The difference between Nutella and Duncan Heinz frosting is that the frosting is actually better for you.

Nutella is the ranch dressing of dessert. You can slather stuff with it to cover for lack of flavor or being uninteresting in other ways.

I love them both but hollandaise is essentially hot mayonnaise. Don¡¯t get weird about Mayo if you love eggs Benedict.
posted by mikesch at 8:49 AM on October 11, 2020 [10 favorites]

Faux pas: I never scoop flour from the bag into a measuring cup and then use a knife to level it off; I just use the measuring cup directly. I fully understand the ramifications of this.

Hot take: turkey is a boring meat.

Best tip: the correct amount of cilantro is twice what the recipe calls for.
posted by punchtothehead at 8:50 AM on October 11, 2020 [14 favorites]

Oh, and liking hot sauce is not a personality.

Chicken wings are largely garbage and mostly suitable for stock. Exceptions are Pok Pok¡¯s wings and the angel wings from Marnee Thai.

¡°Bone broth¡± is just stock. We already have a word for it.

Also, everyone should bake by weight. More exact, fewer dishes to do. Any recipe I might make more than once that comes in volume only, I do the conversion so I can bake from weight the next time.
posted by mikesch at 8:52 AM on October 11, 2020 [24 favorites]

I cut my avocados the short way: circular cross-section.

Shouldn't this be a question, posted in the green?
posted by Rash at 9:04 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best tip: the correct amount of cilantro is twice what the recipe calls for.

Okay, I'll bite.

If I can taste the cilantro in something, there's too much of it. I'm not up on my food terminology, but I'd class it as a supporting herb. If it comes to dominate the flavor, it needs to be cut from the show. With extreme prejudice.

I don't hate cilantro, just hate how much it's come to dominate things. Call it the 1980s drum sound of ingredients.
posted by philip-random at 9:13 AM on October 11, 2020 [11 favorites]

The post in the OP - "canned tomatoes are good for making tomato sauce" - seems to me not so much "a hot take" as "the standard thing that almost everyone does all the time including professional chefs." It's like saying "hot take: salads can have lettuce in them!"
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:14 AM on October 11, 2020 [40 favorites]

Anyway my hot take is that none of you fuckers are sharpening your knives. I have never cooked at another person's house where they weren't using a blunted-to-uselessness knife that they have literally never sharpened ever. (A honing steel is not a sharpener.)
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:16 AM on October 11, 2020 [80 favorites]

I have never cooked at another person's house where they weren't using a blunted-to-uselessness knife

It's such a basic skill to acquire and I've always found this completely bizarre, especially from people who actually cook.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:19 AM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

¡°Bone broth¡± is just stock. We already have a word for it.

THIS.

Humans have been making soup out of bones ever since we had access to fire. Enough with the ¡°clean eating¡± marketing that this is a new thing.
posted by corey flood at 9:20 AM on October 11, 2020 [27 favorites]

"Hot ham water" is one of those evergreen Arrested Development jokes.

And on preview we used to store things in the oven, until someone almost started a fire.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:24 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

we don't think it's relevant to warn you that we store our previous years' taxes in the oven."


i think it's very relevant
posted by lalochezia at 9:26 AM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

"Bay leaf is wasted as a savory herb. It¡¯s absolutely delicious in desserts"

Hmm..interesting.
I was gonna muck about with some Ricotta and Passion Fruit to stick on top of baked figs.
What if I also chucked in a bay leaf.
What do you reckon?
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:30 AM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

Cast iron pans are overrated. They do a limited number of things better than any other pan, and it seems to be a popular assumption that since they do one thing well they're the best most versatile pans ever. They're not. They actually suck at most things (no matter how well seasoned they are), and if you can only have one frypan, you're better off with a cheapo nonstick pan from the discount store that gets replaced every year.
posted by ardgedee at 9:33 AM on October 11, 2020 [46 favorites]

If you can prepare food at home, you're a cook.
If you can buy expensive steaks and not ruin them on a grill, you're a cook.
If you watch youtube videos of other peopling doing these things, they too are cooks.
NONE OF YOU ARE FUCKING CHEFS.

also: absolutely YES on bay leaf in all sorts of things, I'm growing my first tree and, my god, the aromatics from the fresh leaves are wondrous; when dried they still have far more notes than sad grocery store offerings. Get some!
posted by winesong at 9:33 AM on October 11, 2020 [10 favorites]

¡°Bone broth¡± is just stock. We already have a word for it.

I thought a lot of the recent rise in usage was essentially mainstream American culture using that term to brand the Asian style which had previously been seen as too ethnic for white eaters. A lot of the writing I saw emphasized its use in Chinese medicine, which always read oddly as if the writer was unaware of the European culture around chicken soup and (older) dilute beef broth.
posted by adamsc at 9:33 AM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Celery is kinda boring but celery LEAVES are an amazingly flavourful herb (this year I grew Soup Celery in the garden, which is just basically celery leaves).
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 9:36 AM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

I learned from Jacques Pepin that washing mushrooms is *not* a faux pas, you just need to do it right before you cook them, not in advance.

(BTW, the recipe from the video linked above is Pepin's seafood chowder and it is absolutely one of my goto recipes any time of the year.)
posted by jeremias at 9:39 AM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

I'm fine with saying cast iron is overrated for an all purpose thing but repping constantly replaced nonstick is not good. Lots of waste and particularly nasty chemicals.

A decent stainless fry pan works better than either for most things besides eggs.
posted by Ferreous at 9:41 AM on October 11, 2020 [16 favorites]

showbiz_liz you come sit by me! We'll chat about whetstones, angles, and sharpening schedules.

Hot take: You don't have to constantly stir risotto. You have to stir it a lot as it finishes, but for the first half of the stock or so, you only need to stir occasionally.

Best tip: Put a purchase date on every jar of dried spice you buy, and toss it after about 9 months. It might look fine, but all the flavor has evaporated.
posted by Frayed Knot at 9:42 AM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

The biggest thing in food I hate though is people lecturing poor folk about buying whole chicken and parting it out because it's cheaper and you make stock or any sort of "I have 8 hours to make a dish at less monetary cost than buying it pre made so everyone should do so"

Cooking is hard, time consuming, and requires lots of specialized equipment. Don't lecture people for not being all about your hobby. It's an extremely common thing I see and I hate it so much.
posted by Ferreous at 9:47 AM on October 11, 2020 [96 favorites]

They actually suck at most things (no matter how well seasoned they are), and if you can only have one frypan, you're better off with a cheapo nonstick pan from the discount store that gets replaced every year.

Non-stick pans are definitely better for a few tasks but the difference is less pronounced if you don¡¯t try to follow the unscientific health advice from the 1970-80s about not using oil. I¡¯d consider this mostly harmless except that it¡¯s paying a lot more to have a huge environmental impact whereas a $20 cast iron pan will be usable by your grandchildren.
posted by adamsc at 9:49 AM on October 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

If you¡¯re trying to avoid replacing nonstick pans every year, nonstick ceramic pans are amazing and durable and one of my most useful kitchen tools.
posted by corey flood at 9:52 AM on October 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

You see it all the time in food writing and food blog comments, but the increasingly common usage of "substitute x for y" to mean "replace x with y" is just wrong. I usually abhor prescriptivism, but I will die on this hill.
posted by HumuloneRanger at 9:58 AM on October 11, 2020 [14 favorites]

"I have 8 hours to make a dish at less monetary cost than buying it pre made so everyone should do so"
I was at the farmers' market on the opening day of food-stamp season watching this old guy with a walker try to get a bag of field peas. Everybody had field peas but they weren't allowed to take food stamps for shelled peas, only the ones in the pod. It takes forEVer to get a serving's worth of peas out of their pods, but the deal is you can't get prepared food with food stamps--so no jam or baked goods or, apparently, shelled peas. (There's a thresher thing you can buy to shell them but it's for mass production, not for home use, and it's bulky and it's expensive and you'd only get one if you were planning to use it for your business.) This guy couldn't close his fists because he was a thousand years of age but he's supposed to lug home a haystack of unshelled peas and shell them himself in his spare time. I bought him a bag of peas and put it in his hand and expected to feel like a hero but instead felt like crap and still do and will for the rest of forever. We are so mean.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:00 AM on October 11, 2020 [120 favorites]

Enough with the ¡°clean eating¡± marketing that this is a new thing.

It's a crypto-racist marketing. It implies that other foods are "dirty," and those foods just happen to be the ones that *aren't* marketed to wealthy white people. Huh.
posted by explosion at 10:06 AM on October 11, 2020 [40 favorites]

Non-stick pans kill birds.
posted by Splunge at 10:07 AM on October 11, 2020 [15 favorites]

Grind all spices when you use them.

Seasoning cast iron with anything but linseed oil taken past its smoke point is a waste of time. You'll get better results with steel.

Presoaking rice and beans isn't worth it.

