formatted, and it doesn't have anywhere for my notes to go.
True, in this extreme version that goes clearly against the laws of physics.
But without going there, I can clearly hear my mother answering me that once again "it's very simple honey, 20 minutes top", when asked how she did the lunch.
She consistently does this, yet when I copy everything she does, I'm lucky to get 40 minutes.
> Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.
Surely, you are dramatizing a bit here. Or are you assuming that everyone shares the same need to fiddle with everything?
Are you trying to actually learn Linux or just how to use Linux to get other work done. Learning how to use Linux to get work done doesn't require a 'need to fiddle' as you put it, but you're not going to really learn actual Linux (as in how the kernel and core operating system works and hangs together) without getting your hands dirty and breaking a lot of things along the way.
Yes, but do you actually need to know that? I know that, I've been using Linux since the whole thing fitted on four 1.44MB floppies. I don't *care* though, and if my machine is fatally screwed up I just bust out the latest Ubuntu LTS, flatten, and reinstall.
I haven't got time to muck about with rescuing a broken system. I've got stuff to do.
Do you actually need to know JavaScript? Or C? Or Japanese?
As I said, if Linux is just the OS you use to do something else, then no. If your job/hobby is to actually develop Linux or tools that tie very tightly to Linux and how Linux operates, then yes.
No, just personal experience. I started learning Linux as a young teenager and have broken dozens of installations (breaking system python, deleting /usr/ via rsync, doing an incomplete system update, writing a love letter to my boot sector, etc. etc.)
Eventually I have failed in so many ways that there are not a lot of ways I can fail now that I don't know how to rescue myself from. Also I've learned what not do to keep things saveable.
> Or are you assuming that everyone shares the same need to fiddle with everything?
Why else would you use Linux? This fiddling is literally necessary to learn it. Otherwise you have to ask somebody else for help, who has done the fiddling.
Because you just want to get work done, or play your game or browse the web etc?
Yes, learning Linux is fun (for the kind of people who find this fun). But we don't expect people who just want to get on with their lives to eg break Windows or MacOS a lot, either.
I'm pretty close to this at work since about 1/3rd of my job is helping the non-Linux people deal with Linux. Programming is their 2nd language so to speak, and the use of Linux is incidental, it's just what's easiest to give them to keep everything in our company compatible.
They require a person who knows Linux in order to keep working. It's not optional -- they just wouldn't be able to get everything running otherwise without it breaking every couple of days. The fixes they find without us usually end up masking the problem and causing a truly unfixable problem later.
This is one of the biggest flaws of Linux IMO -- you have to dedicate yourself to learning it to be able to use it as a daily driver effectively.
So: if you don't have to, and you don't know how, you shouldn't use Linux at all. There's no point, just use macOS. The macOS people eventually fix their problem on their own anyway since it's so standardized.
I once logged into a ONE HOUR OLD ubuntu install for it to randomly decide that my system font should be 6pt, but not everywhere, and there was no way to change it through any settings panel. Not knowing in what magical text file that setting, if it even had one, was hidden, my only choice was to reinstall.
I guess Arch Linux is a lot saner, they just have one place to change things: the configuration files; and that one place is well documented and there's no magic going on. No weird settings panels that try to be smart.
That's interesting. Did either Ubuntu or Arch Linux patch GNOME to read configuration at different places? Doesn't Ubuntu also have configuration files that actually store the configuration (while the settings panel would be just the UI to the config files)?
At any rate, how are you sure that this bug only affects Ubuntu but not Arch?
I don't use GNOME, so I can't comment. I just use XMonad as a light weight window manager, and don't bother with any 'desktop environment'.
I don't know how Ubuntu nor GNOME store their configuration. I suspect they have lots of plain text config files, but they might also have other formats like databases etc? I think the more important part is that they try to 'magically' do much of the config for you, and sometimes that magic breaks.
I found 'etckeeper' quite useful, it sticks your /etc in a git repository and makes commits when something changes. So you can at least review what just changed that must have broken your config. (I use etckeeper on Arch, but it seems to be also available on Ubuntu.)
> Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.
People bother to do that?
Just wipe, reinstall, and run your postinst scripts to restore everything you need.
Python packaging is a special kind of dependency hell, you get the feeling that forward compatibility is an unknown idea and everything depends on the precise version of anything else. Last time I checked, some of the most popular packages hadn’t even been ported yet to a stable Python release that was six months old at the time, forcing me to downgrade. It’s essentially the most unpythonic aspect of working in Python: a zillion incompatible ways to do things, and nothing works out of the box.
They might differ on what's a problem, too. I've installed arch a few times, and there were some things I had to do, but I wouldn't say I had problems. It was generally a pretty enjoyable experience.
The best way to carmelize onions is in a slow cooker. I used a cheapie one for years that I bought at a goodwill for $5.
Chop up enough onions to fill the vessel 1/2 to 2/3, leave it running overnight (8-10h), wake up next morning to perfectly carmelized onions.
Now drain the juice, portion them out and store them in the freezer (store the juice too for onion soup). Now any time you need carmelized onions, take a portion out of the freezer and thaw. Depending on the recipe you can use them as-is (soggy) or crisp them up in a pan.
Can you share the make and model of your slow cooker? It might generate some interesting discussions. If anyone else uses this "one trick" (joke), please post your make and model here.
I've used this in the past with my instant pot, though it's been a while and I don't recall the exact recipe. I've actually taken to par-cooking my onions sous vide, draining them, and then caramelizing them on high heat on the stove.
I have used 4 different makes and models, from a really old one on my grandma’s kitchen that only had a on/off switch, to my newest one, a programable hamilton beach. I would say everyone worked the same, at least for beans, rice and some stews.
I only did caramelized onions twice with the same one, but based on my experience, any brand/model should work. And I agree, crockpot is the best way to cook caramelized onions.
I bought it over a decade ago, and have since left it behind when I moved to Europe. It was a Hamilton Beach brand but don't ask me what model. It had a shutoff timer, which was nice because I could set it to cook a roast while I was at work, and not have to worry about what time I got home (it would stay on "keep warm" after cooking).
For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice about unitaskers is terrible, except for the first time you start cooking at home and don't know what you need.
Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buying an unglazed piece of quarry from Lowe's for 5 bucks instead of a proper pizza stone is a popular myth. Anyone who has actually tried it, has probably wasted hours on the internet looking for it and when the idea came out was most likely wasting tons of gas going to multiple Lowe's.
Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. Published recipes in a proper cookbook tend to be of higher quality, but its not always a guarantee. You get lucky every once in a while and find a hidden gem, but its almost never worth the effort to try non-established recipes as a beginner cook that can't read a recipe and immediately find red flags.
I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.
Folks, just ignore this rude fellow. A slow cooker is essentially a low temperature heating element and a ceramic cooking vessel. The ceramic dissipates the low heat evenly even on the cheaper ones, and you get a result within tolerance so long as the regulator isn't crap. Just don't scratch up the glaze.
Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that you can set it to automatically turn off or switch to "keep warm" after x hours.
You're also in luck because most people never use their slow cookers and eventually donate them to the local thrift shop, so you can pick them up super cheap to try out and decide if a slow cooker is for you. Once you've gotten a taste for slow cooked foods, you can start looking around for what tools will best serve your future culinary ambitions.
And no, you don't need a Le Creuset; that's just for snobs who like to tell everyone that they have Le Creuset. It won't make better carmelized onions.
Name the brand and model of your amazing 5 dollar slow cooker and give us some recipes to use in it.
Or people could just read dozens of reviews of a hundred year cooking vessel where they always complain about the price but reluctantly admit its better. Spending lots of money on cooking supplies as a novice is fraught with landmines of people wasting money, but out right dismissals of spending any money is also usually a red flag of someone just discovering cooking. A college sophomore in their first apartment probably doesn't need a $300 dollar knife, but an adult with a job that spends the money on something nice will get years if not decades on a much safer and more efficient knife they will get used to with occasional whetstone sharpening.
That's not consistent with my experience. Some knives will never take a good edge. But not all knives actually need a good edge. There are evidently different kinds of "stainless steel"; some kinds are immune to sharpening, some are quite good. But if I want a really sharp kitchen knife, it has to be carbon steel.
Carbon steel knives rust/pit easily - you have to clean them and dry them, you can't just leave them to dry in the sun.
Never a need for the home cook. Professional chefs pay for quality much like we do in tech. Ergonomics, edge retention, sharpness, and dozens of other factors can influence that $300 knife and whether its useful for a professional who chops food 8-10hrs a day, 5 days a week.
For the home cook, who chops maybe for 1/10th that weekly, not much reason beyond placebo.
Mind you, going mid-range with something like a Victorinox can be a good bet for home cooking. $50-ish chef's knife that holds its edge well enough that a honing steel will keep it sharp for a couple of months of once-or-twice-a-day use.
Nothing more annoying than squishing your tomatoes as you try to cut (except having to take time out to sharpen your knives all the time).
Money does not necessarily buy you quality, or if it does, a worthwhile amount of it. I have some nice knives that cost a decent amount, but guess what, my day to day knives are from a $15 ikea knife set that I bought half a decade ago. Are these knives going to last me decades? No, but with relatively minimal upkeep over the years, they're just as sharp as my nice knives. I will probably eventually throw them out when their handles start breaking, but at that point I will have gotten way more than my $15 of value out of them.
You named no brands for comparison and ignored a specific call out for comparison. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it true and as a novice cook this was the most obvious time I learned it.
Have you ever used a slow cooker? You seemed obsessed with naming brands and call it a specialized tools makes me think you have never used them.
It’s just the simplest tool which actually shines best to be used for everyday general cooking. You know when you don’t have the time to do fancy cooking and just need a tasty home made meal with minimal effort.
Yeah, you could probably get better caramelized onions if you know how to cook them, if you have time to prepare them, and if you give them your full attention, but I would bet for the regular person cooking for himself, they are likely to get better results with 1/10 of effort just doing what OP mentioned, with ANY slow cooker.
Theres a specific call out, with an admission of possibly being wrong when presented with evidence. Nobody has presented an amazing recipe or a specifically good device that makes good food.
I own a slow cooker, and it was given to me for free from a friend that had to quickly get rid of all of her personal belongings before being deported. The recipes in it are fine, often times actually very good, but theres also nothing about it that can't just be made better in a dutch oven with an extra hour or so on the stove. But the biggest proponents are the exact people I would not want cooking advice from.
Brands of what? Comparison of what? What specifically would you hope to be able to compare between either slow cookers or knives that would have any serious effect on how good the food you can use them to make is?
The most popular pots and pans for cooking do actually have a brand associated with them, even if its as big as Teflon. Not being able to name any, with a good or bad opinion, is comparable to not having a good or bad opinion about a novel. An old medium where its possible they have a valid new opinion, but usually a good indicator of the level of their opinion.
I think most cookware purchases are just what happened to be in the store at the time. Brands aren't considered much. Even for things like large appliances and cars this applies for a lot of people - and they're not necessarily wrong either.
My point was
>Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks.
The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are nearly always lies, despite how much I wish them to be true.
I have used a number of different slow cooker brands over the years. Most were Crock-pot brand, but I've used others. I've never been able to tell the difference.
Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can.
Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better.
I can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate.
What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.
From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it.
Recipe writers in my experience lie about the duration it takes to accomplish anything. I have yet to follow a recipe and finish it in the prescribed amount of time. It’s very frustrating because it can ruin planning entirely. For example, in Stella Parks’ Bravetart, she says her cherry pie can be made in “45 minutes active time, 45 minute roast, 2 hour rest”. The instructions mention a two-hour refrigeration period, another 30 minute refrigeration period, a 75 minute bake, and a 4 hour rest. A 3.5 hour recipe, in no less than 8.5 hours, assuming the active time is correct.
For this exact reason I lost much of my interest in cooking. I know I am not a professional chef and I can't do things as efficiently as possible, but I almost always spend more than twice the amount of time finishing those recipes. Right, excluding the time for preparation or cleaning, just the cooking part. So a "20 minute quick meal" becomes one hour, and by the time I finish cooking I am already very hungry.
Another bad thing is that sometimes pictures that come with a recipe don't even use the same ingredients. You wonder why your dish appears different until you take a close look at the picture and realize that that's not even the same dish using the same ingredients or steps. That's just a scam.
No, that is not the prep step. The prep step starts with all of these done and is mixing all of these together in a zip lock bag and putting it in the fridge. So 5 minutes seems even a bit high.
The time for recipes is always "with all ingredients washed, peeled, chopped and set ready to go in a bowl. Start!". Also note that step 2 is to put the onions into the pan (but no step says to cut onions) and that the ingredient list says "garlic, peeled, finely grated" and not "garlic" and "onions, sliced thinly".
You might not like that convention of "time" or would like "actual time" in addition, but it is a pretty universal convention. And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
So hard disagree from me. The time seems pretty spot on.
The "prep time" is _not_ the time for the "prep step"? Internet seems to agree with you, it's wild. Why is it not called "assembly time" or something?
Plus, it's not like that recipes on the internet (or books) are usually targeted at professional kitchens. Or like professional kitchens will take times at face value (and won't test it).
It is a bit weird but not moreso than, say, the word "butterfly". People agreed on one convention and one phrasing and stuck with it and it would be confusing to have wildly different time^pro and time^home scales. Just like pasta tells you the time starting with boiling water, so "5 minute pasta" does not mean "5 minutes from entering the kitchen".
> And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
This is a recipe for home cooks not professional kitchens. Both cook time and prep time are always going to be estimates. Labeling a step as "prep" and excluding all of the actual prep tasks isn't useful for someone trying to plan their day. This 5 min step ads nothing of value to the recipe as far as I can see.
This is a great post. Thank you to indulge us. I also like the domain name: SERIOUS Eats!
Real question: I wonder if these recipe websites have done A/B testing on total amount of time in the recipe. In 2023, I could believe it. If recipes with shorter durations are shown, you get more hits. Same with the ridiculous suggestion that all recipes need 1 tablespoon of oil (or less!). People will also return more frequently to your ad-tech empire that provides lousy recipes.
To me, free recipes are no better than free media (online newspapers, YouTube TV, etc.). If you aren't paying, then you are the product.
I use online free recipes to get an idea of the ingredients and proportions. Sometimes, an YouTube video can give you ideas about technique if you are new to an style of cooking. I need to cook something a few times to find the right balance.
My latest recipe is trying to replicate the black vinegar semi-sweet thickened sauce used in Chinese fried eggplant recipes. The premade stuff has a huge list of ingredients -- too many "extracts". I'm am trying to reduce to the fewest number possible, but still tastes close to restaurant style. Each time I make it, I look at my cooking notes, then make small adjustments.
I dunno about 10 minutes, but in my very limited experience it's easier to crank the heat up when you have several pounds of onions. Otherwise, if you're just carmelizing one onion, stirring doesn't really allow you to temporarily remove the onion from the heat, whereas if you have a large amount of onions you're basically turning over the whole lot.
I've only made French onion soup once or twice, but I make Italian sausage, peppers, and onions regularly. I'm not shy about cranking the heat up, but with just 1 onion and 2 bell peppers some of the onions invariably end up a little burnt even before they've begun to carmelize; but in that dish that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I use the microwave to make a dark Cajun gumbo roux. I'm curious if the microwave would work well for carmelizing a small amount of onion. Though, using the microwave for a roux isn't much faster than using a pan; it's just more difficult to fsck-up.
If you crank up the heat you're not caramelizing, you're browning (burning). Caramelizing is a chemical process which requires lower heat and longer time.
I think you can make it happen with a small amount of onions, but you have to watch it like a hawk, stir constantly, and add a small amount of water whenever it starts to go too far.
Recipe writers routinely lie about how long a recipe takes, too. Most reporting a time requirement much under 30 minutes get there by ignoring how long it takes to process & prep the various ingredients. "15-minute meals" often take 10-15 minutes of prep before you can start them.
Yes. My favorite is quickie salad recipes. Their times are correct, as long as you happen to have a refrigerator stuffed with containers of chopped vegetables for some reason.
