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.
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.