Freeze walnuts and flour if you aren't using right away. Refrigerate oils and fats that aren't clarified/refined if you don't want things tasting rancid.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:07 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

That is PTFE, not ceramic.
posted by Splunge at 10:08 AM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

My quirk, is I like to cut up the elements of my meal into bite-sized pieces, arrange those in a large white bowl, and then eat my meal using a long-handled teaspoon. I guess I'm regressing into a high-chair baby. But I do maintain cloth napkins, and occasionally fresh tablecloths.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:08 AM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Loved this little typo in the Reddit thread:

you have to bribe turkey the day before to make it worth while

(My own hot take: dry-brining is better than wet-brining, but either way definitely do it a day or even two ahead of time.)
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:14 AM on October 11, 2020 [18 favorites]

So, the thing I've realized I really like about my cast irons is that they have a lot of thermal mass. They take a little longer to heat up than a thin slice of aluminum, sure, but they stay that temperature longer and with more stability than a cheap nonstick. We've also got a gas stove; being able to 'see' the amount of heat and trust the temperature of the pans is great. When I go to an airbnb or whatevs and end up on an electric stove with an aluminum pan everything goes to shit. oh yes, of course "6" is the right heat for this job on this random-ass stove from the eighties.

Cast iron also gives you a free iron supplement instead of a whateverthefuck-is-in-the-nonstick-coating supplement. (Here's at least one article on that, with some in-kitchen testing, demonstrating that you actually hit the unsafe temperatures pretty quickly.)

(my other biggest pet peeve when cooking outside my home kitchen: Why the fuck are electric elements in old stoves never actually LEVEL?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Yes, I love it when my eggs run over and accumulate in a big puddle instead of spreading evenly over the pan. That is exactly what I am trying to do. Oh, and the pan is weirdly convex on the the bottom, just to make things even more silly? Great. Yes, one square centimeter of contact between this two-ounce pan and an the uneven electric element set to a random number is definitely the best way to cook this dish.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:14 AM on October 11, 2020 [25 favorites]

Enough with the ¡°clean eating¡± marketing that this is a new thing.

It's a crypto-racist marketing. It implies that other foods are "dirty," and those foods just happen to be the ones that *aren't* marketed to wealthy white people. Huh.

Don't forget panglossian return-to-a-never-existing-eden hygiene obsessiveness derived from ignorance-induced technology/science neurosis (that is often as white as fuck)
posted by lalochezia at 10:16 AM on October 11, 2020 [19 favorites]

Hot take: Scratch-made pie crust is stupid, the supermarket crusts are fine and you can make MANY MORE PIES MUCH FASTER. Ain't nobody got time to fuck around with pastry.

Faux pas: French dressing on taco salad, don't knock it 'til you try it!

I'm starting to gear up to cook for the holidays this year, since my mom probably won't be able to make it because of Covid + travel. I'm looking at 11-12 for Thanksgiving, and I've cooked for 12 many times (assuming Covid is still allowing me to be in a bubble with my two local siblings and their families), but for Christmas it could be 17-20 and I gotta think about how to manage that. (I guess I probably can't serve a taco bar for Christmas.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:26 AM on October 11, 2020 [9 favorites]

I vastly prefer cast iron; I can certainly manage cooking in non-stick when I am at someone's house or at an AirBnB, but it never works as well for me. Mostly though, I am just really tired of cooking on low-quality electric stoves, regardless of what kind of pan I'm using. That's all I've had to cook on in the last six or more years, and I get so wistful remembering having a decent gas stove, or reading about fancy new induction ranges.

If I can taste the cilantro in something, there's too much of it.

If you can't taste it, why would you use it? I get that cilantro is a particularly divisive ingredient (along with durian and other love-it-or-hate-it foods), but for those who like it, there are dishes that use it heavily with great results.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:29 AM on October 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

Thoughts on comments ITT since our system, for better or worse, does not allow threaded comments: showbiz_liz would enjoy cooking at my house¡ªI grew up cooking in restaurants and I'm never satisfied with the sharpness of my knives...

punchtothehead says something close to my heart, but not close to my wife's, as she's part of the population who thinks cilantro tastes like soap...

ardgedee is absolutely correct, IMO, about cast iron pans being overrated...

winesong is right: you aren't a chef unless you've cooked professionally at a fine dining establishment or have a degree from a culinary school. That said, you're probably a better cook than you think...

Frayed Knot is dead on with the suggestion of throwing out old spices. The only "old spice" anyone should be using is underarm deodorant, and even then, this is a questionable practice...

ferreous is a hero for saying what many of us were thinking to ourselves...

corey flood nails it on the ceramic pans: switched several years ago and I'm not going back. I had to get a new one due to ruining one by being an idiot, but I expect my latest to last a looooong time, and it was ridiculously cheap even though it was made here in the USA...

Don Pepino is going to heaven (if it exists, that is) for merely being aware and shamed by how horribly we treat poor people in this country...

explosion deserves a medal for stating this in terms even the dim can understand...

bondcliff is right: "you do you" is the wisest watchword in matters such as these, and

lalochezia nails it with pithy dispatch.

All in all, I am humbled to be numbered among such wise commenters. Keep cooking, MeFites!
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 10:30 AM on October 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

Mashed potato flakes are a perfectly fine way to have a side of mashed on a busy weeknight.
posted by schoolgirl report at 10:37 AM on October 11, 2020 [26 favorites]

Fun! (Reading reddit only through metafilter posts makes reddit seem really neat.) The thread is too long to find to the garlic post. . . but, I've learned to multiply the spice quantities in non-Indian English language recipes by at least 3 in order to taste anything at all. Every teaspoon is a heaping tablespoon.

The stupid, silly hill I'm tempted to die on is that it doesn't actually matter what temperature water you use to brew your coffee, tea, tisane, infusion, rooibos, or mat¨¦. Smart people I respect swear they can tell the difference. But, smart people I respect also make use of astrology. If it makes you happy to pretend that scalding tea is a real thing that happens, cheers! Rituals can be comforting. But, as far as I can tell, green tea at boiling temperature is indistinguishable from green tea at 80C. I've tried a blinded test with second-from-the-top-shelf genmaicha, albeit with a sample size of 2. Neither of us could taste a difference. (Also, coffee that's too cold is absolute shit, based on some months of experience trying to make coffee at high altitude. Coffee that's too hot is . . . coffee. I always aim for too hot.)

I'm not chemist and even less a food chemist. But, I can think of very few chemical reactions that don't involve phase transitions and happen at one room-like temperature and don't also happen a little bit more slowly at a 20K lower temperature. Nearly all tea lore that doesn't involve plants and drying techniques sure sound like bunk science to me.
posted by eotvos at 10:41 AM on October 11, 2020 [14 favorites]

Put this in your pipe and smoke it with your burned lips: a pork shoulder cooked in a Crock-Pot and finished under the broiler is just as good as one that's been laboriously smoked over the course of many hours.
posted by lorddimwit at 10:43 AM on October 11, 2020 [11 favorites]

My hot take is that if you enjoy the results than you've done it correctly.

Bingo. My roommate has been shouldering the lion's share of the cooking for me by necessity; he's not cooked a lot, but I've walked him through some recipes. He apologized that one thing didn't come out 100% perfectly, but I told him, "look, at the end of the day the point was to get me fed, right? You have accomplished that and I am grateful. It's all good." As a high school friend of mine said - "it all ends up in the same place anyway so who cares."

100% agreement about the prepackaged pie crusts. The roommate and I teamed up on a dozen veg-and-cheese pasties, something I make every year, and something I use premade pie crust for each year because ain't nobody got time for the homemade. (My biggest problem is actually the rolling out, I can never seem to get it an even thickness.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:43 AM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

my husband is a seriously skilled cook and keeps the knives sharp. as the non-cook, I do most of the dish washing (which I am completely fine with) and I have such fear when I wash those knives.

we use canned tomatoes to make sauces and they are just fine. I agree the garden ripe heirlooms should be eaten raw, perhaps on a cream cheesed bagel with a crack of fresh black pepper.

I'm going to resist commenting on the hollandaise/mayonnaise heresy up top.
posted by supermedusa at 10:45 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

I realize my previous comment is internally inconsistent. I stand behind both inconsistent claims. (But, I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong.)
posted by eotvos at 10:50 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm going to resist commenting on the hollandaise/mayonnaise heresy up top.

They are definitely the same, says someone who hates mayo and eggs benedict.

I will do many fiddly things (remove the skins from chickpeas before making hummus, rinse and wash rice before cooking, etc.) but any recipe that tells you to chop bacon before cooking it is full of lies. Crisp those strips up whole and crumble them - anything else is madness.
posted by the primroses were over at 10:52 AM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Mine is that store-bought tomatoes are just fine kept in the fridge, especially if you prefer eating your tomatoes cold.
posted by Foosnark at 10:55 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

a pork shoulder cooked in a Crock-Pot and finished under the broiler is just as good as one that's been laboriously smoked over the course of many hours.

This thread is for "cooking hot takes", not "heresy".
posted by Mister Fabulous at 10:57 AM on October 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

Chicken wings are largely garbage and mostly suitable for stock.