I've seen youtube videos where they "make" such salads. It's really not far off from "cooking time: 10 minutes. 3 to pick from the menu, 2 to call for delivery, 5 for it to reach you."
That is exactly what "time" means for recipes and why ingredients list say things like "onions, finely chopped" and not just "onions".
Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason. You might not like this convention, but it is pretty universal.
So your complaint sounds like "3 minute angel hair pasta?!?! My water won't even have started boiling by then." Totally understandable misconception for someone who just started cooking, but you should learn pretty quickly what 3 minutes actually means.
Sure, but having wildly different conventions would be even more confusing.
In any case, I am very disappointed with HN for this thread. While I also think "actual time" would have been a more useful standard, words mean what they mean and the comment quality is ...
- "Hey, surely everyone is lying, instead of me misunderstanding a common convention."
- "That universal convention used since forever is dumb. Me complaining to you surely is going to retroactively change this in every publication ever."
- "How dare you tell me that I misunderstood something. I am sure you are personally responsible for that convention."
- "Of course a butterfly is made out of butter, it is right there in the name you moron!"
Electric kettles are certainly fast, but this feels like an exaggeration. Technology Connections[1] made a good video on this recently and even boiling roughly 1 quart of water (which is significantly less than you'd typically use for something like cooking pasta) required almost 5 minutes to come to boil in an electric kettle.
The entire recipe-industrial-complex is optimised primarily for convenience. Even a majority of the supposedly reputable cookbook authors are obsessed with “quick and easy” recipes. If you actually want to learn cooking a cuisine, most of the content you find via google or top selling cookbooks is going to be useless and filled with shortcuts and overly simplified ingredients lists. If you’re looking at a recipe that’s quick, easy, or simple, that’s a huge red flag that the recipe is BS. Another one is if it’s a foreign dish and you can somehow find all of the ingredients in your local supermarket.
> Another one is if it’s a foreign dish and you can somehow find all of the ingredients in your local supermarket.
Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.
The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.
[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.
Using the original source language can certainly help. But even then most of the blog recipes you find are going to have the same problem with being very simplified.
A problem with Google Translate specifically is that it’s often not great at translating ingredients. For instance it will translate daun salam as bay leaf, but there’s something like 6 different types of bay leaf, and they’re not at all similar. If a recipe calls for daun salam it probably wants you to use Indonesian bay leaf, but if you didn’t already know that distinction you’d end up with something weird. Another example would be bawang putih, which translates literally to white onion, but means garlic. Google translate has learnt this meaning sometime recently, but it used to give the literal incorrect translation.
Hungarian here. Yes, it needs a lot of sour cream. Having said that now living in the UK I rather use crème fraîche, which I find closer to what you can buy in Hungary.
No. "Time" for recipes by convention starts with all of this done. This is always the case and allows for easy comparability of recipes.
You might not like this convention, but nobody is lying. It is somewhat surprising that you genuinely thought "writers routinely lie" and never thought to stop and think whether your understanding might be wrong.
The trick to caramelizing onions (without leaving them overnight in a slow cooker) is to add a bunch of water to the pan and steam them until they’re completely wilted, then boil off the water and add oil. This will cause most of the onion cells to burst, releasing their water, allowing that water to quickly evaporate so that the oil can do its job raising the temperature of all the onions to the point at which the sugars begin to caramelize.
I just add the some oil and a lot of salt (all the salt the dish will use) at the start and cook on high. Once they release their water lower to medium-low and let it cook.
My theory about cookbooks: They are not designed for cooking or even cooks.
Instead, the books are fantasy, to let the reader imagine that they could, will, might cook delicious meals and get praise, affection, love, and approval from their family, friends, and dinner guests. And for the onions, part of the fantasy is how easy the cooking will be -- brown the onions in at most 10 minutes.
It might be true of the more stylistic chefs out there for sure -- but I'll pull an America's Test Kitchen recipe rather than a random blog that shows up in google.
A good cookbook can be life changing, a bad cookbook can be near worthless (maybe this is true of any type of book). "12 Recipes" is a book a chef wrote for one of his kids to learn to cook and I loved it. Some soft cooking skills or other background information about what was actually important and what can be skipped really helped me learn to cook much better for myself.
I think the problem with some cookbooks is that cooking is a somewhat technical or scientific process. If the author is too technical, they can gloss over details that will trouble a home cook, like how tos for complex techniques that they are familiar with, how long things will take someone with less practice, how much prep / cleanup can add up at home compared with working at scale in a restaurant with dedicated prep cooks and dishwashers, etc. My partner was a professional chef for a catering company and the "recipes" they used internally had almost zero details besides ingredient ratios. I couldn't imagine trying to follow one without asking a ton of questions.
On the other hand, some people aren't technical enough and so they can't properly assess the details or break things down into a strong formula for someone else to replicate. They can be vague about measurements, timing, or technique, so even if you follow what's written your result is pretty far from whatever they had done in their own kitchen.
Then there are the "telephone" recipes that have been stolen back and forth from different blogs or articles without anyone making them and over time they've degraded into something just plain wrong.
I talk about cooking and food a lot with my Czech teacher (not just because I like to cook, but if I'm low-energy it's such an easy topic) and I brought this idea up - something along the lines of "What do you think about all the recipes that say 'fry onions until caramelised - about 5-10 minutes'?". Her reply floored me - "ha! yeah, 10 minutes? They'd be burned by then!". I spent the next few minutes trying to explain exactly what I meant, thinking that I'd said something wrong or been misunderstood. Nope, no misunderstanding. She swore blind that onions caramelise at 5 minutes and burn after 10. I suspect she's cooking them on a volcano or something.
Watch Tasting History with Max Miller (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ). Every old recipe used to leave out salt, not explain any technique, times, temps, types of ingredients, and barely had proportions. People who cooked recipes were usually professionals who just knew how to cook things. It was around the end of the 19th century that cookbooks for home cooks came out, and they too didn't explain much.
If you are really interested in cooking, either take a class, or buy a book that teaches you how to cook. La Technique and Mastering the Art of French Cooking are excellent instruction manuals. If you learn better from video, Jacques Pepín did a 3 hour video of cooking mostly everything in La Technique.
A lot of people in the comments saying that it comes down to an over generalization of the word "caramelize". I would argue that this is instead representative of the very low quality of the vast majority of most recipes which are produced by rank amateurs at best (not to say there are not some pretty impressive amateurs).
There are many higher quality sources of recipes out there today. Serious Eats being one site that rarely fails to get the details correct (though I managed to find a dough recipe that had 1% salt instead of 2% which seems like an error). ATK/Cooks Illustrated rarely has glaring errors on times or quantities. NYT is also pretty reliable. Also many current YouTube chefs are quite diligent. Joshua Weismann is a regular go-to for me.
The key to making a dark roux, as is used in Cajun cooking, is stirring, scraping, and homogeneity. You can crank the heat on high and stir for about 10-15 minutes, or you can keep it over medium and stir for an hour. If you stir like you're supposed to, you can get the same roux in less than half the time. A good wooden spoon (soft enough to scrape the bottom of the pot) that can get into the corners of a pot and a little elbow grease is all you need.
So why do they tell you that you need to stir for so long? Because if you screw it up, you've gotta start over.
I was curious how fast I could do a dark roux (notably, after burning my first one and needing to restart), and I actually managed one in under 8 minutes, and even took a photo to document such:
And yeah, the key really is stirring constantly, and riding the stove knob to keep the heat right.
My stupid thing that I do that sometimes burns it is stopping stirring when I turn off the heat when I'm done. Pan is still hot enough to burn it, if you don't get it out of there, or add vegetables quickly.
The funny thing is that the jarred stuff is just as good as the roux you make on your stove. It's also perfectly fine to make a giant batch of the stuff and freeze it, and there are numerous recipes for doing it in your oven or even your microwave with great results.
I have great respect for Mark Bittman and regularly turn to How to Cook Everything for its solid recipes, but sometimes he gets it spectacularly wrong. Case in point was his spatchcocked turkey recipe. Quoting the NYT Cooking App:
In 2002, Mark Bittman published this revolutionary approach to roasting the Thanksgiving turkey, which allows you to cut the cooking time of the average turkey by about 75 percent while still presenting an attractive bird. Simply cut out the backbone — or ask your butcher to do it for you — and spread the bird out flat before roasting, a technique known as spatchcocking that is commonly used with chickens. Roasted at 450 degrees, a 10-pound bird will be done in about 45 minutes.
I tried the recipe last Thanksgiving, following the video exactly and extending the time based on many reader comments, and it still came out underdone. It ended up taking 2 hours; we had Thanksgiving dinner at 9pm. A very experienced home cook and scientist I know believes that temperature and timing are thrown off by writers like Bittman who use professional ovens which have far better temperature regulation than the crappy decades-old ovens used by most home cooks.
As for unfailingly good and simple recipes, I can't recommend Jacques Pepin short "Cooking at Home" videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_PgxS3FkP7ATPveBQ1ya...) highly enough. He often takes whatever he has lying around to make some variation of a famous dish - canned tomatoes instead of fresh, a half-empty jar of olives, once even a hot dog to substitute for a sausage in his Sausage Cassoulet (https://youtu.be/Uuli3So6Oo4).
The recipe writing team at the times has recently made a note of how each recipe is independently tested by other, non professional cooks with normal kitchen equipment. I'm skeptical that the recipe was never tried with a conventional oven.
One of the main points of the article that I totally agree with is that recipe authors fudge times by massive amounts to make the total time for a recipe "acceptable". A favorite recipe from years ago in Cuisine magazine for a way-better-than-ordinary Spankopita called for washing and chopping the spinach. In 1982, fresh spinach was almost always very sandy, and needed multiple washings. The recipe allocated less than 5 minutes for the task that probably took me 20 minutes the first time. (Yay for the advent of pre-washed spinach!). Similarly for doing phyllo (aka filo) dough the first time. Very fussy, very time-consuming. A more truthful phraseology might be "after you get good at this, it can be done in as little as x minutes". We do get faster at repeated tasks ... The cynic in me sees at as part of a pattern where we're constantly lied to in advertising blurbs, headlines and summaries, but that's another rant ... :-)
A vast majority of recipes are just inaccurate when it comes to timing.
My favorite technique to caramelize onion is to do it in a convection oven. Just take a batch, add a tiny bit of oil (not olive) to coat it without dripping too much excess oil on the pan. It will just dry out otherwise)... Season it with some salt & pepper and stick it in the oven cold and turn the heat on... ~170C (if your oven runs cooler, you can turn this up to ~180C). Toss every ~20-25 minutes, and it should be nicely caramelized in about an hour and half, or a little longer - just pull it out when you're satisfied with the level of browning.
Bonus: add a touch of brown sugar (1/2-1 tsp / 2-3 medium-large onions) for an extra kick of sweetness about halfway through the cooking time (sometimes, this is cheating).
I like it because there's no open flame or hot stove to deal with, and it leaves me free to do other things.
In hot oil, small pieces of onion will turn into a crunch brown crisp in well under 5 minutes, and larger pieces can have the outside surfaces crisped.
I suspect the authors are not lying, but simply calling the above effects caramelization; not aware that what it means is for the onion to be evenly brown all the way through.
I think the simple answer is that there is a disconnect between what caramelizing onions means for serious applications (i.e. french onion soup) and not-so-serious applications (your average philly cheesesteak or omelette). Just cook 'em down a bit on higher heat if your application is not so serious.
Recipe writers are still lying about cooking time in 2023.
I signed up for a Hello Fresh promo recently to get some new meal ideas, and it's making me feel like the slowest cook on the planet. I reliably exceed their stated prep and cooking times by 100-200%. Tonight's "40 minute" recipe took about 70 minutes, and that was with a family member helping out with some of the prep and cooking.
I wonder if they collect any data on how long it takes actual customers to cook them. I might be slower than many, but I'd be surprised if the median customer could complete the recipe in anywhere close to the listed time.
Don’t disagree that some of the recipe times are very optimistic, but watching friends cook gives me hives at how inefficient they are, handful of things to think about about that will massively speed up your cooking time:
1)read the recipe and spend a couple of min visualizing the steps, what you’ll need and writing out the timing and grouping chores.
2) do some mise en place[a] (buy $50 of small duralex glass bowls for this, they’re great). E.g. do all your dry good measuring, then wet measuring, vegetable chopping in groups.
3. Set up efficiently (mise en place above), watching someone go to the cupboard 15 times and then the fridge 8 times for things in their recipe is a huge waste. Use a trash bowl so you’re not running to the sink or garbage all the time.
4. Learn knife skills (a lot of cooking schools offer a stand alone class). The right way and the wrong way to dice an onion or Julianne a pepper are like 80%+ reductions in time spent on a task…
5. Clean while you cook.
You’ll be shocked at the time savings if you combine these elements.
Biggest thing for me is your #5. When I watch others cook I see a lot of downtime. 30 seconds here waiting for oil in pan to get hot, 30 seconds there chatting with me while their water boils, it adds up to minutes and minutes that could have been spent washing dishes and cleaning surfaces. For me the perfect cook is when the last thing comes off the heat it's the only dirty dish, I can plate it, wash the dish in the sink, then leave the kitchen with the food and the kitchen cleaner than when I went in.
1. There is no "mis" for hello fresh recipes, literally everything is presented in a bag to you. There's often no measuring or any dependencies other than oil, salt, and pepper.
2. cleaning while you cook is not a time saver for producing the food, only a time saver when considering overall time in the kitchen.
In my experience with meal kits over the last two years, the biggest time savers are nothing like what you said.
1. Meal kits try hard to not use multiple pans, as not all kitchens have that. Parallelize cooking where possible.
2. Parallelize chopping with cooking by getting some help.
3. Pre heat your oven before actively starting cooking in the kitchen, ie don't stand idle.
Even still the recipe times are incredibly optimistic.
Each one of these things is worth adopting by itself, if adopting all of them at the same time is intimidating.
Item 5 can be interpreted in more than one way, though, so I think it's worth digging into. At a fundamental level, with virtually no tradeoffs, it's important not to be crowded by dirty dishes while you cook. If you're worried about your elbow bumping a water glass while you chop onions, or if you have to reach around a dirty mixing bowl to find the garlic, it's going to slow you down, both physically and mentally. Keeping your workspace tidy pays back every second many times over.
Taking "clean while you cook" even further, you can try to save time by scrubbing pans and bowls as you are finished with them. This is extremely appealing for busy people, but how feasible it is depends on what you're making, how much work and attention it requires, and how fast you are. It's a rare triumph for me if I can put three dishes on the table with no dirty dishes in the kitchen. I've done this, but much more often, I've messed up dishes when my attention got hijacked by scrubbing a pan that I could have left for later. If you feel rushed or stressed while cooking, you can give yourself breathing room by getting the dirty stuff out of the way in the easiest possible manner, even if that means stacking it to clean it later.
Then you get people like me that fail at step one because we cannot "visualize" the steps. I logically understand what those words mean but I have no practical experience with actually doing anything approaching it.
The point is, don't think you are the baseline for everyone else. Nobody should give two shits about efficiency with cooking unless your job is to cook efficiently.
“Nobody should give two shits about efficiency with cooking unless your job is to cook efficiently.”
That’s like saying you shouldn’t care how long it takes to drive somewhere unless it’s your job to drive there quickly.
Cooking at home is one of the easiest ways to save money AND improve your health (if done conscientiously), but many people don’t do it because they are daunted by it, and they think it’s a ton of time and work. It’s so easy to lower that barrier, why wouldn’t you?
The ease of doing something and the efficiency at which you do that thing are entirely unrelated in terms of accomplishing the thing.
Cooking eggs is easy. You can get more efficient by cracking eggs better for instance but is that going to save anything? Maybe a few seconds. Is that meaningful? No. Cooking tends more often to fall into that category than the other.
As you get better at cooking overall, you'll get more efficient. It's the same for nearly any other skill. So don't bother optimizing for efficiency unless it's your job - you'll get there eventually anyway.