I, and my family, will fight you on that hill to the death. We'd likely starve to death if not for chicken wings.
posted by chasles at 10:58 AM on October 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

Oh, I have found the middle path between "sauce with fresh tomatoes" vs. "sauce with canned tomatoes" -

Can your own tomatoes and have the best of both worlds.*



* Although it is a pain in the ass and I completely understand if y'all read that and think "fuck that noise".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:58 AM on October 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

If I can taste the cilantro in something, there's too much of it. I'm not up on my food terminology, but I'd class it as a supporting herb. If it comes to dominate the flavor, it needs to be cut from the show. With extreme prejudice.

I've heard stories about people who love cilantro and people who think it tastes like soap. I find both baffling. To me, its only characteristic is that it's green, with an incredibly subtle hint of the smell of cut grass or alfalfa while you're burrying your nose in it and inhaling deeply. In food, it has no detectable flavor at all. It just makes things green. I don't object to it or defend it. . . but, the idea that it could ever be overpowering is foreign and really intriguing. (My spouse is a huge fan and uses it in everything. I don't object. It works out well.)
posted by eotvos at 10:59 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

People who get paid to cook, or who otherwise have all day to cook, usually are a bad source of cooking advice for people who have little time, energy, and desire to cook. The best recipes are for things that I can prepare quickly and don't leave me with a dozen things to wash when I'm done.
posted by pracowity at 10:59 AM on October 11, 2020 [27 favorites]

Offering a differing opinion on bay leaves:

I've made numerous pot roasts over the years. I always slavishly added bay leaves to the pot roast, as one does¡­

About 4 roasts ago I didn't have any bay leaves. I coated the meat with pepper and salt. I browned the meat on all sides in a dutch oven to sear before popping in a low oven for most of the day. I popped some chopped onion in the dutch oven and poured a Guinness on that roast. Into the oven it went.

That was the best pot roast I ever made. It didn't have that flavor I don't like, but tolerated in every pot roast I've ever eaten.

I'll never add another bay leaf to any recipe ever again. I suspect that much like my hatred of celery, asparagus, beets and lima beans, there is a genetic component to my hatred of the bay leaf flavor.

Lesson: To each their own. If you love bay leaves, more power to you. Somebody's gotta buy them.
posted by sydnius at 11:04 AM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

a pork shoulder cooked in a Crock-Pot and finished under the broiler is just as good as one that's been laboriously smoked over the course of many hours.

Depends on the plan. Each method yields distinctly different meats. Frankly I don¡¯t really enjoy smoked pork in most ¡°Mexican-ish¡± dishes like tostadas or enchiladas. But there is nothing quite like a freshly pulled smoked shoulder. No one would ever mistake that for pork cooked in a slow cooker.
posted by MorgansAmoebas at 11:16 AM on October 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

"A decent stainless fry pan works better than either for most things besides eggs."

Adding a relatively low cost carbon steel pan into our mix of pans has been a revelation. Between the cast irons and this one I've essentially stopped using even the stainless steel ones except the large specialty one for paella etc. The last non-stick was decommissioned many years ago.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 11:16 AM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

For most things, I'm incredibly sloppy with measurements. I need 1/3 cup of oil but I just used the 1/2-cup measure for something? I'll fill it two-thirds full by eye; one fewer measuring cup to wash. I need 2 Tbsp butter? Open butter dish, visualize a quarter of a stick, cut. I grind pepper straight into the pot and pour salt into my hand until it looks like the right amount. For some recipes I've made a hundred times, I no longer make any pretense of measuring at all.

That said: to live outside the law you must be honest. For pie crusts, I use a scale.
posted by aws17576 at 11:16 AM on October 11, 2020 [26 favorites]

I'll never add another bay leaf to any recipe ever again

Fascinating. As someone who habitually adds bay leaves to rice, soup, meats, and hot toddies, today I've learned to ask some questions of guests first. I'm a big fan of everything else on the bad list too, except for only a mild enthusiasm for lima beans, which is more due to texture than flavor. I'm now very curious if they're related in some genetic way.
posted by eotvos at 11:21 AM on October 11, 2020

Adding some salt to your salads is truly revelatory. I toss in a good pinch of salt, a lot of freshly ground black pepper, and (this is key) some minced dehydrated garlic to most green salads I make, and the results are stunning.
posted by Gadarene at 11:27 AM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

To me, [cilantro's] only characteristic is that it's green, with an incredibly subtle hint of the smell of cut grass or alfalfa while you're burying your nose in it and inhaling deeply.

That's pretty much my reaction to parsley, though with even less of a scent and taste than what you describe. Fortunately, I enjoy the full flavor and smell of cilantro, though I wouldn't use it in dishes where parsley is called for (I just leave out the parsley and move on).
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:27 AM on October 11, 2020

I've learned to multiply the spice quantities in non-Indian English language recipes by at least 3 in order to taste anything at all

Yep. I don¡¯t think of myself as someone who needs a sledgehammer amount of flavor in things, but I routinely have to amp up the spice quotient in my cooking. (Along those lines, I¡¯m not sure if it¡¯s heresy or not, but I will use both fresh chopped onion and pure onion powder, and/or fresh garlic and garlic powder, to achieve this goal. I stress, not the garlic/onion salts!)
posted by mykescipark at 11:29 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

If you love bay leaves, more power to you. Somebody's gotta buy them

It's me! I love bay leaves. LOVE bay leaves. I put about a dozen bay leaves in things in soups and sauces. I only cook for myself though, because my tastes are... Idiosyncratic.
posted by stillnocturnal at 11:30 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

I freeze my garlic before mincing it.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 11:31 AM on October 11, 2020

I'm so angry I got past 40 before I discovered shallots.

Unless the recipe has onion right there in the name like "onion rings," I will use a shallot every time.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:32 AM on October 11, 2020 [19 favorites]

Also me, stillnocturnal - bay leaves in a quantity that might be a vermifuge. We have a Laurus nobilis tree in the backyard that always needs pruning anyway (it flourishes as doth the green bay tree).

When cooking for open houses I will try to remember to make a stew without, though.
posted by clew at 11:33 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's entirely fine to be vague with measurements while cooking. Baking, however, is more of a chemistry experiment and ratios and quantities are rather specific for that.

Sometimes, yes... but even in baking, there's often some play! For instance, most bread recipes will have a range for the flour -- you know you've added enough when the dough has the right consistency. For things like carrot cake or banana bread, I often end up with a little too much grated carrot or mashed banana, then put it all in anyway; it's never harmed the end product as far as I can tell. (But for sure I measure the baking powder.)

Re: tripling garlic in recipes, I've found that I can often get similar or better results by just adding garlic later in the game. Often I'll still put in garlic at the beginning for a diffuse background flavor, but reserve a minced clove or two to add in the last three minutes of cooking. (And when I want a really sharp garlic note, I use a garlic press, which I'm sure goes on someone's list of faux pas.)
posted by aws17576 at 11:38 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

You want to know how to cook something? Google it, read the first page of recipes (skipping past all the bullshit food blogger SEO padding before the actual recipe), and take the median, completely ignoring any weird ingredients or steps that appear only in one recipe. They're clearly not important.

(Unless it's baking or some other dough-based recipe; then ideally read some forums to see what's BS and what's actually critical and what substitutions make chemical sense.)

Stop throwing away half your vegetables. Why did you get scallions or leeks if you're going to throw out all the green parts? If you want only the white parts, just get bloody onions.

Yes, you can refrigerate and reheat rice. I've done this all my life and am still not dead. WTF are you people doing with your rice to turn it into a lethal bacteria cocktail?!

On that subject, "leftovers" is a nonsensical concept with no rigorous definition, and "not eating leftovers because they're gross" is not a rational position.

The knife thing, yes, oh my god. If you sharpened your goddamn knives you wouldn't have to use elaborate "life hacks" or shitty tools from infomercials to cut onions; you'd be able to cut onions like a normal person cuts onions.

Not washing your dishcloths and cutting boards properly is disgusting. I can tell when I'm given a beverage in a glass dried with a filthy dishcloth, or a sandwich cut on a rancid, greasy board haunted by the spirits of a thousand ancient onions. I truly don't understand how this doesn't bother other people.
posted by confluency at 11:46 AM on October 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

What if I also chucked in a bay leaf.
What do you reckon?

I would say: Don't use that much! Like, maybe a little piece of a leaf for a dessert-thing.

My big food peeve is the recommendation that spices be thrown out after 6 months. DO NOT DO THIS! It is EPIC food waste. Spices in general are hard to aquire, many can't be cultivated and must be harvested from the wild, and they generally get shipped to the 4 corners of the world. Throwing away a jar of spices is generally equivalent (resource-wise) to chucking a whole ham or two into the trash. Don't do it! If the flavor of your spices has faded, just add more!
(An exception might be powdered wasabi mix, whose spicyness fades within a year or so...but that's really more of a condiment...)
posted by sexyrobot at 11:48 AM on October 11, 2020 [17 favorites]

I'm a compulsive spice hoarder. I know that the flavours fade, so I'm trying not to stock so much at once -- but I have a lot of old spices now to work my way through, and they're completely fine even after many many months of storage. A lot of them are whole and stored in a dark cupboard, which makes them last longer.
posted by confluency at 11:52 AM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

bondcliff: "My hot take is that if you enjoy the results than you've done it correctly."

My hot take is dinner.
posted by chavenet at 11:53 AM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

OTOH, my favorite spice trick, which I only bring out for special occasions because time:
If you can get whole spices, DIY'ing a ground spice mix is AMAZING.

(Similarly, thai green curry from ingredients is a thousand times better than anything in a jar. First time I tried this everyone was like 'holy shit!')

But I totally agree with the 'add more instead of throwing out' philosophy. I think I usually start at 3x spices and add more to taste, though. The tiny glass jars of spices at the white-bread grocery for $8 are ludicrous, and have usually been sitting on the shelf for ages anyways. Go to the indian grocery (or whatevs) and buy that larger bag for half the price...
posted by kaibutsu at 12:05 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

While a good knife won¡¯t make you a better cook, if it helps you enjoy cooking more, you¡¯ll be more inclined to find joy in it, and you¡¯ll do it more, and, presumably, you¡¯ll get better by doing.

Also, there¡¯s no such thing as too much garlic.
posted by rp at 12:05 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

A fancy ¡°fuzzy logic¡± rice cooker is a worthwhile investment.
posted by bonobothegreat at 12:13 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I bet chocolate chip garlic cookies would be good.
posted by pracowity at 12:14 PM on October 11, 2020 [17 favorites]

Most of the things we might have gone out to restaurants for in the past - those things we've learned to make at home and they always taste better. Though we rarely go out these days, if we do, it's basically to avoid having to clean the kitchen.

So here's a hot take: any recipe calling for cooked chicken? Pick up a loss-leader rotisserie chicken at the supermarket and use it instead.
posted by jquinby at 12:14 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

My hot take is that basically every "[ingredient/process/tool] makes no difference in the final result" take is an own goal.
posted by invitapriore at 12:18 PM on October 11, 2020

but the increasingly common usage of "substitute x for y" to mean "replace x with y" is just wrong

I don't wish to attack your hill without good reason, but why is it?
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:23 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

The last jar of bay leaves I bought smelled oddly and uncannily like Fernet Branca. I used one anyway and it ruined a whole batch of carnitas. My wife smelled the jar when I complained and apparently they're California bay, not regular bay. NOT THE SAME THING, SPICE ISLANDS.
posted by dr. boludo at 12:26 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

I've heard stories about people who love cilantro and people who think it tastes like soap. I find both baffling.

The origin of people's taste perception of cilantro is genetic.
posted by jeremias at 12:33 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Asofoetida used subtly in sauces and gravies adds a depth of flavor that makes you want more.

I find cilantro off putting but I can tell when it's not there and always become: "this is not right."

Although I say the same to TV chefs who pile it on like their dish is a cilantro 'with some other stuff!"
posted by Max Power at 12:41 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Cake mixes can be really good, and are nearly foolproof. Yes, I can make many other sorts of cakes than the ones you get in boxes, but I can't make a cake with as delicate a crumb as Duncan Hines' Yellow Cake Mix; and I certainly can't do so with only a single bowl and measuring cup to wash up, an hour before a birthday party. Also, I could eat an entire sheet pan of my strawberry-filled buttercream birthday cake that is based on Mr Hines' mixture, all by myself.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:45 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Dull knives are bad, but using the oven as storage for non-bakeware is the absolute worst. "Sure come over to make cookies, but we don't think it's relevant to warn you that we store our previous years' taxes in the oven."

One of my father's graduate professors, a Byzantinist named Milton Anastos, maintained two apartments, one for himself and his wife and one entirely for his books. For fun, he used the oven in the book-apartment to store, yes, books. This lasted until the year a wayward graduate student made the mistake of turning the oven on.

After that, books were banished from the oven.

Anyway. I had to agree with the Redditor who loathed turkey. Even the very best Thanksgiving turkey I've had has not, in the end, been all that great.

Not sure if reverting to eating peanut butter & jelly for lunch during this plague is a faux pas or not.

Despite my adoration of all things chocolate, chocolate cake is surprisingly...unsatisfying most of the time? Unless it has really good fudge icing on it. The temperature of that take is up for grabs.
posted by thomas j wise at 12:45 PM on October 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

Cake mixes can be really good, and are nearly foolproof.

This chocolate cake recipe begins with a box mix and has amazing results. It's an exception to my chocolate cake grumbling above.
posted by thomas j wise at 12:47 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I bet chocolate chip garlic cookies would be good.

And here's the main hot take from this entire thread, truly.

Rosemary chocolate chip cookies are definitely delicious.
posted by bassooner at 12:55 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Related: I made pot roast last night using a fairly typical recipe*, except I used twice as much onion and celery, and about 8 cloves (most of a head) of garlic, plus about half or two thirds of a cup of dried porcini mushroom pieces (no need to reconstitute first). The bouquet garni was about 6 bay leaves and **entire** 1/2-oz packages of fresh thyme and rosemary instead of the piddling "2 or 3 sprigs" suggested by the recipe. Holy moley, was it fantastic!! Best pot roast I've ever made, by an absolutely huge margin; once in-person gatherings are a thing again that will be one of the first things I make. So yes, definitely double or triple up on most herb/spice seasonings is my suggestion.

*After I browned the meat and sauteed the onion/celery/garlic, I chucked everything in an Instant Pot - meat on top of the carrots and potatoes to keep it out of the liquid, then mirepoix on top of that - and pressure-cooked everything for an hour. Then I made gravy using the leftover liquid cooked way down. In my experience, almost nothing cooks properly at the times stated in Instant Pot recipes - sort of like the "saut¨¦ onions, 8-10 minutes" in every recipe ever. With few exceptions, cooking stuff at 1.5-2 times as long as a recipe says, and at highest pressure setting, generally comes out about right.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:07 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

pracowity: "I bet chocolate chip garlic cookies would be good."

Try making some
posted by chavenet at 1:07 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Faux pas: French dressing on taco salad, don't knock it 'til you try it! YES! I thought I was the only one who likes this! I don¡¯t remember how or when I first tasted it this way, but now I never make taco salad without French dressing on hand.
posted by bookmammal at 1:14 PM on October 11, 2020

Cast iron is essential for some breads. Like the soda bread I made yesterday, which was half gone before I realized I had not told my kid lunch was ready. Oops. Soft, springy, moist crumb with a crust as thin and crunchy as a cracker. It was delightful. Not going to get that outcome without the Dutch oven to hold the moisture in.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:21 PM on October 11, 2020

Salad = Salted.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 1:21 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

I bet chocolate chip garlic cookies would be good.

I have made these from the Gilroy garlic cookbook recipe, and they are great!
posted by jgirl at 1:32 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Hot Cake Take: Chocolate cake is a terrible chocolate delivery system, no matter what you put on it. It just wishes it could be brownies and it isn¡¯t.
posted by wabbittwax at 1:35 PM on October 11, 2020 [9 favorites]

Hot take: turkey is a boring meat.

Even the very best Thanksgiving turkey I've had has not, in the end, been all that great.

In the words of the sage Yukon Cornelius, ¡°You eat what you like, and I¡¯ll eat what I like!¡±
posted by musicinmybrain at 1:43 PM on October 11, 2020

Enjoying organ meats is not inherently a virtue.

also thanks for reminding me to pick up more bay leaves before winter stew season hits
posted by Vervain at 1:49 PM on October 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

My quirk, is I like to cut up the elements of my meal into bite-sized pieces, arrange those in a large white bowl, and then eat my meal using a long-handled teaspoon. I guess I'm regressing into a high-chair baby. But I do maintain cloth napkins, and occasionally fresh tablecloths.

The single most dramatic shift in my cooking habits happened because I spent a semester in China. In China you will never, ever see a knife at the table, because everything is already either cut into bite-sized pieces or is easily splittable with chopsticks (like whole fish for example). Once I got back home I basically never cooked a meal that was "big piece of meat + veg on the side" ever again. My eyes had been opened to the fact that for most things, that makes no goddamn sense. (Steak is obviously a different story.)

You want to know how to cook something? Google it, read the first page of recipes (skipping past all the bullshit food blogger SEO padding before the actual recipe), and take the median, completely ignoring any weird ingredients or steps that appear only in one recipe. They're clearly not important.

Yes! YES! This is how I mostly cook now. If I'm feeling ambitious and really want to crack a recipe, I'll get out a notebook and go through 10 or 15 recipes, with a column for each recipe, listing the same ingredients in the same row. That makes it really clear what is and isn't optional, and the range of quantities you have to work with. Then once you have that info, you can make a new recipe tailored to your states and what you have around. I came up with an amazing chocolate pecan pie recipe that way.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:51 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

I currently work and cook in a commercial kitchen. I have the knife callous and burns to prove it.

I am not a chef and I will politely correct guests if they ask if I'm the chef or call me the chef - I'm a line cook. I get a lot of compliments about my cooking and they want to offer compliments to "the chef" but I will still graciously defer and communicate that I'm not the chef.