Knife skills make such a difference. When my partner is helping me in the kitchen, I normally give him one vegetable to dice, and I dice everything else.
I can give him a bell pepper, and by the time he's finished with one bell pepper, I've diced two other bell peppers, the onions, the celery and the chicken.
Or if we're dicing and roasting potatoes, he'll dice one potato in the time it takes me to dice 3 or 4.
Most of the time he just cleans up after me or sets the table and we find that a better arrangement.
I found after starting to apply mise en place that when I wasn't doing it I was still quicker than before. I fetched more things from each cupboard or fridge when I opened them, even if I wasn't measuring out the item into a container beforehand.
Mise en place is trading a small amount of convenience now for a significantly higher load of dishes later. Notice how the pop culture chefs that push it hard always have staff that do their dishes.
Yeah definitely more dishes, but honestly I throw most of the little bowls into the dishwasher on the top rack, so the marginal time impact is just the 1 min extra unloading the dishwasher…
its very good for the first time you make something or if you arent used to the kitchen at a friends place, but efficient home cooking doesnt really resemble efficient restaurant cooking
I have the same experience with Marley Spoon. I always make sure I prepare everything in advance but the actual recipe wants you to do some of the cutting and dicing while stuff is already cooking and they often have impossible timing.
For example, they will have you fry the meat for 2-3 minutes, clean and chop a boatload of vegetables and add them after those 2-3 minutes pass. Sometimes they even do this during a step that requires constant attention, like browning minced meat.
I have no idea how they test these recipes. Maybe they are possible if you’re a professional chef in a fully equipped kitchen with plenty of space but they aren’t in my tiny kitchen where I have to spend half a minute digging the colander out from the back of the cupboard.
They also assume I have an infinite amount of cutting boards and knifes. For example, in step 1 they expect me to cut a chicken breast into bite size pieces, and then in step 2 or 3 I have to cut veggies for a salad. I can’t re-use the cutting board and knife I used for raw chicken for salad without giving it a thorough washing. So I cut everything in advance and do the chicken last.
> So I cut everything in advance and do the chicken last.
To be honest that's better anyway - unless you have some long cooking times with nothing to do but clean up & prepare the next thing, a bit of planning & preparation - mise en place - ends up saving time and giving better results IMO. (Better results because you're not accidentally cooking something longer than you wanted, say, because you were trying to finish chopping the onions to add, and the onions aren't uneven because you didn't rush.)
Cutting board covers, a rubber mat that lays on top of your cutting board, cut all your meats first, toss it in the sink, swap knives, cut all your veggies.
Saves 5 minutes or so of prep time, well worth it IMHO. Also you can just throw it in the dishwasher and not worry about scrubbing a wood cutting board and possibly damaging it with moisture.
Maybe a dumb question, but this sounds useful so I searched for "cutting board cover" and didn't get the expected 10 pages of results. Is this something you made for yourself? Does the knife cut it and little bits of cutting board cover end up in the food?
I despise plastic cutting boards, they slip around too much.
A plastic (or maybe it is some type of rubber, not sure) that goes on top of my wooden board works well, it stays in place and it also pops into the dish washer.
I feel that the time quoted to cook the recipes is always based on an experienced chef, which is likely often not the case for things like Hello Fresh.
An experienced chef will have be far more efficient at chopping/food preparation - I'm reasonable fast at chopping but still probably end up focusing over details an experienced chef would know aren't going to matter for the final recipe.
Also they're probably better at managing the parallel threads of execution most recipes need, hence they always talk about boiling water for pasta far more early then I ever end up needing it.
I'm not the person you asked but I also am a very fast home cook due to professional cooking background.
The job is the training in that kind of work. No one comes out of culinary school particularly fast and even most serious cooks don't go anyway. Cooks change restaurant often and every restaurant is a completely different set of foods and techniques.
Training may teach you how to do something but doing it for hours a day months straight is where you learn to do it fast. A skilled cook at the prep table is looking at it like an F1 pit crew basically. What physical motions am I about to perform, what can be set up in advance and where should it go to reduce extraneous movement, what are the intermediate steps that can be batched together etc. There's never enough time for all the work you need to get done in the kitchen, so every day is a challenge to optimize your efficiency more than the previous one.
Basically you can teach someone the right way to dice an onion but they won't be truly fast at it until they've diced a few thousand onions. Apply that to every task in the kitchen over a decade and you're pretty quick by the end of it.
Even just some deliberative practice for a home cook can make a big difference. I am absolutely, positively not in the professional league. I'd be drummed out of any professional kitchen in the first five minutes. But I'm also way faster, better, more able to recover and improvise than I was twenty years ago, because I deliberately tried to stretch my skills a bit. Not a lot. Just a bit every so often. Over 20+ years it adds up.
It's just like any other intricate physical skill that requires practice, like music or sports.
I've started seriously learning guitar / ukulele, and it's amazing what improvements you can get just spending a few minutes a day where you slow down, do drills (like practicing scales), and analyze what you're doing.
The first time I play a new, unfamiliar piece of music with any tricky bits it feels awful, and I hate it with every fiber of my being. I want to run away and give up on ever learning it. That's when I take a break and come back the next day - when it usually seems much more accessible after I've had time to process it.
The first time you practice cutting an onion the "right" way will feel really slow, annoying, and taxing to your brain. You'll want to do it the way you're used to, even if that's horrendously slow. Do this every day for a week or two and you'll be amazed that it just happens naturally without having to think about it.
Yes for sure. And professional cooks are focused on different things too, not all of their skills are normally applicable in home cooking. The two best cooks I know (both better than me in terms of consistently delicious food) are as you describe: older people who have just been paying attention and caring about it for a long time.
This is it. I've volunteered in a kitchen with professional chefs, even between them there was a big difference: the most experienced chefs were that much faster than even decent home cooks, at least 4x. It is amazing to watch.
I remember Rachel Ray's 30 minute meals usually featured her pulling some ingredients she'd already chopped up or soaked in something the night before out from the fridge. Apparently the time spend yesterday didn't count against the clock.
It's tough to parallelize a recipe the first time you're cooking it - unless you have a photographic memory you're gonna have to keep checking back between steps and it's easy to miss something. Ends in getting really stressed out when you have something on the stove and realize you need to chop veg in 30 seconds.
It's better the 2nd or 3rd time but I think with these meal plan services you're cooking something different every day, so it's hard to develop that familiarity. Ideally you'd follow their steps and take as long as you need the first time, and then go out and buy groceries and do it again, but that probably defeats the purpose of using such a service anyway
That's exactly how I'm using the service: get ideas for new meals during the promo, then cancel and make the ones I liked myself with ingredients from the store. So I do have some hope that I'll get faster. :)
Mirrors my experience. Prep work is the most underestimated part. I think they start with everything out on the counter and unpackaged and with necessary tooling lined up and ready. But those things take time. For me, something like mincing garlic cloves takes a solid 5-10 minutes alone and is one of the things that consistently stands out as they must have started with minced garlic to get to this time estimate.
I found that it really just comes down to how much experience you have. I started cooking a lot this year, mostly because it beats taking my girlfriend out to dinner every week. When I started I was very slow and dinners would take me in excess of an hour, mostly because I was just very unskilled in the basics of cooking.
As time has gone on I found that making dinners took me less and less time, part of it is knowing the right techniques for preparing certain foods, others are little ergonomic things like getting a knife magnet and ensuring all the tools you need are at your fingertips. It's also knowing how long food cooks for, what you have to keep an eye on and what you can just let cook. The first time I made smash burgers at home it took me in excess of an hour to prep and cook everything and yesterday I was able to do the same in about 20 minutes.
Nah that's a perfect example of how experience & technique can speed things up dramatically. Here watch ole JP do it in about 90 seconds even while slowing down to explain it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y5h1pDHhzs
That’s not what an average home cook can do regarding knife skills. These services and recipes should be written for their audiences which are likely typical home chefs that don’t handle knifes that well. I’ve been cooking 40 years and have certainly tried to use a knife that way and it always feels unsafe to me. Also, typically requires a very sharp set of knifes which I do keep but I don’t think the average house does.
It's not what an average professional cook can do either but it's still one useful reference on how long it takes to chop garlic. No one is going to follow a pasta recipe that says it takes three hours because they do shit like allocate 4 minutes per clove of garlic.
They should estimate based on a average user. Or at least give more context than a single X minutes. Three hours is a bit excessive as an example but the difference between 20 and 45 minutes is crucial and more representative of common underestimation. They could also suggest things like buying Preminced garlic to eliminate common timely tasks. Instead they tend to go the other way and would be more likely to recommend you go foraging for wild garlic
I have the exact same problem/frustration and yet my wife consistently cooks the entire meal near or at the estimated cook time. Clearly I'm not as efficient as I think I am!
The thing is Hello Fresh is for people who are not used to cooking. If you're used to cooking then you know enough recipes, you know what to buy and you don't need Hello Fresh.
Having cooking time from actual customers instead of veteran cooks would be helpful.
On the contrary, my wife grabs recipes from Instagram (usually the Whole 30 crowd, but not exclusively). We've found their 20 minute recipes incredibly successful and tasty, and rarely cook anything else. Off the top of my head, one we get a lot of our recipes from is "deliciously Ella."
I think it helps that each post has a picture of the meal, which suggests that the author has actually made it themselves.
If you like salmon, and have a costco membership, one of the best, easiest, fastest and affordable meals:
Get the salmon with the (3) butter-herb balls on top of it. (They used to be ~$19 on avg but now they are closer to $29 due to inflation)
Get a Ceasar Salad Kit from the walk-in fridge. ~$7.99 (these used to be $5.99)
Cook the salmon in the oven at 425 for 27 minutes.
Make the salad kit.
Get a bowl and serve salad in an individual bowl and put a piece of the salmon on top. Serves 4. SUPER good. But the salad doesnt do well as left overs, so if you're not going to finish it that night - make the salad in individual portions to avoid a wilted mess the next day.
Also, if you have wimpy-limpy veggies (such as celery) put into an ice bath in a bowl in the fridge for a while (an hour or two) and it will become crisp again.
I almost never look at recipe timing, but anecdotally, I know I'm slower.
That said, I spent time as a line chef in a kitchen, and it gave me some useful skills in kitchen: cooking lots of things at the same time. These days, I'll fire up my grill, have something on the, and maybe something in the oven, and have done it enough times to know when to start/stir/turn-off to make sure everything is done right around the same time. Very much like a restaurant.
Also, some things are just easier when you let the tool do the job for you. I never cook rice any other way than in an Instant Pot, for example.
My wife and I use the Sorted Sidekick app from the Sorted Food youtube channel. It's the only recipes I tried where the stated cooking time pretty much matches how long it really takes us.
Absolutely! I think I am especially slow at cutting veg, which is a compromise between my motorically undeveloped and untrained self not cutting my fingers (happens every few weeks) and speed. Multiplying by 1.5 is a safe lower limit for me.
I did learn a few things through it though (how to use vinager and not to be afraid of more than 5 ingredients), which is a great outcome. Apart from a bigger selection of recipes I know.
I would highly recommend learning how to use a chef’s knife properly. There are techniques for cutting, cleaning etc that reduce the cooking time significantly. I had the luck to be taught how to use one in school and by my dad but I always notice most people don’t know how to use it and don’t take the time to learn it (which would save them a lot of time)
I love the advertising on some of the crock pot or instant pot packets you can find in the store. It'll say like "ten minute prep time!" (ignoring the 4-8 hour cook time) or the instant pot one will say "ready in 5 minutes" when that means the pressure cooker will cook at high pressure for 5 minutes, but it can take 5-10 minutes to heat up to that point.
I had the same problem with Hello Fresh. I dreaded doing all the prep. However, we tried one called Green Chef and found it much more realistic. The cost of any of these services is too high for me to stomach without some sort of discount but we actually enjoyed cooking the recipes with this one while it lasted.
The last step - 14 - is in fact two steps of (unspecified, but looks like 5-10), and 8 minutes cooking time. Which means you've about 15 minutes to do the other 13 steps. Maybe theoretically possible if you've kitchen-professional chopping speed and know exactly what you're doing, but allowing for thinking time? Hell no.
And let's not talk about the amount of shopping time to get the 15 required ingredients. Most of which are fresh so you're not going to have them kicking around in a cupboard.
Well, we know this is not true. At least Armando Scannone had a team of 4 cooks to make and rehearse each and every one of the recipes in his famous cookbook [1]. Armando Scannone has a famous Venezuelan cookbook, it is the obligatory reference for those who want to make Venezuelan dishes. I have personally tried many of the dishes and the recipes are correct and the result is just as the book indicates.
Four skilled cooks will be able to complete recipes much faster than even a good home cook.
It's like watching an electrician wire a bathroom in two hours and assuming anyone can do it. They can; after years of experience and knowing what to do, what not to do, and what to avoid.
IME Hello Fresh and Gousto were always double their quoted time. 40 minutes was almost always 80 minutes. There is just one exception, namely that Gousto's 10 minute recipes are actually 30 minutes, but that's explained if you notice that they're often 15 minute recipes and they're lying and claiming they're 10 minutes (they have 5 minute, 10 minute and then 20 minute recipes, but no 15 minute recipes, which suggests that they round down for 15).
I never pay attention to the overall cook times. I read through the recipe and picture myself doing the steps to get a feel for how long it will really take.
My experience is similar to yours. Prepping takes the longest time for me. I feel that cooking is all about prepping as the actual cooking on the stove takes a lot less time. Many recipes just mention the actual cooking time and some very vague prep time.
Do you prepare following the steps in the guide? I’ve found that it’s much quicker to prepare based on what hits the pan when. If you do that the first items hit the pan sooner and you are in a nice rush to keep up the cutting with the cooking. Massive efficiency gain. And do some YouTube based cutting training. But that was coming from total beginner level.
I've also been surprised at how often the times listed in a recipe are outright fiction. There seems to be little reason for it except in cases where they want something in a "30 minute meals" type category that it really has no business being in. Or maybe the meal only takes 30 minutes if you have your personal sous chef do all of the chopping, prep, and oven preheat for you ahead of time.
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.
----------
Prep: List all prep steps (chopping, dicing, measuring, seasoning, mixing sauces, 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.
This has been a long-standing gripe of mine when it comes to recipe syntax - by listing all the ingredients up front, recipes look like they should be parseable with a single pass, but in practice there are too many forward-references. I recently bought a cookbook for my child which has recipes written in a clear, procedural way, and the absence of gotchas is really refreshing: I wish this style would become standard.
I agree with the folks saying that caramelized is poorly defined in popular cooking. What I think most recipes really mean is "sweat the onions until soft". What many people end up with is "dried-out onions that are burnt in spots". While caramelize is definitely a slow process that has several phases.
I think the real point is- there's a lot of stuff where people are stirring things in a pan on a stove. Try the toaster oven- it's much more set-and-forget, has better heat control, and if you're lucky, it has a fan that recirculates the air, which greatly improves the results.
Properly caramelized onions are more like fruit jam than anything else.
Hilarious that there's 500 comments on this, of all things.
You can safely say in a recipe book that caramelized onions take 10, 20, or 45 minutes or an hour. Chances are the writer has the best intentions and reasonable knowledge of the subject matter.
Nobody's going to sue you if you're wrong. So there's no single source of truth for how to caramelize onions. Life goes on.
FWIW, caramelization boggles scientists to this day. Last I heard/read, there are still unidentified sugars that occur there that don't occur elsewhere.
This is why I built Yumee (https://yumee.recipes), a social recipe sharing app where you can only share recipes that you have yourself cooked (and you need to share a picture of your creation). Makes it very real and you can build your cookbook own cookbook mixed with recipes from your friends and family
Recipe collections are pointless anyway. The best cookery book I have is Process Cookery, a textbook for commercial cooks studying at vocational colleges in England. It tells exactly how to do things and has example recipes with flowcharts showing which parts of the process are unique and which parts are common to other recipes.
It doesn't go into a lot of theoretical detail about food chemistry but it is an eminently practical and down to earth textbook for people who will cook for a living. No frills, no pictures.