And a line cook is also a specific title and function. A line cook needs to be able to multitask and think fast and work fast. If I have a 4-5 top table come in and they all order apps as well as entrees, I need to stage and fire them all in the correct order so that they all are ready to plate and serve at the same time.

Now multiply that by having like 4-5 tickets on the rail and they're all 3-5 tops with apps and this is why I'm fueled by energy drinks, B vitamins and ibuprofen and sometimes make crazy noises.

And the definition of "correct" is really difficult to define and it depends on how full your ticket rail is and what the orders are and what you already have on deck. Some dishes take longer than others, some have more of a shelf life, so I might start a soup first because it can stay warm on the stove for longer without degrading, but something like a burger or protein needs more timing and attention because it can be under or overcooked.

Our kitchen manager is our chef in that she's our chief, our menu and recipe designer - but she also really isn't a chef even if she's our chef, even though she's owned and operated her own restaurants. She also wouldn't call herself a chef.

And when people offer "compliments to the chef" I pass that praise right up the chain of command for my kitchen manager the next time I see her, because, well, yeah, we live for this kind of positive feedback and praise, because commercial cooking is a lot like being in a codependent or even abusive relationship that you're addicted to for some reason.

A chef is a very specific title in the restaurant and cooking world like Doctor that implies both professional training and schooling, understudy and the extensive experience required to run a restaurant kitchen from the dish pit on up to, well, chef and manager. And that schooling and experience does not necessarily mean they've been to a culinary school - it can be self taught and learned on the job and you can still earn the title of chef, and this really makes for the best chefs because trade schools for culinary arts tend to be a waste of time and money and you might as well just dive into the dish pit and work your way up and get paid while you go to school.

90% of cooking is really about prep work and doing dishes. It doesn't matter what your ingredient budget is from high to low, if you don't know how to prep and in what order to prep things you won't be able to cook really good food. It doesn't matter if it's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or lobster consomme, it won't happen well without good prep work.

After all the prep work comes the mise en place. Every dish on our menu has a prep list and a "kit" of ingredients that forms our mise en place so the line cooks can fire off as many dishes as fast as possible at high quality levels and consistency.

Those ingredients in each kit for each dish have a given life span. So, for one example look at a basic salad. You have to prep just enough to try to use up all of those ingredients before they expire. You can't, say, prep enough cucumber rounds for an entire week and call it good. For one, it'll go bad and be wasted before you use it all. For two, you'll run out of storage space in a hurry. For three you'll blow up your prep cooks and make them angry.


Cast iron? You basically never, ever see cast iron pans in a commercial kitchen unless it's for a specific presentation or dish like fajitas or maybe even a paella where the cast iron is serveware, not cookware.

We almost exclusively use commercial grade nonstick pans. They even get gently cleaned with steel wool because they can take it. They also get used with metal tools like spatulas, tongs, whisks and so on and they don't chip or flake. I have a couple of bare steel/clad pans and some aluminum ones as well. Sauce pans (pots) are almost exclusively aluminum because they're big. If they were cast iron or clad steel they'd be way too heavy to work with. I have a really, really big uncoated steel pan I use exclusively for caramelizing onions which is something I basically do all day for every shift, there's almost always a pan of onions getting caramelized.

Also, I'm basically re-using the same pans all day, every day. There's a pan or multiple pans dedicated to each of our menu line items. One for proteins, one just for veggies, one for soups and so on. These don't get washed at all mid shift unless something went wrong and something got burnt the wrong way. These pans live on the stove and basically stay hot all day. If they need cleaning because there's char built up they get wiped out dry with a paper towel over the trash can, which is one of the real reasons why we use nonstick pans. It gives repeatedly consistent results at high speed and is easy to clean and reset for the next order.

The stovetop temperatures in a commercial restaurant kitchen also tend to be much hotter than home cooking. I work on an electric "french top" stove that's basically just 3 big iron slabs forming a continuous flat surface with a non-figurative fraction of a ton of thermal mass keeping it hot no matter what I throw at it whether it's a giant pot of water to boil eggs or 8 different pans going at the same time.

These are set to different temps from hot (about 400 F) to medium (about 250) to low (about 175) and I modulate pan heat by shuffling pans around on the french top. So, a protein might start on the hot zone to start the sear and then get shifted from left to right to a cooler zone to finish cooking through. I really, really like this system because it means I don't have to think about burners at all, I can load the whole stove top with pans and I don't have to worry about centering each one over a gas burner. They can crowd right up next to each other and get shuffled around like a very hot and fast game of Tetris.

So yeah, no cast iron pans. It's way too fussy to take care of and clean and keep properly seasoned in a commercial kitchen. They take way too long to come up to temp. I can throw a cold non-stick pan on the hot zone of my french top and it's melting butter to a smoking point or searing something in about 20 seconds.

Cast iron pans also generally don't meet food safety handling rules and NSF specifications for commercial kitchens. As any cast iron fan will tell you you're not supposed to wash them with soap and water, and, well, everything in a commercial kitchen must be able to survive going through not only soap and water but also sanitizer solution.

To use cast iron in a commercial kitchen you would effectively have to strip the seasoning from the cast iron pan and then re-season it every day or every shift cycle or so, and there simply isn't time for this kind of shit in a commercial kitchen and the mere thought of it is making my eye twitch just talking about it.


There's a ton of other things you don't find in commercial kitchens that people use in home kitchens, things that people have been told to believe are essential for cooking. Alton Brown talks about this over and over in his Good Eats shows - the useless unitaskers.

But it goes way beyond that, and an easy example is knives. We don't use expensive or fancy forged knives in a commercial kitchen. They're just really common stamped sheet steel knives with an NSF rated plastic handle for easy sanitizing and cleaning, and they're cheap as dirt. I don't think any knife on my magnetic knife block costs more than $20-30, if that.

My favorite knife right now is a cheap little santoku, about a 6" blade. It sharpens quickly and easily and is easier to work with in a cramped kitchen than a big French style chef's knife. I actually don't really like traditional chef's knives at all because the sharp, long point on them is really quite dangerous. The last three times I've been knicked or cut it's because of that sharp point on a traditional chef's knife, because a true chef's knife is also sharp on top of that point, where a santoku is blunt and also has a blunt nose and foot.

What we do use is a knife sharpener as well as a honing steel. No, I don't sit around hand-honing knives on a whetstone until it can slice paper like butter. We just use a common carbide rod sharpener that'll dress a blade in about 5-10 strokes and ready for work. I use it multiple times a day to keep the edge on my working knife and sharpening my knives is one of the first things I do after turning on the stove and starting the dish sink water.

I really don't care if it can slice paper - or paper thin tomatoes. Which, yeah, slicing paper thin tomatoes is easy even with a dull knife if you use the knife correctly - it's not really a good metric for knife quality despite what informercials have been saying for years.

I just want it to be sharp enough that it works and isn't dangerous. It needs to be able to slice up a block of cheese and then run through 5-10 pounds of yellow onions with less force, work and effort as well as increased safety. (See also: Knife callous.)

Other things we do actually use in a commercial kitchen: Food processors, aka the RoboChef, because fuck everything about hand-mincing several cups of garlic. No, throw that pre-peeled garlic into the robochef and pulse it for a few seconds, throw it in an six pan insert and move on to the next task. It still takes less time to wash the RoboChef parts than it does to hand-mince that much garlic.

We also use things like microplanes, bench knives (pastry, bread, scraping cutting boards), flexible cutting boards (go straight from prep to pan, just roll it up and dump your prep into your pan, or storage container, no awkward scraping or scooping stuff up with your hands or the flat of a knife) and other super basic hand tools.

We also use measuring cups, spoons, scales, thermometers and other measuring tools. I even have a multimeter with a calibrated thermistor so I can check and calibrate our other thermometers.

But in working commercial kitchens there's not a whole lot of expensive gadgets. Nothing from Sur la Table, nothing from Crate & Barrel or whatever, no fancy German or Japanese steel. No frickin' Le Creuset, either or enameled anything. It's mostly just pots and pans, knives, cutting boards and stordge containers and dishware/serveware and a lot of hard work.

And this is true of basically every kitchen I've ever been in. Yeah, there's some cool specialty commercial kitchen tools like the French top stove I work on now. Or immersion/stick blenders. Or maybe a sous vide setup. Heck, we even have one of those "sphereizer" kits to make mock cavier or pearls but I'll probably never, ever use it.

But most of it is super basic and not complicated at all. It's just a lot of experience, hard work and a plan and good prep work.


If anything the most valuable tool in any kitchen is the not so lowly dishwasher. If armies march on their stomachs, a commercial kitchen marches on clean dishes.

A kitchen will grind to a halt without clean dishes and it'll happen so fast it will make your head spin right off your neck. If I'm not prepping or cooking I'm washing dishes and it's easily 50% of my work load when held up next to the prep work and actual cooking and firing. No clean dishes? I can't plate and fire. I can't prep. If I don't have clean rags I can't clean and sanitize work surfaces or cutting boards.

I've had shifts where we've run through all of our serveware dishes multiple times over. meaning every single plate, every spoon and knife has been out on the tables, then through the dish pit and then back out again many times in the same day. Those are good days when i know we're actually making money.


So yeah, i guess my hot take or faux pax is about kitchen tools and myths and commercial kitchens.

If you really want to cook like a pro at home, save your money for good ingredients, learn how to prep and learn to love washing dishes - and then cook a lot. Try new things. Learn to read and interpret recipes and how to adjust them and compare different variations of those recipes.

The culinary world is interesting because there's really no substitute for experience and practice. It doesn't matter how good or expensive your tools are, and if anything it can get in the way of actually cooking or learning to cook. It doesn't even really matter if you go to a culinary school, you're still going to get most of your education on the job and on the line.

Most commercial kitchen menu items from high end fine dining to greasy diner or pub fare are made with very simple tools, often with little more than a knife and a pan and super basic hand tools like tongs, spatulas and spoons.

If I ever am lucky enough to own my own home and design my home kitchen, I'll probably set it up like a commercial kitchen with commercial fridges and stock it with a whole commercial system of NSF rated tools, including hotel pans, inserts and lexan tubs for prep and storage.

That being said, I don't really cook at home. Most commercial kitchen workers don't.

What do I eat at home? I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon and sleep a lot to rest up for my next shift.

Heck, I barely even eat my own commercial cooking because you get tired of it after cooking the same things every day. Yeah, I've eaten everything on the menu because I need to know how it's supposed to taste and look, but i basically never have time to make a full entry or item and then eat it.

At work my shift "meals" are often just a bowl of rice with some butter on it, or maybe some bits and pieces and scraps left over from prep. Sometimes I'll just set a bowl aside and throw in the ends of cucumbers or carrots or the odd broken bits of cheese or something and then maybe I'll have a few seconds to cram some of it in my face while hiding in the pantry and dry storage. Sometimes I'm really lucky and something falls into my apron pockets and I find it later. Oooo, pocket fries or tots, yay.
posted by loquacious at 1:52 PM on October 11, 2020 [163 favorites]

Spices, medium take: keep almost everything but your highest-traffic spices in the quite small jars (like the little squatties you buy Poultry Seasoning/Pumpkin Pie Spice in every thanksgiving and then throw out and replace the next year, or Penzey's good glass 1/4 cup jars) with refill quantities stored in a closed container that doesn't get opened constantly. Most of them don't need to go in the freezer unless they're oily - I freeze powdered and dried citrus, bay leaves and dried (and soon fresh! my tree is growing!) curry leaves, and things like flax seeds and nuts - just close it up in a baggie or deli container or larger spice jar in a dark cool place and only open them to do refills.

Own some small funnels, it'll make this life easier.

DO make your own mixes if store-bought ones don't quite hit the mark. Lemon pepper has never lived up to my dreams, so I buy lemon powder (which I also use on all kinds of other things) and good ground pepper to make my own, sometimes I also make a version with sumac. I buy Everything Bagel seasoning from TJ's or Aldi, but I dump it into a bowl and augment it with smoked jalapeno powder, smoked garlic powder, tomato powder, and fancy flaky salt. Delicious on bagels, avocado toast, and vegetables you just need to get steamed and on the table in a hurry.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:52 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Own some small funnels, it'll make this life easier.

There is no kitchen tool that feels more superfluous when you don't need it that is so incredibly unreplaceable when you do need it. I've tried using foil funnels. It did not go well.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:54 PM on October 11, 2020 [9 favorites]

I think the second time I made chicken tikka masala, I decided to "save time" by using the jar of garam masala I had in my spice rack instead of grinding the spices myself.

Unfortunately, that brand of garam masala had way more cinnamon than I expected, and when I tasted what I had made, it tasted like cinnamon chicken. Not exactly bad, but not as good as what I was aiming for.

I spent about half an hour trying to get rid of the cinnamon flavor. Not that there's really a way of "getting rid" of cinnamon flavor except to try and add enough of everything else to balance it out... So much for saving time... And it still didn't taste quite right.

Then, at the last second, I remembered that the recipe called for cilantro. So I put in a bunch of cilantro, and was amazed. It suddenly tasted *exactly* like what I was trying to get.

So while I'm not the biggest fan of cilantro, I find it necessary in some cooking. And while I don't always grind my own spices, I do try to at least taste the mix before I use it.
posted by grae at 1:57 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

My favorite encounter with people's attitudes toward bay leaves took place in my local food co-op, when a very determined-looking woman in clothing I took to be Indonesian stood holding an empty gallon jar with "Bay" printed on its side, and with two men in almost comically propitiating postures at her sides, said in a voice of absolute finality "I must have this."

But Wikipedia tells me Indonesia has its own variety of bay, for which another site I'm not linking declares US bay is not a good substitute, though considering its vast profusion of herbs and spices, I wouldn't put it past that co-op to have been carrying Indonesian bay leaves.
posted by jamjam at 2:06 PM on October 11, 2020

I think the second time I made chicken tikka masala, I decided to "save time" by using the jar of garam masala I had in my spice rack instead of grinding the spices myself.

I think I spent a half hour a few months ago laboriously toasting and grinding spices to make a half cup of garam masala so that I could put 1/2 tsp in a recipe. So I feel your pain.

On the plus side it seems to keep for a few weeks at least.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:15 PM on October 11, 2020

¡§Cast iron pans are overrated.¡§

Nooooooo. I think a lot of people believe they are hard to care for, when they really aren?t. I use them for EVERYTHING, have 13 of them (including some from my Grandmother ) and couldn?t cook without them. I bake in them, fry in them, make spaghetti sauce in them, and even WASH THEM WITH SOAP!!! Combined with a gas stove top, it is so easy to control the temperature.
posted by olykate at 2:37 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

Also for a good sauce additive, just buy dried porcinis and grind them to a powder. Instant flavor when added to a sauce.

I don't think that's a faux pas though.

And yes you can clean a properly cured cast iron pan with soup, harsh abrasives are the no no.
posted by Max Power at 3:03 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

What's your take on Cassavetes? What's your take on Cassavetes?
posted by NedKoppel at 3:18 PM on October 11, 2020 [9 favorites]

My Mom gave me her good-sized cast iron pan. It has a smooth machine-spun surface that needs little care. It's thinner than modern pans, much easier to lift, even with my arthritis. I found its twin at a thrift shop, so I have a backup. I don't let cast iron sit in soapy water, would never put it in the dishwasher; it gets washed with a metal scrubbie and some soap. I use it all the time. I don't want to use non-stick products, and cast iron works well for me, though it would be problematic in a production environment.

Your herbs may have been in the grocery store for a while. Before that, they were probably harvested annually, and stored. If they smell good and taste good, use them. The herb/spice companies benefit most if you replace them often.

Cooking is learn-able, and if you want to cook, don't let people bully you. Find people who can write recipes properly, learn to read the recipe carefully and follow it until you have the experience to go off-road. I made sourdough bread during the Pandemic, and I don't have special tools, baskets, meters, etc. It was great.

I use mashed potato from flakes for shepherd's pie, Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust, Pepperidge Farm stuffing cubes, Better-Than-Boullion, and frozen veg for roasting.

Every recipe that says you can cook onions in 5 - 10 minutes is a terrible lie.
posted by theora55 at 3:20 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

Two words: Kosher salt.
posted by NedKoppel at 3:24 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

>Also, coffee that's too cold is absolute shit, based on some months of experience trying to make coffee at high altitude. Coffee that's too hot is . . . coffee. I always aim for too hot.
Over-roast beans are already burnt and aren't made worse when scalded by too-hot water -- espresso roast is a level of darkness I don't like in my drip filter. So I have mild and medium roast beans that sing out their flavour in 80-90¡ã Celsius water.

Old coffee oils add to the burned flavour, too, so bleach-and-soap or Renovate your coffee equipment.
posted by k3ninho at 3:33 PM on October 11, 2020

loquacious, as someone who spent a previous lifetime working in kitchens, I felt your comment viscerally and it gave me a flashback that felt like it lasted a month in just a minute. I'm not sure I've seen anybody describe it so well (even Bourdain himself didn't bother with that level of detail).
posted by General Malaise at 3:56 PM on October 11, 2020 [16 favorites]

Marjoram makes perfectly good soup taste like perfume.
posted by aniola at 3:56 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

oh oh oh I LOVE chocolate bloom.
posted by aniola at 3:57 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Max Power: "And yes you can clean a properly cured cast iron pan with soup, harsh abrasives are the no no."

I see what you did there.
posted by chavenet at 4:12 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Guacamole makes a fine pasta sauce.
posted by ShooBoo at 4:20 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Cooking a turkey requires only one rule:
Stick one onion cut in half up its bum.
No cast iron required.
posted by BozoBurgerBonanza at 4:21 PM on October 11, 2020

Salt and a couple of paper towels will clean your cast iron pan right up.
posted by Windopaene at 4:26 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

I sous vided turkey breast for a crowd last thanksgiving and it worked great. Bone out 2 whole breasts (4 breast halves), arrange halves cut side opposite each other so the form two rough cylinders with herb butter spread between. Tie with butcher twine so they hold their shape, seal and sous vide for a few hours. Take the skin from the breasts, salt, bake between two sheet pans with parchment on either side so they remain flat while they get crispy, roast the tones for stock for gravy.