I would say also because people at home are afraid to use the proper heat needed, don't know exactly how to use the stovetop and balance the heat, most people don't have a gas stove (or induction), which could give you more control and people just don't have the proper pans and tools and experience.
My wife's recipes are ALL tested by me. Multiple times. I even used her recipes to cook myself (rare).
Her cooking blog and vlog didn't get any attention other than lots of hate for the Borsch vs Borscht debate and others.
Her blog: https://www.rednumberone.com/
Vlog: https://www.youtube.com/@rednumberone1
I really wish she made more of these so I can test interesting food - sacrifice man.
Tell her to make more.
All made real, all photos are made by her and the videos too.
It takes a lot longer to make a recipe for photos and video.
Preparation for photos and video recording gives you a strong reason to make-up recipes 10 / day and hope they go well.
dont over follow recipes. Get the ingredients and the amounts if you care to and then use your judgment. I mean read it so you know what they do, but there are likely small details that are missing or that are included but not relevant. It also may just not be optimized for your preferences.
In the modern age, SEO is partially to blame for inaccurate recipe cook times. At some point Google realized that folks would click on more recipes with shorter times, as people would use that as a metric when cooking. So they would promote quicker recipes.
What ended up happening is some recipe developers would try and actually reduce the amount of time their recipe took, and others would just "shorten" prep (or even cook) time down, to try and get the most clicks. I know Kenji talks about it in one of his POV videos, but I couldn't find it in a cursory search.
Since there isn't really a reliable way to know how long recipes would take for _you_ across different sites, it's almost not a useful metric, but it is what's been optimized for.
For me there’s never enough sauce, glaze, topper, what-have-you called out for the dish. I consistently have to 2-4x the volume just to serve the meal appropriately. Occasionally the recipe ratios are so off that the entree would burn without more liquid.
I respect the hell out of Kenji but if properly caramelized onions are central to the dish (e.g. French onion soup, caramelized onions for a burger, etc.) I tend to come down on the side of Daniel Gritzer (also of Serious Eats).[0]
I think a) because adding a 20 minute step to a recipe makes it unappealing so calling it 10 makes the recipe more popular, but more importantly b) because what they mean is "make them transparent and possibly slightly brown" which you can sort of do in 10. No one cared that this isn't really caramelizing. Very few recipes really need caramelized onions. They're a sweet mess. Basically I think recipe writers just like to throw around terms too loosely to make their recipes sound fancy when what the 99% of recipes including fried onions needs is "lightly fried, transparent looking onions".
I wonder if the author remembered to have their pan searing hot before throwing the onions in? They should sizzle from the pan heat and the water from the onion touching your oiled pan.
The author says his onions were still raw after 5 minutes in the pan, so there is no way he's using a hot sauté pan or even a fry pan with adequate heated oil.
Cooking and baking is like following a lab, you can't miss a single step! We don't blame chemistry when we can't re-create the lab, we retrace our steps. Since the author is a sports blogger gone pseudo-entertainment politics, I think we can safely assume the pan was cold.
Deep fry the onions, same with bacon. Cut so they are separate, but large enough to be removed with the metal grid deep fry pot. Watch as you first dip - the steam flashes off quickly at first. Have the oil under 350 - watch with care as they burn fast. Keep stirring to break clumps and when they reach the brown you want, remove and drain. Same with bacon - m break up clumps.
This will give nice crisp bacon - too long and it gets hard - bacon bit stuff.
I learned this in the Air Force kitchen when they have a surge and onion loving bacon eaters early in the AM, en masse...
A NYT Cooking recipe for a French Onion Grilled Cheese sandwich admits 45 minutes to prepare, allocating 30 minutes to cooking the onions. I've made it a few times and I think that's about right. It's friggen delicious BTW:
Ah, recipes. One person's (unless otherwise stated) opinion on what method and mixture of ingredients are good, often written in a haphazard way.
I think the reason for many people can't (or think they can't) cook is that they tried a few times and failed. Or they're intimidated and don't know where to start.
And that's the thing with recipes, they are very often not a good place to start. Most recipes assume you have a lot of knowledge and can read between the lines.
There is a great hack that makes caramelizing onions a breeze and cuts down the cooking time significantly. The secret would be adding a small amount of water* at the beginning of the caramelization process. Not only does it reduce the overall cooking time, but it also ensures that the onions caramelize evenly without the risk of burning.
The main difference between sauteed onions and caramelized onions is the cooking time. Caramelized onions are cooked at a lower temperature, for a longer period of time, resulting in super sweet, tender onions.
Im a talented cook. I have no idea how long it takes to caramelize onions, lightly brown garlic, etc. I just do it by look, feel, smell, etc. So if asked to write down a recipe, it would just be rough guesses. Same with measuring, is it a tablespoon? I dont know, its "this much". A lot of cooking is just tacit knowledge and really hard to write down specifics. Its not like baking which is more of a chemistry experiment.
Recipe writing is a specific skill, for sure -- it's teaching rather than doing. But for anyone who isn't learning alongside an older relative, there has to be a way to develop that intuitive sense. A good recipe writer can call out those key areas where you have to develop a feel for something, and enable that kind of learning. Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is a great example of that.
There was a time I believed caramelizing meant adding sugar. So I went to caramelize some red peppers by adding sugar. By far the best thing I ever made.
The author wrote a follow up in Gizmodo - apparently Google's answer boxes were also claiming that it took "about 5 minutes", and they were listing OPs article as the source. Incredible.
The butter 'trick' is just browning the butter (which happens faster than onions) to add deep color and extra flavor to sauteed onions. For some bizarre reason the author interpreted this as blasting onions and olive oil at high heat until they were a charred mess, and then goes on to blame recipe writers for why they can't seem to cook onions. What a strange article.
If it's just browning the butter, it's not really caramelizing the onions. I could get brown onions with any number of coloring agents, but it's not the same thing.
Most recipe sites are also misleading when it comes to the amount of fat required and the quantity of spices (at least for Indian cooking). I used to wonder why the special “restaurant” recipe was as just meh. Then after I got a little more experience cooking regularly, I just realised instinctively that the quantity and duration of cooking wasn’t accurate at all!
I worked with company that creates cook books and utensils in Switzerland in 2010, and they have a workshop kitchen on their premises. For every new recipe, they invite regular people to cook it at least twice. If the results are bad or inconsistent, they tweak the recipe and repeat.
I guess we don't have a kitchen of much global appeal, but at least it's consistent.
Interesting to mention Madhur Jeffrey, who I had indeed felt betrayed by in her descriptions of browning onions by time, which never seemed to match my experience. Her book World Vegetarian otherwise taught me to cook 20 years ago. Or maybe, that following directions closely to a good recipe could make up for a serious lack of experience.
Similarly: Why do drum teachers and instructional videos lie about how to hold drumsticks? I was told for years to hold them at the balance point. This is wrong! You generally hold them a few inches lower than the balance point which allows you bounce the stick loosely in your hand so that it rotates in the air around the balance point.
Do they? Most tutorials I've seen tell you to find the perfect "bounce" spot, which is the spot where the stick will give you the most bounces when released and left to freely pivot around your finger.
I learned to caramelize onions at age 14 from Julia Child's "Art of French Cooking". I learned to make her French Onion soup. Medium-low heat, lots of butter, onions, and a solid hour of stirring creates a jammy, sweet, milk-chocolate-brown onion paste which forms the base for extraordinary onion soup.
There actually is a way to get deeply caramelized onions quickly. Ripping hot pan, start with a bit of water. Then it's just a pattern of sear, deglaze with water, sear, deglaze with water. Repeat until level of caramelization required is achieved. You won't get it in 10 minutes, but it's VASTLY quicker.
I ran into this issue when making french onion soup for the first time. I was so mad. The recipe said something like 45 minutes to cook the onions down. No. It took over 2 hours. Was it delicious at the end? Definitely. But I'd have started earlier and had it with the rest of my meal.
Was thinking exactly the same recently, but about all the recipes across the Internet. I need an "honest cooking time recipe" website where people will not tell about the whole meal in 20 minutes, but calculate the time honestly, and include all the preparation stages.
Actually, my grandma can do it in ~20 minutes and her onion soup using one onion will still taste better than mine which uses four onions. Apparently the trick is to use enough oil for the amount of flour that you use. A lot of the golden color comes from that.
> In truth, the best time to caramelize onions is yesterday
Yep. I took the article's suggestions to heart, and now when I have a recipe requiring caramelized onions I take the time needed, or prep them in advance. Now my mujadara is pretty darn good.
Yep - you don't want to just let the whole thing sit, but certain parts of a meal are better done over time (for example, I've heard the best pizza is where the dough is made the day before, but the pizza itself is made fresh).
What struck me in this piece is that the author tried to experiment but not to understand what he was trying to do. Chemically/Physically I mean.
I became a way better cook when I understood that the Maillard reaction happens starting at 140°C and caramelisation at 180°C (Wondered why this is the default setting of for oven cooking ? Now you know).[1]
The whole thing of cooking, apart from flavour mixing, is to bring your food (onions or anything else) to a high enough temperature to attain the desired reaction. And it is way complex than it seems with several parameters to play with : pan material for general heat conduction, stirring will allow homogeneous temperature conduction in the pan and will give time to the highest bits to cool down, fat helps for local heat conduction, adding water or wine will detach flavorous parts after "maillared" or caramelized (known as deglaced). And certainly many more that I still ignore.
So to come back to the point of caramelized onions, time can help but it is not the unique parameter. As suggested in other comments, you can slow-cook during the night and achieve easily a perfect result. You can also do it quite quickly (I have done it in 5 to 10 min I think) with a strong enough heat source and a lot of stirring to avoid pyrolysis.
In the end, it is no wonder that the famous post of Tim Urban is called "The cook and the chef [...]". [2] All of this makes me wanting to know more about "first principles" of cooking (mainly for flavour mixing, I still have a lot to learn on this point). Maybe receipe writers are making them up on the go, but most of the one I read have at least a bit of "chef" in them to be roughly good in their parameter estimates.
I am surprised no one else bring that up in HN. My main excuse to indulge in frequent visits of this site is that I think most people here try to be first principle thinkers when they comment. By the way, this is a way to long post for here, but I hope it will be useful for curious cooks.
Hmm I dunno. Are people using a stone-cold pan or something?
You can brown (I presume this is what most recipes mean when they say "caramelise") onions brown fairly quickly in ~5 mins or so on a good induction hob and normal (i.e. not absurdly weighty) day-to-day saute pan. It was equally as fast on gas hobs when those used to be a thing too.
A non-induction electric hob of course is a total different matter as they are total utter garbage, so if they are using those then yeah it probably just takes 10 minutes to get to the right temperature to cook at all!
Maybe the onions you bet in Europe are easier to cook? Wouldn't surprise me if there is some different variety that is common here but not there etc.
You can turn onions brown fairly quickly in ~5 mins..
Caramelized onions are not the same as browned onions. Going from raw to brown takes 5 minutes, and going from brown to caramelized takes about another 25 to 45 minutes.
Heat is not the problem. I don't think you understand what browning onions well means. Which is understandable, because getting them "brown" in a few minutes is pretty easy, and that's the way it's explained in most recipes.
Browning usually means at least partial (noticeable in taste) caramelizing. That just won't happen in five minutes.
Purposeful strategic misrepresentation from those in power leaving others to succumb to sunk cost fallacy and perpetuate the myth of Hirschman's hiding hand...
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1) Prepare Pressure Cooker: Heat up your pressure cooker (Instant Pot: press Sauté button) over medium heat. Ensure your pot is as hot as it can be (Instant Pot: wait until indicator says HOT).
2) Pressure Cook Caramelized Onion Purée: Melt 3 tbsp (45g) unsalted butter in pressure cooker. Add in sliced onions, shallots, ⅓ tsp (1.3g) baking soda. Sauté until moisture starts to come out of the onions (~5 mins). Close lid and pressure cook at High Pressure for 20 minutes, then Quick Release. Open lid.
3) Reduce until Caramelized (takes roughly 16 – 17 mins): There will be lots of moisture from the onions. Reduce until most moisture has evaporated over medium high heat (Instant Pot: press cancel, Sauté button and Adjust once to Sauté More function). Stir constantly with a silicone spatula. Once most moisture has evaporated, adjust to medium heat (Instant Pot: press cancel and Sauté). Stir until onions are deep golden brown and all moisture has evaporated. Season with kosher salt & ground black pepper to taste. Remove caramelized onion purée and set aside.
Jesus, that sounds so boring. Do they have robots (single devices) that can do it? I always thought having a pot that can gently stir itself would be helpful in a home kitchen.
Well, the only thing is that brown and a bit crispy onions and not caramelized onions, that's it.
The author is mostly complaining that the caramelized onions mentioned in the recipes simply aren't that.
Brown and a bit crispy onions are nice and that's how I most of the time make them as well. They're just not caramelized onions.
My sister in law writes recipes. She has a recipe column in a newspaper and wrote a few high quality recipe books. I saw them in a bookstore. So she's reasonable successful. Her pieces are charming, her recipes inspiring.
The thing is. At a birthday party when I was talking to her, she confessed to me that she never actually tries her recipes. When it's time to do a new piece, she sits down at her computer and makes up a recipe. She is experienced and knowledgeable she it usually turns out ok. But if you make her recipe you may well be the first one to do it. What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this.
So if you cook from a recipe you'll have to adjust to realities and modify it were needed, because the recipe writer sure as hell didn't do it for you.
As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections.
Everyone who is interested in cooking should do themselves a favour and buy a proper cookbook. Something that starts with the basics, and works itself up to full meals. It should have cheat-sheets for basic ways to cook all your staples, here's all the ways you can cook a potato, with times and temperature. Here's all the ways you can slice an onion, with examples of what it's good for. Here's how to cut a cow into pieces, here's what the pieces are called, here's how long each piece takes to cook and what it pairs well with.
Unfortunately, most people think they can cook something from a recipe collection without being proficient at the basics. "I'll just follow the recipe!", and then they wonder why it didn't work. A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.
And yet recipe collection regularly outsell cookbooks by a wide margin.
I guess they look good on a coffee table at least.
> A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.
I tend to disagree on that one, unless you are particularly experienced, or naturally gifted, measuring tools (timers, scales, thermometers,...) will give you the best results. At least for me, that's the case.
And if you can't follow a recipe to the letter, without knowledge of how things are supposed to feel, it is not a proper recipe. The entire point is to give you consistent results, if I had the intuition, I wouldn't need a recipe.
And even if you are an experienced cook, precise instructions and measurements will give you a better baseline from where you can improvise. Yes, I have an idea on how cook a potato, but unless the recipe tells me how to do it, how do I know how potatoes are supposed to be for that recipe in particular?
So yeah, no matter how good at cooking you are, if you "just follow" a recipe properly and it doesn't work, then the recipe is wrong or incomplete. It is like in programming, 99% of the time, where there is a problem, it comes from the software, not the computer running it. And successful developers don't ask users to fix their bugs, even on open source projects where users have the ability to do it, why should it be different for recipe writers?
I think you're leaving out the extent to which cooking is an analogue process. Your particular ovens temperature envelope, the rate at which your pan or wok heats (due to its thickness and composition), the specifics of the varieties of plant or cuts of meat you're cooking, the quality or specifics of the spices or oils you're using. I'm no chef, but it seems like these can all make quite substantial changes in cooking times, sauce thickness, flavour profiles etc etc, and all necessitate observation and analogue adjustment of cooking processes.
> I think you're leaving out the extent to which cooking is an analogue process.
The main difference between cooking and process chemistry is that the latter actually cares about quality of the end result.
There is some unavoidable variation because of the inconsistency in ingredients and lack of access to tools that would mitigate it. However, the typical kitchen tools are also just bad by design, with any kind of precision or consistency long ago "value engineered" out of them. And now we also learn that cooking recipes are mostly pulled out of their writers' arses, to the point you might as well ask GPT-4, and save money on a cookbook / avoid exposure to ads and made up life stories on-line.