When *everything* else is done, remove turkey from bath, dry, sear on absurdly hot pans with a huge amount of butter, rest briefly and slice. Break up skin and serve with the turkey slices.

The great part of this is that thanksgiving is all about the sides anyway, but the timing usually hinges on the turkey that¡¯s taking up 90% of your oven. This avoids that entirely, the sides get hot and the turkey takes 10 minutes of active work (if your butcher bones it out for you, which they will).

You don¡¯t get the dark meat with this method, but it¡¯s so much easier for a crowd and the breast is moist enough to satisfy the dark meat lovers.

I guess the hot take related to this is don¡¯t roast a whole turkey and your life gets easier and the turkey won¡¯t suck.
posted by mikesch at 4:46 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

Faux pas: French dressing on taco salad, don't knock it 'til you try it! YES! I thought I was the only one who likes this! I don¡¯t remember how or when I first tasted it this way, but now I never make taco salad without French dressing on hand.

I, too feel that French dressing is the secret ingredient, but I took it even further afield with Catalina. The tomatoey-ness is just perfectly acidic, and the honey sweetness perfectly complements the spiciness of the chilis and cayenne.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 4:49 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

Marjoram makes perfectly good soup taste like perfume.

I grew some this year, having never tasted it before. I now understand what other people must be talking about when they say cilantro tastes like soap. Never got that from cilantro, but marjoram is the soapiest damn thing I have ever put in my mouth including actual soap.
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:53 PM on October 11, 2020

Two words: Kosher salt.

More words: there are multiple types of kosher salt and they are not at all the same level of saltiness, not even close, and if you use Morton kosher salt in the same amount as the recipe calls for but they wrote it with Diamond kosher salt in mind, enjoy your salt bomb that you just made.

Hot Cake Take: Chocolate cake is a terrible chocolate delivery system, no matter what you put on it. It just wishes it could be brownies and it isn¡¯t.

Brownies will give you a purer chocolate hit. Chocolate cake is for when you want the flavour of chocolate with complimentary flavours, be they vanilla icing or cherry compote for your Black Forest cake or orange liqueur soaked in or whatever. You try any of that shit with brownies and it's just too rich and too unpleasant.
posted by mightygodking at 5:06 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Have you tried making your chocolate cake with beets? I promise, the beet flavor disappears, but the chocolate delivery is very very good.
posted by Quonab at 5:16 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yes, you can refrigerate and reheat rice. I've done this all my life and am still not dead. WTF are you people doing with your rice to turn it into a lethal bacteria cocktail?!

What?? Where do these people think fried rice comes from?

Two things made me the cook I am today: moving overseas where most things available in a standard US supermarket just aren't available, and the roughly four years spent trying to get restaurant started, failing, then working in other people's restaurants (I really should've done that the other way around).

A friend recently commented on a photo of biscuits I made, suggesting I try her two ingredient biscuits, using self-rising flour and cream. I can get cream (it's one thing more easily found in Japanese grocery stores than in America), but self-rising what? It just isn't here. I mean, we used to have some stores that sold bisquick, but that's been gone for years. Not having access to mixes is what pushed me to learn to cook for myself. In Tokyo now, there's a ton of good food from several different cuisines, but that wasn't really the case 15-20 years ago, and if, for example, I wanted to eat tacos, I had to make them myself. That was pretty much the going thing for the last 15 years of my life. I want to eat (food) but (food) isn't here, I guess I'll just have to make (food). Sure, ready made pie crusts are great, but the ones I've found here are either the size of a flour tortilla for tacos, or square, but also tiny, so last year, I made my pumpkin pie crust from scratch (and had to search like ten different "international stores" for canned pumpkin), and it was perfectly cromulent, though I did learn why you need to pre-bake the crust.

I learned a ton working in restaurants, enough so that loquacious' comment awakened a deep longing in me that I need to push back down, as my body can't handle working in a kitchen for any real length of time anymore, and our finances can't handle me earning kitchen wages. From kitchen work, I guess the thing I took most to heart was that restaurants and eating out are built almost entirely on the exploitation of cheap labor, which is reinforced by further exploitation of the love the people in the kitchen have for their craft. The intoxication I felt when the rail was filled with tickets, and tickets kept coming, getting fixed to the shelf with magnets, the exhilaration that came with knowing just how busy I would be, but that I could handle it because the team I was a part of was ready for it, it was awesome, even though none of it would show up in my paycheck. The macho bullshit combined with the love of the work has been perverted into a toxic mix that is used to keep people working ridiculous hours for low pay, all of which has been twisted into a badge of honor. I remember joining in on talking shit about people who quit the kitchens I worked in, saying the pay wasn't worth the work put in, saying they just couldn't cut it, etc. It's fucked, it's wrong, and dining out is only as cheap as it is because of exploitation at every level.

That said, yes, keep your knife sharp. Use a food processor for any level of mincing above a couple whatever, cloves of garlic, chilis, stalks of lemongrass. Make it from scratch when you can, don't feel like shit when you can't. The end goal is food in the belly, and if you got that, that's a baseline good. Anything else is gravy (and homemade gravy is really not that hard!).

Except for that bullshit about crockpot anything being the same as BBQ. It's not bad, it's just not BBQ. BBQ is an art form with history and love. Crockpot pork shoulder is fine, and I'm glad you enjoy it if you do, but pulled pork is a labor of love (made easier with bluetooth thermometers!).
posted by Ghidorah at 5:19 PM on October 11, 2020 [11 favorites]

I, too feel that French dressing is the secret ingredient, but I took it even further afield with Catalina. The tomatoey-ness is just perfectly acidic, and the honey sweetness perfectly complements the spiciness of the chilis and cayenne.

There was a popular potluck dish when I was a kid which was called "taco salad" though it bore no actual resemblance to one - it consisted of iceberg lettuce, canned pinto beans, shredded cheddar cheese, and Fritos, tossed with Catalina dressing. I loved it but it is not a taco anything - this was northern New Hampshire in the 1970s so I'd be surprised if anyone who made it had even tasted a taco. I have a community cookbook from about the same time that has the cheese dip made by combining Velveeta and Ro-Tel tomatoes - in that cookbook it is called "Concaso".
posted by Daily Alice at 5:30 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

They actually suck at most things (no matter how well seasoned they are)

One more observation about cast iron (made w/o preview and w/o expectation this will be the last word on the subject): Contemporary cast iron pans (and I'm looking at you Lodge!) are not ground and polished inside after being cast and as a result have a rather pebbly textured cooking surface. I can't even begin to compare these with cast iron pans of yore which when well seasoned and maintained provide an excellent and almost perfectly non-stick surface. (For proof: go look at prices for old polished inside cast iron pans for sale on eBay. This is the reason.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:36 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Thrift shops can be a great place to buy kitchen knives.

My theory is many people are intimidated by sharpening and just donate their nice knives once they go dull.
posted by soy bean at 5:47 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

The best way to tackle a turkey is to butcher it,* so you have the boneless breasts, the bone in thighs and legs, and the carcass (the wings are secret, you freeze those and save them for later). Make turkey stock from the carcass, and you¡¯ll have more than enough for the stuffing/dressing and gravy, and then you¡¯ve got frozen stock for stews and such all winter long.

Not having an oven is one reason why I got into smoking food in the first place. Smoking the breast and legs separately is easy. You can even throw in a pork shoulder to give everyone a little variety, too. If smoking isn¡¯t doable, sous vide, as mentioned above, is fantastic for turkey, but tricky, as you need a different temperature for the thighs than the breast, and even for me, two separate sous vide machines is just a bridge too damn far.

* This can lead to fights, though. When I went home a couple years ago, fulfilling a long standing dream of making thanksgiving for my family, my aunt was incredibly angry that I wasn¡¯t planning to have the standard full roast turkey. It took a while to explain why, and while she enjoyed the results, she was clearly still annoyed that the bird wasn¡¯t whole.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:48 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

I have a community cookbook from about the same time that has the cheese dip made by combining Velveeta and Ro-Tel tomatoes

This is what parties in Texas taste like, and if you go to a Superbowl party anywhere in the state next year you would get covid and this queso, guaranteed. It just...is. Ro*Tel has a nice flavor profile and the Velveeta makes it party friendly because as long as you can keep it a little warm it won't seize up. People own entire small crock pots specifically for the Ro*Tel dip.

And if your family had at least one extemporaneous cook, the velveeta-ro*tel combo was just the base. It's a good base, because of the non-seizing factor and the green chiles. But you'll absolutely find it enhanced with chorizo, carne asada, fresh or pickled jalapenos, as part of 7 Layer Dip, next to homemade refried beans and/or perfect guacamole. If you go to a very fancy high school, you can get it instead of canned nacho cheese on your chili dog or Frito Pie at football games.