Hell, GPT-4 can at least also give you a Gantt chart to go with your recipe[0].
In the end, the only way to deal with this is by hand-holding the process, performing minute adjustments as guided by experience. This makes cooking much more of an art than it could - or should - be.
> However, the typical kitchen tools are also just bad by design, with any kind of precision or consistency long ago "value engineered" out of them
Its ripoff engineered. I just threw in the trash an obscenely expensive pan with Vegan, cancer free, teflon free and gluten free coating thats coming off.
> The main difference between cooking and process chemistry is that the latter actually cares about quality of the end result.
Do home cooks not care about how the food tastes? This seems like a strange take. People started cooking by roasting or boiling things over an open flame or searing them on a hot rock. Most of the techniques learned and passed down are about how to ensure good results under contexts where the inputs are naturally inconsistent and hard to control.
I don't know why we'd have an assumption that people have or want to work with precise scientific instruments all the time.
Timer is accurate only if you have first done experiments with your unique settings. However temperature gauges are very useful. I usually trust my eyes and nose more than a timer.
> I tend to disagree on that one, unless you are particularly experienced, or naturally gifted, measuring tools (timers, scales, thermometers,...) will give you the best results. At least for me, that's the case.
Both. Have both. Ingredients are not 100 uniform and always cook in same way. Have "how it should be done" and "how it should look during/at the end of the process". You can't have exact same temperature on the pan as recipe, I guess unless you're constantly using IR thermometer to check
And humidity, altitude/weather, variations in stoves/ovens, shape and thermals of the pan, etc. There are too many variables for the same process to produce the same results.
I cook a lot and although you’re right in some regards (scales, thermometers are very useful) you’re discounting the variance in many things making following a recipe precisely not always possible.
For example smoking a brisket. There is no perfect temperature that tells you it’s done. We know the thereabouts but one brisket might be done at 203 while another is at 200 and another at 205. You need to feel it.
Each animal is different and each smoker is different and the weather really matters. A humid day will influence cooking differently than a dry day.
Unless you can get uniform ingredients you’ll never be able to follow a recipe to the letter and get great outcomes every time. You should use tools but in the end you need your senses and you should taste everything you can before serving.
> I tend to disagree on that one, unless you are particularly experienced, or naturally gifted, measuring tools (timers, scales, thermometers,...) will give you the best results. At least for me, that's the case.
If you’re baking then you usually must follow the recipes as it will yield the best results. Experience will tell you more or less water will result in what. More or less baking soda will alter the result in what way. Etc
But if you’re cooking dinners, you don’t really need to follow recipes. Soup? You can often just throw whatever you want in the pot and it doesn’t matter. If it said 1 onion and you added 4, just tastes more oniony”
> So yeah, no matter how good at cooking you are, if you "just follow" a recipe properly and it doesn't work, then the recipe is wrong or incomplete.
No, this is 100% false, and this is exactly why recipe collections are popular, because people think they can just follow a recipe to get a delicious meal. There is an immense difference in quality and properties of ingredients, difference in cookware, difference in appliances, etc. What's "medium heat" ? What's a "medium-sized potato" ?
You need to know basic cooking to work around these differences, you need to know what something feels like and looks like when it's done, otherwise you will forever fail.
This is why I use The Joy of Cooking and virtually no other recipe source. It’s a giant book because in each section it describes the mechanics behind whatever the section is based on; e.g. the poultry chapter starts with 10 or so pages describing how to select a chicken depending on how it’ll be cooked, how to cut it apart, what different poultry terminology means, etc. It teaches you what it means to “braise” or “broil” or “sauté,” etc.
For someone who didn’t learn to cook growing up, that book is a godsend.
On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”
I also use the Joy of Cooking and love it (as well as Mastering the Art of French Cooking).
> On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”
What I do is look at about half a dozen recipes online when I am trying something new. I compare them and make my own recipe based on that. Through practice I can usually glance at them and see pretty quickly what they are doing differently and similarly.
Most dishes come out really well because I can get a feel for the dish before it's made and I have the freedom to make changes based on what the different recipes say (and my intuition). I'd encourage everybody to take this approach and not follow just one recipe.
This is my favorite internet Chef (well famous chef on the internet now - hes accomplished, funny and cooks like my granda did -- He says "just make sure you measure EXACTLY" (as he puts in random amounts of shit and doesnt really measure a thing).
Knowing to just have a copy of [The Joy of Cooking] and [Better Homes and Gardens] takes you very far. The recipes are full fledged you're-a-homemaker-with-time-to-do-this level, so sometimes you can simplify them down -- e.g., there are some pancake adjacent recipes that have you put the yolk of an egg in first, followed later by the frothed white -- I skip that.
The only time I need to stray from those is for various kinds of ethnic cooking, in which case, a cookbook devoted to them serves a lot better than a website with a bunch of machine generated boilerplate at the beginning.
Oh for sure ethnic recipes are the downfall of The Joy of Cooking. Admittedly I have 0 skill in the kitchen, but those have turned out hilariously underwhelming. I’ve started to quadruple the spices
The Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker cookbook were the cookbooks my parents taught me to cook from.
I've since added the America's Test Kitchen cookbook to my collection. (Others, too, of course.) It's very explicitly a cookbook developed by chefs testing out recipes and fine-tuning them to get them just right.
Unfortunately, I rarely have the time & energy to cook from scratch these days, and the majority of the recipes I actually make come from Blue Apron—but they're also a pretty good source, and make some damn good dinners in a very practical amount of time.
The internet does have well written and tested recipes, you just have to find the people who are writing them. Mostly word of mouth because search has been dominated by content farm SEO spam.
I use recipe websites. When I want to try something new, I read a handful of recipes there, usually those with high user ratings. But what I really pay attention to is the writing style. If it's just a dry "do this then that then that", it might very well be some stuff someone made up on the spot. But if people go into detail, like "yes this seems like an awful lot of butter, but trust me, this is how the real thing is done at the restaurant where you don't see it", and little details that make me believe the person is actually writing from experience and dropping hints of what to watch out for, it's usually a really solid result for me.
Even when comparing across several recipes, I can still run into issues. For example, about five years ago I wanted to make banket, a Dutch almond pastry. I found several recipes online, compared them, and started testing them out. Every single one of them had a runny filling. Worse, most of the recipes were just copies of each other, sometimes with unit conversions, but the same wrong recipe.
I ended up experimenting with the recipe over the next six months, eventually getting the texture of the filling right. But those initial recipes were so far off, I doubt any of the authors had actually made it.
There is so many variables that could ruin it that it's hard to know exactly what went wrong. As an example, I've had relatives come visit me from a very humid place when I lived in a very dry place, and trying to cook the same way they do it at home but everything turning out differently, just because of the humidity of the air and the hardness of the water used.
Well sure, in essence that's just a "works for me" thing. Also, no idea how much this is a regional/cultural thing, I exclusively use a German site for this. It doesn't seem to suffer fake ratings like Aamzon etc., probably as there isn't too much to gain from that. Story mode might sound a little extreme though, it's mostly that I like useful hints about common pitfalls, rookie mistakes, ingredients that can have vastly varying properties, these kind of things that an experienced chef might just know, but not a rando like me. :)
Not exactly a cookbook, but the manual for our weber gas grill has proved shockingly useful in cooking most meats to near perfection. Has tables for thickness, cuts, etc.
Let me save you a few characters in the future friend:
In both Firefox and Chrome (probably Safari too) there is a page number at the top of the page when you open the PDF. Here you can manually type in a number. Open up the PDF and enter "65" and it'll take you directly to the page you enter.
Might be, although the UI is certainly different, at least for me on Windows. The page numbers are in the top-left on Firefox but top-center on Chrome.
Weber is a long-term premium brand. Hence plenty of skin in the game. I've had similar experience with manuals (or web sites) for cooking/kitchen products from similar brands.
This reminds me of When my great grandmother became unable to cook and decided to pass her recipes along, it turned out that half of her “traditional southern food” classics had been from some old southern living cookbooks or the back of a Betty Crocker box somewhere.
She made a cookbook of her recipes we all enjoyed for years and years and she included some of the original cutouts and index cards from probably the 50-60s or so. There’s also a lot of steps that you’d expect from a grandmother “cook until done” and “add some spices” to some of them.
I'm learning cooking as an adult (if I had to grade myself, I'd say "early-stage apprentice") and it's by far one of the most difficult things I've learned. One of the reasons is this:
> A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.
And it's not only that. If you just eat a lot, you'll know what things are supposed to look like when they are done. However, the difficult part is knowing what intermediate stages are supposed to look/smell/feel like! If you get it wrong at T=15 minutes, there might be no way to save the finished product at T=30 minutes, however hard you try.
And that intermediate stage you don't experience just by eating. That takes cooking and understanding.
A fun one is salt to taste early on when the dish isn't safe to taste - raw eggs are in the bowl for example. Not to mention the amount of salt to make the batter taste good is not always the same amount you want after baking is done.
No such book actually exists. There's a french book that covers basic/common procedures and a reader's digest book but those are about it; and they definitely are not beginner oriented.
Delia Smith's How To Cook taught me a lot. Three volumes. I just yanked volume 1 off the shelf and the first three chapters are on eggs: boiling, poaching, frying, scrambling, baking, frittata, tortilla, souffle omelettes, egg whites, egg yolks, meringues, custard, souffles, hollandaise. The next four chapters are flour.
There is such a book here in Switzerland called Tiptopf. It even includes sections like "where in your fridge should you put which foods" and covers all the basics.
It's very popular and almost a national treasure at this point. In high school here there is a cooking/housework class which is where pretty much every student gets this book. So due to the education system alone almost every person should have this book.
Someone bought Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course as a wedding present for me and my wife. We were already reasonably proficient in the kitchen, but this book goes from the basics of boiling an egg, cooking perfectly fluffy rice onto more complex recipes. We've bought it for newlyweds since.
The CIA has a huge blind spot for non-European food. Check out the Chinese Cooking Demystified youtube channel. They did a video on the CIA's laughably bad mapo tofu recipe. It was bad enough that simply following the instructions got their neighbors up in arms.
...The world, for just a moment, was a far more interesting place. Then the realization that no, the Central Intelligence Agency does not have a crack division of crypto-culinary experts in the midst of a cold war, attempting to thwart or coordinate psyops in which they sabotage other nations morale through spreading deliberate, yet subtly disasterous cooking advice.
My kid goes to a camp that abbreviates its name as CIA (the C stands for Camp and the IA are the initials of some old rich guy) and it always throws me.
I imagined it as them needing to have experienced chefs on hand to teach ethnic cuisine skills, so that deep-cover spies wouldn't be unmasked by their inability to make the local cuisine.
Cook's Illustrated Best Recipes goes into a lot of the background techniques and rationales. They have an online actual cooking course as well, A number of Alton Brown's books. Cooking for Geeks from O'Reilly. There are quite a few books and sites out there that go into techniques for different foods. Of course, there are also specialized examples as for bread baking.
That's just not true. Every generation has its own version of this. In the 60s-70s, it was The Joy of Cooking. In the 90s it was How To Cook Everything. Based on the replies there are some candidates for today.
The Joy of Cooking still takes up the bulk of its pages with recipes. Though pretty much all cookbooks did pre-Web. You got recipes out of big cookbook volumes (as well as newspapers etc.)
I agree with your basic point though. And there are tons of cookbooks today that do spend pages on relevant techniques--though certainly some are celebrity chef memoirs interspersed with recipes and high-quality photoss.
For me it was the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. For example, the section on cream soups is a detailed explanation of the process of making any cream soup, with a table of details and variations for each vegetable. I assume they didn't test every variation, but the first part obviously showed enough first hand experience to teach understanding not just rote repetition.
Harold McGee's books are classics: informed by modern science but intended for home cooks and covering all common ingredients and techniques. They're more like reference books then something readable though.
Harold McGee has two main book. On Food and Cooking is his more famous and 'hard core' book and definitely not something I would recommend to beginner cooks. The ratio of scientific background to useful advice is much more geared towards someone who really wants to deeply understand cooking. It also spends a lot of time talking about the history and anthropology of cooking, which while interesting, isn't useful if you just want to learn how to make a tastier omelet.
The Key To Good Cooking on the other hand is a much better book for home cooks and focuses entirely on practical ingredients and techniques and is organised in a way that makes it much easier to find exactly the advice you need as you need it.
'Never used' as I get a lot of pleasure tasting and trying myself, picking up tips via browsing bookstores in the past and YouTube or talking to chefs now.
I have a very well worn copy of The Joy of Cooking and highly recommend it. I rarely use it these days, but I've also built up a lot of cooking instinct and I'll usually just look up 3-4 recipes and combine the parts I like from each.
Very amateur cook here and I never thought about this before, but I can see your point.
When I follow a recipe it may or may not turn out well. If the recipe is a bad one or there's a part of it which requires a technique I don't know, the end product won't be good.
When I learn a technique it opens up a variety of options for just creating delicious stuff. A good example was learning how to make a pan sauce. Suddenly a bunch of things lying around the kitchen became ingredients for whatever kind of delicious sauce I was in the mood for, accompanying pretty much any meat or vegetable I wanted to eat. Dozens of possibilities for making great meals all came from one technique.
When you learn the techniques you end up with tons of options for what you're going to cook and the end product turns out better because you understand why it works.
I'd be a lot more hesitant about adopting this approach to baking though!
It's not quite what OP suggested, Joshua Weissman's Unapologetic Cookbook does something similar. The first section is literally, "A Little Cooking Foundation" and the first subsection is "Staples From Scratch." It's not comprehensive, but it is cohesive - by the end, you're using recipes from the beginning.
He's also got a YouTube channel that's pretty fun to watch.
That said, be careful what you wish for. My partner and I joke that he's pretty over the top sometimes. For example, the first part of that book includes recipes for butter and Ranch dressing. I'm sure they'll taste amazing, but if you're trying to make dinner after work, it'll be late by the time you get to eat, vs. just using stuff off the supermarket shelf. Really depends on what you're trying to get out of a cookbook.
Yea, Weissman is certainly a talented blend of home and pro cook but jeez do I not have time to make literally everything from scratch.
But making those recipes every once in a while can teach you a lot of techniques that you can carry over into other off-the-cuff recipes. One of my favorite things to do is add extra spices to mayo/ranch as a sauce or dressing. Sure, I can buy Siracha mayo at the store, but mixing it myself takes only a few seconds and I have more control. Little things like that can go a long way to making weeknight cooking more interesting and less monotonous.
I remember when I reached a point where I could just look at the rice through a glass lid and know it was done together with the timer in my head. Silly, but a big moment for me. Growing up, my parents always butchered the rice so I had this weird fear it was really hard. It’s not, as you said, timer and how much water.
This was one of the worst cookbooks I ever bought and some things were borderline wrong.
I should have taken notes of what irked me so much about it, but there were multiple things about it that weren't for geeks. Any interview in it filled liked pure filler and because the book is black and white illustrating pictures loose nearly all meaning.
Most "illustrations" are more than unnecessary anyway and seem to be only there as a space filler. Don't get me wrong with 400 pages it is not a pamphlet or something and there ARE useful information in there, but most of the information wasn't useful, scattered through the book, interrupted by interviews with 0 value and littered with recipes I would never cook.
I personally rate "The Food Lab" from Kenji Lopez-Alt much higher than this and more helpful.
I didn't care about the pictures, I was more interested in the explanation about the science behind cooking.
> .. littered with recipes I would never cook.
Me neither but that's exactly what I liked about it. I would have normally never tried them out, but because of this book I decided to try a few and was amazed how good they were.
You can also just go online and read the recipes for free, which is quite nice. I moved to a country without HelloFresh but sometimes take a browse through their recipes and buy ingredients in person, when wanting to try something new (but unsure what exactly.)
I've inherited an 80's Good Housekeeping cookbook. Some recipes are very dated but it goes in to detail on all the techniques needed for each dish including a lot of things people did more of back then like breaking down a whole bird from scratch.
I thought all cookbooks were just recipe collections until I picked up Darina Allen's 'Ballymaloe Cookery Course', a 'proper' cookbook that you could use for life by Ireland's Delia Smith (I guess? not too familiar with Delia)
Look at what your local culinary schools are using. Practical Cookery by Foskett et al is a popular textbook that covers pretty much everything you could want to know about how to cook and how to use every bit of equipment you can find in a kitchen.
One way to get some general recommendations is to check out the James Beard awards [0] for "general cooking" cookbooks. You'll get what the industry and expert chefs think are the best for beginning cooks to get started (and they're usually right).
Serious recommendation: Back in the day (like more than a decade ago) I learned to cook using rouxbe.com and it really set me up for a love of cooking. Can’t vouch for any changes since then, hopefully it’s still good.
I'm not really surprised. There's a youtube channel called Chef Jean Pierre. He is a retired Chef that used to run a restaurant since the 1970s, has cookbooks, was featured on PBS, etc. (Some say he has a more colorful past with his cooking school/restaurant business in Florida, but I don't know much).
Either way. He's got the consistently longest cooking videos on youtube. He explains that long videos don't do well. But it takes time to cook. Sometimes a long time. And he's a professional chef. So he goes very fast. All in order to make videos shorter so the audience doesn't turn away. Even with prep time where everything is arranged before filming, it will take him something like 20-30 minutes to finish one recipe. But his cooking is consistent, you watch him caramelize onions, you watch him multitask. Once again, he's very fast, but still, it's just not that fast to cook.
Audiences want fast. "quick 10 minute recipes" are all the fad. Equivalent to bite size twitter feeds and tik tok videos even though cooking can take a long time. But that's what the audience wants, and that's what the audience gets.
> He explains that long videos don't do well. But it takes time to cook.
This is not a mystery. People don't "cook along" with videos. People watch cooking videos for either to get inspired or for a vibe, most often for both.
A stew might take hours to be ready, but the core idea of it can be expressed succinctly in a few sentences. Totally made up example: "We brown beef, and then simmer it with potatoes low and slow with the bones in. It is ready when the meat falls off from the bones. Spice with a pinch of cinnamon." Those are long and sweaty hours in a kitchen to make it, but you can read the idea in seconds. Put the details and quantities in the description. Those few who want to cook it will find it there.
If there is some technique or twist, make a video about that specifically? It doesn't all have to be recipes. I have watched a video the other day where a person explained why they put a few drops of water in the pan when they are frying bacon. If they would have done it in the middle of a 20 minute video I might have missed it. Or what is even more likely would have been skeptical of the technique without the added explanation and test pieces where he has done it both ways to show the difference.
And videos you watch for vibes are not about cooking. They are about the personality of the presenter, that parasocial interaction. It doesn't matter how the food tastes. You won't eat it anyway. What matters are the feelings you experience while watching it.
Perhaps a stew doesn't need to show all the steps.
But a lot of recipes require you to multitask between several parallel workflows of ingredient preparation and combination, keeping you active in cooking until either the final step ("put everything except the garnish into the oven for X minutes") or until the recipe is complete.
I'm an amateur who enjoys cooking and does it once a day in order to feed my family.
One of my biggest learnings is that no matter what I do it takes quite a while to cook a meal. Huge complex meals can take hours to prepare, but even a simple meal usually takes me half an hour - because that's just the time it takes to grab the ingredients, boil water for pasta/rice/potatoes/..., cook and present it. The time it takes to cook a meal is largely determined by the duration of the longest step. All the rest is done in parallel, with more complex recipes simply requiring more multitasking. So cooking a simpler meal often makes for a less stressful experience and simpler flavours, but often doesn't save much time.
Exactly what I have experienced. Even whatever time is mentioned in the cookbooks, I was never able to beat it. It takes a minimum of 45 minutes to prepare a decent dish for me. I too am an amateur and I measure my time with my mother's time and I see a difference but not so much. I do not do multitasking if I have something on the stove which requires constant stirring or moving around.
Also I found that slow cooking brings out the best flavours and aroma.
My sister was a chef. I cook okay but the very difference with her is 1. the skills, 2. the tools and 3. the ability to do things in parallel. All that means she's a lot faster than me.
1. To chop an onion or a shallot real fast, you need to do it a lot. In restaurant, you can probably chop 100x what you can do at home. Grated carrot with julienne knive ? It seems absurd to me at the time, but in the end that's a training.
2. To not lose time, you need the proper tools (and know how to use them). Sharped knive, flour stifler, ... . For example, my knives are not sharpened often enough, which means I cannot chop vegetables that well.
3. Cooking several things in parrallel will go wrong if you do not know what to look at before things get burned. If you are too "prudent", you will lower the fires and degrade your scalability.
Video editing is a thing. Something that takes 30 minutes to cook can (and should!) be cut down to 10 minutes of video. You cut five onions, you film how you cut one and edit out the rest. If you stir for 10 minutes watching for certain signs to note when it's done - put in a 30 second show&tell for when it's close to done but not yet; and a 30 second show&tell for when it is ready; and edit out the other 9 minutes.
Yeah but if you're a newbie you're not really seeing the whole thing. That's the problem in my opinion. You're told to stir until golden brown, wait till the jiggle is just right, etc. You edit out the boring bits because that's common TV etiquette but then it doesn't become a cooking video anymore, it's just entertainment. That's the fundamental divergence of cooking content: instructional cooking or cooking as entertainment. One tries to mask itself as the other, because the other is boring. You end up with this weird edutainment content that's barely instructional and ripe with inaccuracies, hence recipes that take three times as long in reality to prepare.
I wager that most people hardly ever try the recipes they see, and of those that do, most suck at cooking. The point at which you start fast forwarding through stuff is the point in which you don't need cooking videos anymore and can just work off a written recipe. People want entertainment, and cooking is one of those easily monetized. non-politicized things on youtube that's just ripe to turn your brain off and follow along.
Well, no, the whole point is that a well edited cooking video would help a newbie to understand it, by explicitly and intentionally showing what exactly does "stir until golden brown" mean instead of just filming the whole cooking process and expecting that they'll magically notice which moment they should pay attention to.
You don't need to show the initial 5 minutes of stirring which are unambiguously not golden brown, you do need to show the "it looks brownish but it's not yet golden brown" and the "this is done" steps - and if you cut out the unimportant parts which aren't relevant to any decision, then it helps focus the learner's attention where it's pedagogically most effective.
In an ideal world they would also show "this is how it looks when it's too much and you should have stopped earlier", but that requires cooking/wasting an extra batch.
And for onion cutting, instead of spending the valuable viewer's time on looking at how you cut 5 onions, instead show how you cut 1 onion but make sure that the camera angles make it clearly visible how exactly you do it while you explain it; then the other 4 onions then add no value and can be cut off-camera.
Audiences don't want long segments of monotonic action with predictable outcome. No need to show how to slice a kilo of onions. It doesn't sound like the chef videos you mentioned suffer from this, but your "want fast" generalization is off the mark.
He doesn't waste time mincing onions, at most he'll showcase how to do one with proper technique. He has entire videos dedicated on how to chop vegetables and prepare meat. His videos take a long time because he doesn't bullshit the cooking process. You watch him stir until he's at the right consistency to add other ingredients, you watch him go through the entire process for literal 30 minute meals because that's what he promises you. If you have your ingredients ready, this will take 30 minutes. And 30 minutes is what you get.
Yep, that's how I read your original description and I'd watch the heck out of that if I had time. I was just commenting on the "they want it fast" remark.
I have seen a couple of TikTok creators do cooking videos in a very condensed way. They cut everything, but the important parts out of the video. For example no one wants to watch something in the oven for 20 Minutes, just say that it goes in the oven for 20 minutes and show the result after you took it out.
I’ve cooked with him a few times (he gave classes at our family’s cookery shop) and he’s the real deal. Colourful doesn’t begin to describe his actual background, though.
> What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this.
Books have a much higher production value than content farm material like your sister writes. They also rely heavily on reviews, which is incentive to invest the effort to do it right.
Modern recipe books have photos of the dish, so obviously they made it at least once. It would be unreasonable for them to invest all of the effort into writing a book, typesetting it, creating photography to match, proofreading, and getting it published, but to not actually try the recipe inside.
I’m sorry, but your sister is projecting her behavior on to everyone else in order to justify it. She is writing content farm material, but that doesn’t mean the entire industry works that way. Especially not the paid material book industry that hinges on reviews, gifting, and referrals.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but there's substance to what the sister-in-law is claiming. I've had a few (not many, but frequent enough) mistakes from very highly produced books, from high-profile celebrity chefs - case in point Thomas Keller. As I was measuring out the ingredients I thought no way this could be right, I'm an experienced home cook and baker. Went with the recipe against my instincts anyway and it turned out quite bad. Especially when the recipe is adapted from a pro kitchen, they make gargantuan portions of stuff, and when reduced for the home cook, the portion and ratio don't necessarily get tested. There are also egregious substitution advice blithely thrown in, for example the Bouchon Bakery cookbook tells you to heat river rocks (but not sedimentary rocks! lol wut?) in your oven and throw water on them to create steam. If you follow this advice you're likely to ruin your oven when one of these rocks explodes. The pros use steam-injected ovens, the test kitchen uses steel chains, but this "use river rock" thing was probably thrown in there by a non-baking intern and I can promise you they never tested this.
Except for rare pockets, the state of Internet recipes is utter garbage. Get a good foundational cookbook, cook and learn from your experience, which no shortcut can substitute. The people who do test their recipes as far as I know, are Cooks' Illustrated and America's Test Kitchens (they're the same company I think).
I have extensive cooking experience both professional and at home, and have written published recipes and also been a tester for published recipes.
I have very low trust in online recipes in general, and always evaluate the source of them first.
But books are not, overall, that much better! Whatever testing was done was often done ad hoc or in professional kitchens, or on a much larger batch that was arithmetically scaled down to home sizes. This often works fine but not always, and usually needs some tweaking. It tends to be especially true of cookbooks affiliated with a well known restaurant or chef, but certainly not limited to that.
Cookbook recipe testing is basically like fact checking in non-fiction. It's up to the author and not invested in or validated by the publisher, unless the publisher is specifically specialized in cookbooks. Usually this means some of the recipes were tested by the same handful of friends & family. The fact that there's a photo means very little, just that someone made that dish once. No cookbook has photos of every recipe.
> But books are not, overall, that much better! Whatever testing was done was often done ad hoc or in professional kitchens, or on a much larger batch that was arithmetically scaled down to home sizes. This often works fine but not always, and usually needs some tweaking. It tends to be especially true of cookbooks affiliated with a well known restaurant or chef, but certainly not limited to that.
When the pandemic lockdowns hit and the Bon Appetit test kitchen people all started filming from their home kitchens there was a marked shift in what they cooked and how over time. One of the things Carla Music noted was that having to do her own dishes completely changed her approach to designing recipes because she realized how much of a hassle it is to be pulling out all kinds of specialized pots and pans and multiple spoons and such.
Rather, I assume, they probably think that since they earned that experience now, they may as well profit. These "actually realistic recipes" are apparently an unexplored market after all.
Are there any specific markers you for books that can be trusted?
All these comments are making me think that I should never trust any proportions in a cookbook again. I guess that leaves experimentation and keeping notes, which I already do -- but curious if there are existing published recipes tested in home kitchens that I can rely upon a little more.
I don't usually consider a book trusted until I've cooked a few recipes from it. There are chefs & authors I know from experience or reputation that take home cooking of their recipes seriously but even then if they change publisher or go a while without a book I'll be cautious with recommending the new one.
The things I look for in recipes are unfortunately not things that are easy to share as advice to look for, mostly intuition based on long experience. I just sit down and mentally "cook" the recipe, visualizing each ingredient and step and seeing if it makes sense and the directions are realistic.
One simple thing you can definitely look for is count how many pans, bowls, measuring cups a recipe calls for. If it's several of each that recipe was certainly written for an environment with professional dishwashers and likely not tested for home cooking. Might not be a bad recipe either, but it's more likely to leave out some details because it was originally written for a professional audience where you could assume familiarity with the techniques.
Another thing to look for is check the measurements and see where they came from, especially now that metric measures are becoming more common. If all the metric measurements are too precise it probably wasn't written or tested in metric. No one is measuring 118ml that's a half cup that was converted on paper. Or like 75mg of egg isn't one egg or two eggs, so that recipe was scaled down from a much larger one and probably not tested at this volume. Again though a red flag not a condemnation.
You seem to be projecting assumption here. The comment you replied to says she's written books they've seen in a book store.
Also, note that the average book sells very few copies. Even traditionally published books. Some books have higher production values that'd justify a lot of extra effort, but tends to be linked to name recognition for people with very established names. It's not at all a given that all that much money has gone into producing these books.
My wife is a professional recipe writer for magazines, books, restaurants, meal-kit services, and companies.
She absolutely tests the recipes. A huge part of her work is testing for other people in addition to writing them etc. Testing itself is a HUGE industry.
I don’t want to say anything bad about a family member, but please treat your comment as a reflection on her, and not of recipe writers in general.
Just to echo this, recipe tester is a profession in and of itself. There are publishers where recipes are not tested, but more established and trusted ones absolutely do.
My favourite on Indian cuisine is the Dishoom cookbook: it comes with recipes for most of their most famous dishes from their restaurant. I've tried most and, whilst the recipes might need a little tweaking to match your kitchen equipment, they are generally spot on. In fact, as far as cookbooks go, it's one of my favourites because it actually gets you close enough that you can figure out what to tweak.
And on the topic of onions: it has a three page section on caramelising onions, which will take you anywhere from half an hour to over an hour, depending on the quantity. That book doesn't lie.
I also have cookbooks that have been gifted to me that belong in the trash. You can tell from just looking at the ratios, times, and method description that the dish isn't going to turn out as expected. Worst of all, my partner is the type that can only cook from a recipe book and this has brought on many arguments over a simple suggestion to deviate from the recipe.
Restaurant cookbooks are often very good, if they give you the actual recipes they use in the restaurant.
Except... a) they're ideally making big batches, enough for 10 or 20 servings, and b) their stuff is usually very modular, i.e. made out of other recipes. How do I make that great chicken with the yogurt dip? First make the marinade (recipe on page 42). Then make the spice mix for the yogurt (recipe on page 65). Then make blackened peppers (page 210). etc etc
I've almost never seen a recipe book that didn't have at least one recipe where some aspect of the picture didn't blatantly contradict the recipe; i.e. it was just a stock photo.
Even in Delia's course - she has a good reputation for testing & refining etc. over time, not a TV personality with questionable time/skill in kitchen - the photos & making of those dishes to photograph are credited to someone else.
(And sometimes they do clearly vary from the recipe - like clearly not the called-for cheese, or without the described scattering of something over the top or whatever. Which I think's mostly fine or even good, but occasionally I think 'what do you mean by x' and either can't tell from the photo, or have to remind myself that that's only someone else's interpretation anyway.)
Here's my grandma's recipe for flapjacks ... accompanied by a picture of flapjacks ... the recipe I made up, the picture was from a stock photo site (best place to get pictures of gravy! /jk) ...
I know a food stylist and a food photographer (both work / have worked for major UK newspapers) and this is nonsense. They cook and photograph every recipe.
That's a pretty modern development. Older cookbooks, including classics that are just as good or better than anything being written now, don't have photos, and rarely have illustrations.
Cannot say for recipe books, but for illustrations for ads and/or for restaurant posters, the "traditional" way was to not use food at all, or use only partially actual food, the rest being artificial.
Very likely this has changed but once there were specialized artists that made mock-ups (often using wax, but not only), besides the ready-made props (usually plastic).
And then there is an endless list of non-food ingredients that are used because they come out great in photography, example:
I'm inclined to give food photographers a pass on the "non-food ingredients" thing. Most of these fall into the category of "make something which looks like food but lasts longer" -- fake ice cream which doesn't melt, fake milk which doesn't soak into cereal, fake syrup which doesn't soak into pancakes, et cetera. It's not a matter of making something which looks better than real food -- it's just that photoshoots have a unique need when it comes to how long the food lasts. If you're eating pancakes, they should never stay on your plate for the amount of time a professional photographer would want to spend with them.
Sure, nothing against the practice, food photographers do what is needed to do to obtain a good result, it was only to explain why often times what you actually cook looks quite different from the photos, a part is to be attributed to (less) capabilities of the cook, but a part comes from the sheer fact that the photo does not represent the actual output of the recipe.
I know someone who was a cook for a food photographer. they always made 10x what was called for. For one salad in the photo she made 10 so they could choose the best looking one, then a lot of time was spent adjusting exactly where each tomato was. Likewise make 10 pies, take a slice our of each, then the artist uses a rubber scrapper to put the right lines in the side of each slice, then choose the best to photograph. It was all real food.
I'm not saying that they don't also do fake food, but a lot of real food is used as well.
This is probably why I often just browse the ingredients of a recipe for inspiration and sometimes even don't read the instructions. Most recipe books are not very good. Not trying your own recipes is, respectfully, just fraud and I would not call those books high quality.
Its like buying expensive things, a higher price doesn't always translate to higher quality. Sometimes it just looks like high quality, is marketed and priced as such, but it falls apart when used. Sometimes it does however, and it takes some experience to be able to discern between the two.
And there are actually high quality recipe books that are more than just inspiring, sometimes they are unpretentious and you know it because the recipes 'just work'.
From what I’ve read and seen, many cookbook authors test their recipes repeatedly in home kitchens. Most have testers or volunteers to ensure they make sense and work. By contrast I have some books that are restaurant recipes they purposely did not modify for home use. They are ridiculously complex and interesting.
I picked up a cookbook from the 70s in a second hand shop. It's got okay content for the most part but some recipes are incredibly unappealing for modern tastes, stuff like savory jello.
This is a little frustrating to hear. Since that is exactly the feeling I often have. Proportions and time seems incorrect and you question what you are going wrong. I have a few cookbooks like the ones from Yotam Ottolenghi where the recipe is actually correct. It is so much more fun to use. Nothing wrong with improvising in the kitchen, but trying to fix incorrect salt balance, being stressed over longer cooking time than expected, etc. is not much fun.
I'm a decent cook, and occasionally I've been in the middle of a recipe and noticed something is off.
It came with experience, but knowing whether 1 TSP or 1 tbsp of something per portion is the right rough ratio comes in handy significantly more often than you think
> that is exactly the feeling I often have. Proportions and time seems incorrect and you question what you are going wrong. I have a few cookbooks like the ones from Yotam Ottolenghi where the recipe is actually correct. It is so much more fun to use.
The recipes are good. But the book rarely specifies an amount of anything, and sometimes when it does it's accompanied by a note saying "I toned this way down for an American audience". [1] Many recipes include the direction "add enough water to prevent scorching" one or more times.
I just take the philosophy that that book mostly expects you to know what you want and how to get there, and whenever you try making a new recipe from it you might be wildly off. But it's not a matter of the recipes being "incorrect" -- they're great! It's that they're underspecified.
I don't think the requirement for familiarity with a recipe can really be gotten rid of. Learning to make rice-a-roni from a box had its hiccups; over time I tended to get better results despite not consciously doing anything different. And if any recipe is going to be tested for reliability and ease of following by people who are barely able to cook, it will be the directions on a box of rice-a-roni.
[1] And he wasn't kidding about that. I had to use five times the amount of berbere indicated in that particular recipe to get it to taste right.
My wife has written cookbooks and worked as a recipe tester for cookbooks, blogs, and even the little recipes on the back of bags of flour and stuff. I’m sure not every published recipe was tested, but a lot of them were. Some by me, an inexperienced cook nervously testing recipes for my wife’s book as she watched me like a hawk. At least 2 people tested every recipe in her books.
The Australian Women's Weekly's recipe tagline is "Triple Tested", meaning their recipes are cooked at least three times in their test kitchen. The kitchen has been at it for around 100 years and their recipes are highly trusted and well known in Australia (for good reason).
Surely that can’t be true. Even semi professional chefs need to figure out what flavour combinations need to go together, amounts of each item, etc. Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. I just don’t believe she would get anything approximating a good result from this.
I hate that we do this in so many domains of our lives.. create unrealistic expectations via fake representation and then wonder why so many people are unhappy.
> Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like.
Food photography very often is staged for visual appeal, not prepared as directed (for a recipe illustration) or as actually prepared (for a restaurant illustration.)
> Even semi professional chefs need to figure out what flavour combinations need to go together, amounts of each item, etc.
No they do not. Haven't you ever tasted something and said "this needs salt?"
Once you know what x+y tastes like and y+z tastes like, you can sometimes imagine what x+z would truly taste like; Any two things you think might taste good together probably do, for just as surely as you can imagine what something looks like, or sounds like, you can imagine what something tastes like.
The amounts generally remain the same orders of magnitude so even if they're not to your taste, the dish will probably "work", and if it doesn't, home cooks have priors:
Everyone has a crap oven, or high/low humidity or altitude or whatever, so there isn't a single recipe that would work for everyone, and I think most home-cooks know this! Hasn't a recipe ever turned out badly for you?
So if there are any issues they might have with a recipe, I could believe they would blame their skill and/or their kit, and/or adjust a few times before they ever blamed the recipe, because surely that can't be true!
> Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. I
We have hi-resolution AI pictures all the time on this very site that people can't tell from fiction, and food surprises you?
C'mon! You can get pictures of just about anything from stock photography services. At newspaper-dpi nobody is going to notice!
> I just don’t believe she would get anything approximating a good result from this.
Well I guess it depends what exactly you mean by a "a good result..."
It could be the way you're interpreting, but I suspect what she means is that she didn't go through and verify the exact measurements and timings in the recipe. There are simply too many variables involved in (non-baking) recipes to produce an exactly reproducible result - your ingredients might be different sizes, your "medium" heat is probably not their medium heat, differences in produce might affect the amount of salt/sugar you need to add, etc. Also, when scaling a recipe up or down, you won't actually want to scale things linearly - it generally takes much longer to cook a large portion than it does a small one, or it feels silly to use 1/8th of an onion, etc. Most of these can be solved through measuring by weight, but that's annoying unless you're baking.
So the recipe is really just some rough proportions that have probably never been cooked exactly; you are expected to make adjustments. That's why I find video recipes super helpful - you can see how each step is supposed to look, so if the timings in the recipe are wrong you can still adjust on the fly. And tasting as you go is always a good idea too.
Lately I've been hunting recipes online for FODMAP compatible meals. Some of the recipes are just weird/wrong or poorly written.
Last night I was following a recipe that listed 8 eggs in the ingredients but in the instructions only telling you to use 3...
So many other weird things as well... non standard measurements or putting things in the instructions that dont show up in the ingredients, or instructions with completely unrealistic timeframes (like the caramelized onions). Also.. the number of FODMAP recipes that have major no no foods in them like Garlic or Onion :-$
It's more like deploying code to production without at the very least running it once. That would be really fucking dumb. Most people don't do that. The above comment is saying that most cookbooks are hot garbage and dont have recipes that have been used once.
I did have a guy, supposedly experienced, push some code to master that he had obviously not run because it still had obvious syntax errors. I can only assume there was a bit of a culture mismatch, but still, shall we say I was peeved.
Aha, I've often vaguely suspected as much with certain well-known food columns. I wrote it off to incompetent cooks, but it makes more sense that they were just making it up as they went along.
One that sticks in my mind was a recipe that called for a dozen whole cloves, where really you'd just use one or two. If any.
A dozen whole cloves, used in the way the recipe called for, would make pretty much any dish painfully inedible.
I remember a conversation in my 20s with a friend who said "Jamie Oliver's recipes all work" and I was nonplussed by it - I figured that all the recipes in recipe books had been tried and tested, but boy was I naïve. The ones I know which always work are: any Jamie Oliver, any Anna Jones, Ottolenghi's Simple, River Cafe Easy, and The Intolerant Gourmet (a great book of recipes even if you don't have food intolerances). Leith's Cookery Bible is also good - there's a particulaly good one for boned stuffed chicken - although some of the recipes are a little dated now.
Most recipe blogs these days include pictures of the dish as it is being prepared. I think it would be hard to generate those pictures without actually cooking the dish (though as AI image generation improves that will change).
Haha I understand you. I have way too many cookbooks that are untried and untested. I like looking at the pretty photos and marvel at those kitchens and kitchenware. And the ingredients, so colorful!
Then I realize I don't know what half those ingredients are, wouldn't know where to source them, and in any case I don't have time to go shopping for nonstandard stuff.
...and here's an example of someone whose job can be replaced with ChatGPT.
I realised long ago that most published recipes are not very good, but it's the first time I've heard that the writer doesn't even try them. "Turns out OK" is a terrible bar, if I make up something in my head it'll almost always turn out "OK", if I'm following a recipe it's because I want a better chance of it being better than OK.
YouTuber home cooks make it “live”, so I generally trust those. Same for Gordon Ramsey, Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal etc.
As far as YouTubers go you have the holy trinity of Adam Ragusea, Ethan Chlenpwoski and Joshua Weissman, although I dislike the latter and would sub (haha) him out for Brian Lagerstrom.
All of those YouTubers hit a good balance between: scientific basis, concise clear steps and taking reasonable shortcuts.
Yes. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
I do have a few heuristics for pure recipe books:
1) the recipes have short lists of ingredients. There is a tendency to include obscure or hard to get ingredients for the sake of it, even if it's impossible to taste in the final product, I guess as a source of pride for home cooks.
2) the recipes discuss possible failures and ways around them. Especially with baking, there is inherent variability in ingredients, so you can tell the author prepared the dish many times before when they saw things going wrong and worked around that.
3) not always easy to find out, but the author being a professional working chef (not a celebrity chef) is a good sign. There is no time for unnecessary embellishments in a working kitchen, things must be robust and as simple as possible for the given final result.
The best example I've seen so far were David Lebovitz's recipes. Always stripped down to bare necessities, with multiple contingencies discussed, robust and simple. You can tell that's something that can be made dozens times a day with consistent results. Too bad it's so rare.
> The best example I've seen so far were David Lebovitz's recipes.
Nice to see a +1 for Lebovitz - not really familiar with him, but have been getting into home-made ice cream and just ordered The Perfect Scoop last night as my first/only ice cream recipe book.
This is what I long have suspected to be the case. At least for cookbooks of the very common kind. Perhaps the most well known ones do it differently. But cookbooks are a dime a dozen, and probably most commonly bought as gifts. Quality is not a priority.
As for quality, I expect a bread recipe printed on a flour package to have better chances of having been verified.
My grandmother was friends with both Martin Yan and Julia Child.
One way I made time to spend with her in a meaningful way was to have her teach me recipes that she learned from them (she never traveled with Julia, but she did travel with Martin on several trips to asia (on one trip she then took the Orient Express)...
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One thing that I learned from her was that recipes (not baking/pastries) were good guidlines - but every time I asked "how much" to put in of a certain spice/ingredient she would shrug her shoulders and wave her hand and say "whatever you feel is right"
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My best girl-friend has been at the french laundry for years - and I learn a lot of information from her regarding ingredients, wine pairings etc.
But at the end of the day - worry about your own palette prefs - but follow a recipe, and as youre eating it, determine what you would change to make it more to you/your families/friends tastes and follow your gut. :-)
I imagine this is like a senior dev who says all they do is copy code from StackOverflow. There’s some amount of good social skills, humility, and expertise that forgets how simple things for them are like rocket science to others.
This seems about right to me from watching Kenji cook on his YouTube channel. He was promoting his wok book and everything he cooked he would say, “I think it says to do it this other way in my book, but you can do it this way or your own way and it will be fine”.- which I appreciate. I’ve noticed the cooking channels I watch on YouTube are technique based more than specific recipes. So I’m wondering if some people read a recipe thinking “this is the exact way” and other look at it as just a rough template
I notice this in alot of recipes. See very highly rated reviews, lots of reviews, scroll down to reviews, 'omg i can't wait to try this' = 5 stars ... hmm
People put a number of stars based on their mood, presumptions, willingness to support a buddy's business, but not so often based on the real experience with the product or service.
This is why I find America’s Test Kitchen so helpful: they’ve tried everything repeatedly, and because of that it’s rare to find one of their recipes that doesn’t work.
That's why you should only follow recipes from reputable sources.
Some people break down the science of a particular dish and explain in all detail the purpose of every single ingredient and cooking technique. They run experiments and tell you the impact of every single decision and come up with an optimized blueprint.
>...she never actually tries her recipes. When it's time to do a new piece, she sits down at her computer and makes up a recipe. She is experienced and knowledgeable she it usually turns out ok.
If she's experienced I guess that means she does (did?) cook something. So what does she cook when she does cook?
For what it's worth, I found the best way to make them is to cut them into very thin slices. My rule is bell peppers have to always be "bite sized" because of how tough they are. If you make the pieces to big, you will have to "bite into" the pepper rather than eating it whole and I think that's where they get a bad rap since they can be very tough to bite into.
I dated an editor for a travel writer for a well known travel book company. He'd update his old books to include his 'visits' to new places, sourcing the content from other publications without actually going there.
Already on it! The images part. https://jellicles.substack.com/p/10-rooting-for-root-vegetab... : all images are AI generated. I am a classically trained chef and so the recipes are tested. Sure saved me a lot of time to put it together. There is no way I could have thrown something together with pictures without midjourney. The actual recipes are already ready but won’t be up before 2024.
I can come up with..say 10-15 Cabbage dishes with pictures and a write up in 30 minutes. The recipes might take less than one hour if I know where to look. The main thing we learn at culinary school is flavour pairings + texture + colour. French cuisine is very codified with its mother sauces..the six main cooking methods etc ..everything else is derived from the main templates. It’s a little more now with sous vide and gels and alginate etc. but that’s not for home kitchen recipes.
Example: cabbage. Goes well with sweet potato, guacamole, onions, citrus, chilli peppers. carrots, peas. Another example: Walnuts+cabbage. Because there is walnuts, apples will piggy back on those flavors. Because it does, cranberries will piggy back on the apples. Decide which one of the mother sauces. Then I can make a salad or in a taco or a sandwich or a quinoa bowl or soup or like a cabbage roll. That’s like at least..6 recipes I can come up with this one flavour combination.
But there is a method and order to it. You can’t pair cranberries with chilli peppers and cabbage. It won’t work unless you have apples and walnuts. It’s kind of nested.
This is how we build flavours as layers. Next we repeat the same process for textures. Then we do for colours(because we eat with our eyes too). French cuisine being so codified, this process can be applied to any cuisine and any ingredient.
I am putting it across in a simplified manner, but it takes years to ‘get it’ intuitively to build a dish on the fly. I started cooking professionally twenty years ago. I can come up with a book of recipes within a day.
But the pictures tho’ … AI generated photos are a time + money saver. Game changer. I love it!
- 12 slices of bacon
- 12 mozzarella sticks
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup breadcrumbs
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/2 teaspoon paprika
- Vegetable oil, for frying
- Marinara sauce, for serving
Instructions:
Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Wrap each mozzarella stick with a slice of bacon, starting from one end and wrapping it tightly. Place the bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks on the prepared baking sheet.
Bake the bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks in the preheated oven for about 12-15 minutes, or until the bacon is crispy and the cheese is melted. Remove from the oven and set aside.
In three separate shallow bowls, set up a breading station. Place flour in the first bowl, beaten eggs in the second bowl, and breadcrumbs mixed with garlic powder and paprika in the third bowl.
Heat vegetable oil in a deep skillet or pot over medium heat until it reaches 350°F (180°C).
Take each bacon-wrapped mozzarella stick and dredge it in flour, then dip it into the beaten eggs, and finally coat it with the breadcrumb mixture, pressing gently to adhere. Repeat this process for each mozzarella stick.
Carefully place the coated mozzarella sticks into the hot oil, a few at a time, and fry for about 2-3 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the fried mozzarella sticks to a paper towel-lined plate to drain excess oil.
Serve the bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks warm with marinara sauce for dipping. Enjoy!
These bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks make for a delicious appetizer or snack that combines the gooeyness of melted mozzarella with the savory crunch of bacon.
Looking forward to the Stable Diffusion based Illustration.
I've found it surprisingly good. It seems to understand how flavours are paired at least well enough to take a stab at balance. It does tend to default to American cuisine though.
Ask it for something bizarre like sweet and sour potatoes and see how it does.
Or a recipe that combines anchovies and strawberries, that's a good one.
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!
> The tablespoon of olive oil is to kickstart the process, after that enough fat will render out of the meat to keep it going.
Agreed on meat, but I consistently see way-too-small amounts of oil suggested for cooking veggies, too. It's like every recipe writer online got together and decided that 1) they must specify oil quantities for those steps, but 2) the quantity must never exceed one tablespoon.
Vegetables can release a lot of water. The amount and how much it affects the other ingredients varies significantly on which you put in, in what order, how much, and in what size of pan. If the pan is crowded, has high walls, or a lid, that can also affect how much water stays in the pan.
I can't think of any situation where I would want more than a literal tablespoon of oil for cooking the first veggies thrown in (usually onion). By the time the onions have begun to caramelize there's is enough water that the original tablespoon of oil is no longer significant.
The first step in carmelization is to remove most of that water so the onions can reach maillard reaction temps. Try doing it without oil and an equivalent amount of water instead. It's much more temperamental.
> The first step in carmelization is to remove most of that water
Where did I say it wasn't?
Anyway, about adding water, I respectfully disagree. The oil is necessary and it really is a tablespoon in a shallow and uncrowded pan with the lid off.
EDIT: I'm specifically talking about browning some onions when called for as an initial step in a recipe, not for making a huge batch of them for use as a condiment. Cutting the onion into finer pieces also speeds things up.
America's Test Kitchen actually does suggest adding water to reduce the amount of time needed for caramelization--and not an equivalent amount of water, but much more than the amount of oil you'd use.
The idea is that adding water, raising it to a boil, and covering the pan reduces the amount of time needed to raise the temperature of the onions to the caramelization point, more than offsetting the amount of time needed to remove the water itself. That plus adding some baking soda near the end reduces the overall time considerably.
I'd rather not comment about the reliability of ATK because that would be missing the point, but their recipe seems overly fussy and anyway they cut their onions too long in that video. I think it's kind of gross when you have dangling onion strands.
Slow cook them first for a few hours at a low temperature and then caramelize after. All your onion in a dry pot. Don't add water. Strain them when done and you have... soggy pale onions. Heat up the biggest pan you have and add some butter to do the caramelization (don't crowd the pan like they do in their video). Add some good balsamic vinegar and brown sugar while you're at it. Be sure to make a huge batch so you can freeze some for later. Don't bag and freeze before letting the onions come to room temperature. It's a lot of water in them onions man, but you can use that strained out water for a vegetable stock!
I've got my own invented version of this style. I will boil them in a cm of water or something at the perfect time it evaporates I then add the oil.
I don't like them like the Americans do but there is lots of to play with it. (I've even started boiling onions whole before I use them in a bunch of other dishes)
> I can't think of any situation where I would want more than a literal tablespoon of oil for cooking the first veggies thrown in
I've helped cook at a camp where 500 people were going to eat the meal. That requires very different thinking from large family cooking where at most 20 people are eating, and a small family is different as well.
If you take a university student who has just left home and never cooked for themselves and tell them "just pour a glug proportional to the ingredients"...that's pretty close to useless for them, especially since they don't yet an intuition for what things you can freehand (and how much you can freehand them) and which things you shouldn't.
After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
That said, I agree with you that recipe writers usually do a poor job of laying which things fall more on the "suggested amount, you can just eye ball it" end of the spectrum and which ones are "you should really pull out at least a spoon to get close on this one".
> After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
Not GP and I wouldn't phrase it quite like that - but I definitely would. You can give a rough indication, but salt should be added to taste.
(Unless we're talking about baking, where for one thing you can't taste until the end anyway. In that case yes of course measure, still to taste, but the feedback loop is longer.)
>After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
No, but you do, almost universally, say "salt to taste." Which is a different way to say the same thing.
Strictly speaking a PhD isn't a PhD "in" something. It is simply a PhD (a doctorate in philosophy).
Obviously philosophy isn't that informative a term, so people try to be helpful by adding what
field or topic their actual research was about.
Some vocational/applied higher degrees in specific fields do have specific initials to differentiate them from a "generic" PhD (for example, the EngD).
> Spices in a stew will only ever possibly reach 212. When blasted on dry heat they can get higher.
Some claim that this is a thing when making rice too. I've tried toasting the grains for a few minutes before adding the water to boil, but I can't say I can tell the difference. Maybe that's a time issue like the onions, or maybe it just doesn't do anything...
> Some claim that this is a thing when making rice too. I've tried toasting the grains for a few minutes before adding the water to boil, but I can't say I can tell the difference. Maybe that's a time issue like the onions, or maybe it just doesn't do anything...
Quite a few Indian dishes require toasting the rice first, if you don't you will end up with a very different dish. In the right context, it makes a huge difference.
> Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home.
until you read Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and start watching the epicurious yt channel.
the "4 levels" and "pro chef vs home cook" epicurious playlists are amazing eye openers, where they exactly highlight the actual difference in skills and knowledge.
Restaurant quality is real and it’s because high end restaurants usually buy the best produce at wholesale and pay for stuff a grocery store can’t. For example they get much better blackberries in top restaurants because they need to be handled extremely gently when ripe: a grocery store can’t put that stuff out on shelves or it would get destroyed.
At the very high end, restaurants also get a quality edge by creatively using excessive labor — in other words using ingredients that are very hard to source, and doing things to food that are so tedious or complicated that nobody would try them at home.
One of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen, is closing soon. Their menu costs about $800 per person, but even at that price the business barely turns a profit and runs largely on unpaid interns who put in the endless hours of manual labor so they could have the famous restaurant on their CV:
Plus, restaurants can practice the same recipe again and again for months or years on end. It would be pretty damning if they wouldn't be better than home cooks after that much repetition.
I'm going to bet that this one is going to depend in part on the particular product, and it's freshness/storage conditions, your location relative to the source mill, and ambient weather.
Yet, "sifting flour" was a thing years back... not the one bought in the store but the one stored in large sacks, and ground in the local mill. The amount of lumps sifted out was non-trivial.
You can conceivably get a Maillard reaction with toasting some spices (e.g. cumin seed) where you wouldn’t just by throwing them in a stew. But I agree with your overall point. The 1-2 tbsp olive oil is -everywhere-. Also, better to use canola oil for browning meat.
1-2 tbsp of oil is enough to improve the thermal conductivity between the pan and the meat. you're not cooking the meat in that oil. then the meat starts releasing it's own oil (and water) and continues the process without needing additional oil.
if you don't put in a bit of oil, then you're searing one side in a dry pan, and the second side in an oiled pan. and if you're only putting a bit of oil in and it's all in contact with the meat there's really no reason to worry about smoke point, use whatever oil is handy.
Toasting spices can flavor your oil, but the Mailard reaction really only happens when amino acids react with reducing sugars, so nothing to do with spices at all.
Olive oil is fine for browning as long as it isn't extra virgin olive oil. Refined olive oil can actually have a higher smoke pointe than rapeseed/canola oil.
Olive oil is not the best choice for browning meat, because its burning point is too low. Once it burns, it will disintegrate into bitter byproducts, some of which are carcinogenic.
Canola oil has a high burning point so is a better choice, but if you really want to avoid it, sunflower oil is a good choice as well.
Light/refined olive oil has a smoke point of up to 470°F. You can sear meat anywhere between 400°F and 500°F.
There is absolutely no reason you can't sear meat with olive oil. You just have to use the light/refined stuff, and not the virgin/extra virgin (which have smoke points closer to 410°F.
Worth noting that canola oil, in the best case scenario, has a smoke point of 450°F.
You can cook steaks without adding any oil at all -- in fact, this is how to cook steak in an apartment without getting it all smokey.
According to America's Test Kitchen, do this: Pat dry. Start cold in nonstick/cast iron — no preheat, no oil. Flip every 2 mins. Start high, after few flips, turn heat down to medium. Keep flipping every 2 mins until done.
Most cuts worth eating have some fat on them (filet mignons might not but they are very dry anyway -- to me they're not worth it). This fat is enough to brown and cook the steak on. It's completely unnecessary to add oil.
Even better is a reverse sear in stove on an elevated rack on a baking sheet at 230 degrees for 30 minutes, then you finish the steak off on a hot oiled (avocado or maybe peanut oil) skillet for 1 minute on each side.
I went from sous vide > reverse sear (faster than sous vide) > oil-free pan-sear, in the decreasing order of time of it takes.
I find the pan-sear delivers almost the same results in much less time (of course, you won't get the uniform insides of a reverse sear, but close enough since you're flipping so much). I'm also at a stage of life when I can afford better cuts of meat.
That’s what chefs were taught too. The reasoning behind it is that less flipping equals good browning. The idea is that carryover heat and resting will cook the insides adequately.
But I think ATK or someone else debunked this as the best practice. Flipping more than once gets you more even internal cooking.
In my oven, 230deg is just about maximum temperature; cooking anything that hot for 30 minutes will result in cinders. I take it your oven is calibrated in Fahrenheit?
I’m curious too — 230F seems low for that amount of time. I’ve cooked plenty of meat in a smoker at 200-250F, but it takes many hours. On the flip side I agree 450F (~230C) sounds a bit high, but not imo catastrophically so.
I season before bringing the steak to room temperature; and after seasoning I leave it standing for a good hour.
The idea is that salt on the outside of the steak initially draws moisture out of the steak, making it dry. But given enough time, the salt penetrates deeper into the steak, and holds the moisture in.
Plenty of spices distribute their flavors better in oils/fats than in water.
Take some szechuan peppercorns and boil them in a soup and see if you feel the ma numbing sensation. Then saute them in oil for a few minutes and then add the soup, and notice the difference.
Nah, a cake with settled, minimally touched flour is dense and too… cakey. You take a fork and run the tines through settled flour thats been sitting for any length of time and you see you end up with much less fluffed up flour in a given volume. Now mix in cornstarch, for either cake or frying batter, and that helps prevent the gluten from forming when you mix in whatever liquid, keeping the texture of the cake or breaded whatever airy and light.
I only sift flour if I'm making scones, it seems to make a difference. I'm not a cakey person, I don't bake cakes. It's cake bakers that tend to care about sifting.
That strikes me as a fairly modern thing. I imagine that weevils and/or rocks in flour was a common issue just a few generations ago (or, in many countries, to this day).
It can also remove clumps that can form in wetter climates, or from flour of lower quality. During the pandemic I got a big ol bag of flour that was loaded with clumps, and I had to gradually sift all 50lb of it. So, I guess it can still be totally useful in modern times if you have bad purchasing and storage options.
I always put my flour in clear plastic containers so I can see how much I have left. I also put bay leaves in with the flour, as the eggs/larval stages of a lot of grain pests are susceptible to their eugenol. [0,1]
For anything long term I pour the flour out onto long trays, let it reach 0°F/-18°C in my freezer and keeping it there for 3 days, then storing it in food safe 5-gallon buckets with bay leaves and oxygen absorbers, though some also use dry ice. [2]
these are great tips! i recently bought some of the buckets (pp), and I've been freezing all my grains and legumes upon purchase for a long time for exactly that reason
i'd be nervous about putting dry ice in a hermetically sealed container like a bucket
a thing i've noticed with storing food in plastic (pet) coke bottles is that they never seem to get beetles and that they tend to collapse a bit over the first year or so; i suspect that, even without a fe/nacl oxygen absorber, the food oxidizes enough to consume the oxygen initially present, which reduces the gas volume about 20 percent and kills any beetles initially present
a lot of my flour is in 6-liter pet water bottles with pp caps; none of it has evident beetles but i did freeze it first
The issue isn’t that bugs get in, but that bugs are already in. Weevils will lay their eggs in with the flour, which are impossible to sift out. Unless you bake them at 140°F/60°C, freeze them at 0°F/-18°C, use pesticides, or deprive them of oxygen, they’ll eventually hatch and eat your flour/grain.
Hah, for once, a benefit of having celiac, no wheat for me apparently means no weevils for me. I mix up a lot of gluten-free flour mix to substitute for all-purpose flour. It's a mix of way too many flours and starches (white rice, brown rice, sweet rice, potato starch, potato flour, ivory teff, tapioca starch, arrowroot flour) that I got from a blog many years ago, and haven't tried to slim down because it works great for me. Never had any bug issues; maybe specialty flours have better quality control.
I mix up 2 kilograms at a time: 500 grams sweet rice flour, 400 grams brown rice flour & potato starch, 200 grams ivory teff & arrowroot starch, 100 grams white rice flour, potato flour, & tapioca starch. The original recipe had almond flour instead of white rice flour, but I decided to make this nut-free (had some friends with nut allergies).
Nope - those are all bagged single ingredients I usually order online. Authentic Foods has most of them. The ivory teff is from Maskal. The arrowroot and tapioca might be called flour, starch, or powder - all the same thing. Potato starch and potato flour are 2 different things.
oh, so for example it's 100 grams white rice flour, 100 grams potato flour, and 100 grams tapioca starch, not 100 grams of a mix of the three? i guess that makes it add up to 2 kg
I use one to two teaspoons of oil, which is just barely enough to coat the pan if you swirl it, and it works fine if the heat is right. You're not trying to shallow fry the meat in a sea of grease, just stop it sticking and get better thermal conductivity.
Sifting flour is absolutely essential if you’re adding it to a liquid. Sometimes you can get away without sifting if you mix a few dry ingredients first then add liquid on top. If you get it wrong, the flour clumps up tiny grains and never separates. You can end up with really grainy cheese cake
Sifting makes sense if you knead by hand - makes absorption easier.
Toasting spices in a little oil - spices release flavor into the oil and your kitchen smells awesome.
Meat also releases fat when browned. So it is kind of self sustaining.
Whether you dry-roast or toast in oil depends on what you're trying to achieve; if you want flavoured oil for something like a tadka, then you use oil. Dry roasting to season e.g. a curry produces different flavours. It's also harder; different spices burn at different speeds, so for example add cumin first and turmeric last. burnt turmeric is very bitter.
If you need more than one tablespoon of oil then maybe you just don't know what you're doing. Meat contains fat and vegetables contain water. Consider learning patience (i.e. using lower heat) instead of criticizing people on the Internet for being better at cooking than you are.
This won't work. Together with fat, juice is released as well. As long as there is liquid water, temperature won't go over 100C so you're effectively boiling your meat and not browning it.
Searing your meat only goes at temperatures that are high enough to immediately evaporate any escaping liquid.
You mean, use a cast iron pan at high heat? Yeah that definitely works, it's standard practice in professional kitchens to do it like that.
But at low heat it will not. Or well, eventually your meat will brown, but first your steak will have boiled for a while so you'll never be able to serve your steak rare or medium rare.
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
I disagree with the author's assessment. I think it depends on how caramelized you want your onions, but there's a quick way to cook them.
I cook mine in a stainless steel pan without oil. The sugars will start to caramelize in the bottom of the pan. At a point I add a small amount of water to the pan (less than a tablespoon) and then cover with a lid. If it's a 10" frying pan, I use a 4" lid. The steam cooks the onions quickly and the cooked onions absorb the browned sugars from the bottom of the pan.
People really make cooking a lot more difficult than it needs to be. If it tastes good and your technique works, who cares?
Thinly slice 10 onions, dump them in a big pot with some oil on a medium heat for 10-15 minutes stirring frequently. Then turn the heat down to low and cook for a further 45-60 mins, check on it and stir every 10 mins or so. When it gets dry, add water and use it to deglaze the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. It's finished when the onions are a deep brown colour and their volume has reduced to about 1/6th of what it was to begin with. Store in fridge, enjoy with every meal in the following few days.