You can make a scratch party queso, but to keep it viable for a couple of hours you'll have to put so much sodium citrate in it that you will have made homemade Velveeta and y'all, just go to HEB and get some dang ol' Velveeta, you've got too many other things to do to get ready for this party. (Also, the Queso Blanco version of Velveeta is equally good for this dip.)
posted by Lyn Never at 6:08 PM on October 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

Eyebrows's secret turkey recipe: Get a turkey. Get 1-2# of bacon. Put turkey in roasting pan. Cover entire top of turkey with bacon. Roast 15 min per pound at 325 until thermometer registers 160. Let rest 20 minutes.

The bacon bastes the turkey for you, you don't have to fuss with it at all when it's in the oven, and it makes the turkey stay moist and tender.

Plus, cook gets to eat the crispy bacon off the turkey while carving.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:18 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

OH man loquacious the "SHIT WHATEVER FOOD ELEMENTS THAT I CAN GRAB AND EAT IN 45 SECONDS IN THE WALK IN" meal is the fucking staple of kitchens. "Is this worth a cigarette break?"
posted by Ferreous at 6:25 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Contemporary cast iron pans (and I'm looking at you Lodge!)

Can't second this strongly enough. I can't fathom how Lodge gets the love it does except for its enameled pieces; the finish on their bare cast iron is an abomination and to be avoided at all costs. Vintage cast iron hands down, or if a person wants new, Butter Pat pans.
posted by vers at 6:28 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

My hot take is that people aren't using enough MSG in their home cooking. If you taste a dish and it's missing "something", there's a good chance that something is MSG.

Put MSG In Everything, You Cowards
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:47 PM on October 11, 2020 [16 favorites]

I love old cast iron, but asking people to get hunt down old ebay cookware or fish thrift stores is silly. Yeah it was way better, but access is shit! An enameled dutch oven is way better of an item for most use, but even the cuisanart or lodge version of those are expensive.

Modern cast iron is mediocre quality and requires a reasonable amount of upkeep. Hell, I like cooking and I get home after only an 8 hour day and want to just make the easiest food possible, I don't want to deal with pans that need heat up time, cool down time, and a separate washing method! I've known enough people who only had a burner or range top and not an oven for seasoning. It's not as easy as made out to be.

I won't rep nonstick, but steel pans are common, reasonably cheap and don't need you to do any special care.
posted by Ferreous at 6:48 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

I only have cast iron frying pans.. all vintage, from the 1880s to the 1940s. The new stuff doesn¡¯t compare. My pans have always been cleaned with soap and water, no way you are going to remove a proper seasoning with a bit of soap.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:56 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

Despite what some people think, being a super-taster is not great. To quote They Might Be Giants, I would not know if a pear tastes like a million pears, because I've only had one tongue and this is how things taste to me. I have never been able to enjoy beer or coffee. I choke down wine and many green vegetables because I'm trying to be a grown up, but none of it is delicious.

If you want to get yourself tested you can buy cheap test strips and get 100 for less than $20. If you are not a supertaster they will taste like paper and if you are it will taste like satan's anus. Enjoy!
posted by Alison at 7:01 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Wow. For me the most aggravating kitchen faux pas was carefully remodeling a kitchen but failing to put in the very best hood I could afford. It is everything. Oh, and at least one burner capable of 30K BTU.
posted by bz at 7:15 PM on October 11, 2020

Oh, oh, and a chamber vac.
posted by bz at 7:21 PM on October 11, 2020

or if a person wants new, Butter Pat pans.

300 BUCKS for a cast iron pan?!? Yeesh. Look, cast iron is cast iron; the only difference between cheap Lodge pans and vintage ones is a polished cooking surface. So here's what you do: Spend $25-$30 on a Lodge pan (or use one of your existing, if you have it) and take an orbital sander to it. If you don't want to DIY you can probably find a machine shop or blacksmith or something in your local area who'll sand the inside smooth for far less than $200. Then season it. Hey presto, a pan just as good as an overpriced artisanal or even expensive vintage pan on Ebay!
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:32 PM on October 11, 2020 [16 favorites]

By the way, I've absolutely done the above (DIY, took me less than an hour) and the result was fantastic. It was even non-stick enough to cook eggs in. My only regret is that I used flaxseed oil, and the finish didn't last very long - oh, and it stank to high heaven while seasoning. Next time I feel like getting back to cooking eggs in it, I'll re-season with canola oil and get on with the rest of my life. I've used canola oil on my other two cast-iron pans and they do great, though I do want to eventually get them sanded smooth as well.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:35 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

I haven't made garlic chocolate chip cookies, but I did make garlic butter florentines and they were pretty rad.
posted by aws17576 at 7:40 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

DO NOT purchase a perfectly cylindrical blender. It is basically a food gun, that will get shit all over the fucking ceiling, and you may end up scalded by a rain of hot vichyssoise. I, um, read that somewhere.
posted by sexyrobot at 7:51 PM on October 11, 2020 [10 favorites]

I cooked an egg this morning in an 8" Lodge that I bought at Target for like $9.00 ten years ago. It didn't stick. And I use soap to clean it.

This notion that you have to have it all ground down to some kinda infinite smoothness seems beside the point to me. I mean no offense, but every time cast-iron comes up these opinions about how to take care of them, or treat them, or use them start bubbling to the surface like folks who are arguing about surf boards.

Also, I would eat garlic cookies in a heartbeat. But then again, I drink red wine with fish.
posted by valkane at 7:54 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

Rice is just as easy to make on a stovetop pot and tastes just as good as from a rice cooker. You only need a rice cooker if you¡¯re eating rice 3 times a day.

A jar of minced garlic in oil is a godsend when you¡¯re in a hurry and don¡¯t want your fingertips to smell.
posted by furtive at 8:03 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

the fucking staple of kitchens

For real. Staff meals got me used to cold food and warm beer. I don¡¯t eat quickly, so the staff meal would sit there, and if I had a chance, I¡¯d take a bite. Staff beers would come an hour before last order, and at that point, I was always trying to get prep for closing done, so that beer was always room (kitchen) temp by the time I got to it.

Mostly due to shitty staff meals prepared by indifferent college kids, I¡¯m a lot less picky now, and, though it might not sound like it, food is a lot less of a central thing in my life now. Sure, I¡¯ll still get excited about some things, and if I have someone to cook for, I¡¯ll do my best to make sure they enjoy it, but a part of me is fine with throwing a party for friends and enjoying them enjoying the day while I wash dishes and eat in the kitchen.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:08 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Fuck, I miss having big groups of people over for a cookout. Fucking Covid.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:08 PM on October 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

We have a beautiful cast-iron pan with red enamel on the outside and a wooden handle. I have no idea how old it is, my partner won't let me wash it because I do it wrong. But it's hard on my wrist. If I had a physical therapist, I'd be banned from using it.

I was definitely coveting those Butterpat pans. Those Butterpat pans are lighter, and they say the angle of the handle is ergonomic, and it has a tab for a 2-handed grip.
posted by aniola at 8:08 PM on October 11, 2020

Expiration dates are usually worthless - food is usually the most flavorful right before it spoils.

If you can cook things as well as those that come from a chef you're entitled to call yourself a chef. There's no bonus for speed cooking or using obscure ingredients.

Buy a really good enamel cast iron dutch oven and enjoy it for the rest of your life - your decedents will think fondly of you. Oh, and read the directions on its care and feeding.

It may be too soon to tell if old cast iron pans are inferior to new ones. The vintage ones are seasoned with decades use with saturated fats and probably washed properly (ie very little if any soap). They do seem to have a rougher surface but an angle grind can probably make them as smooth as the expensive ones.

Animal fat is the new smoking. WHO studies suggest that life expectancy is measurably decreased by consuming even moderate as low as 4 ounces per week.
posted by onesidys at 8:21 PM on October 11, 2020

My first thought take is, redo basic kitchen moves (dicing, egg cookery, browning onions, whatever) a number of times over and pay attention to what works and what doesn't. what's your stove setting, which pan worked best, what heat level in the pan made sense, which oil. Repetition is key. Same goes for a basic skills cookbook (Joy, Bittman, Fannie Farmer). Once you know how the basics behave and what success sort of looks and smells like, branching out into weirder stuff becomes a lot easier.

My second thought take is, a lot of kitchen advice taken individually is maybe for shit. Try different stuff and figure out what works for you. My home kitchen is a mad bastardization of all the good and bad advice given above, and I am pretty happy with outcomes generally and pretty happy with my skills. I have zero training in cookery and ddidn't really start paying attention until I was in my twenties (now 50). I get by.

My third thought take is, for heaven's sake do pre-prep! Get your mise en place action sorted out! My two kids in the last couple of years have been trying to cook more and watching them read stuff on the internet and try to execute the recipe stepwise in real time just makes my brain bleed. Ramekins and custard dishes full of diced whatever are your friend. Pretend you are on TV if it makes life easier for you.

My current challenge in cookery is my household went veg (ovo lacto pesce) about a year ago fairly abruptly, and while I really don't mind, it's been a weird adjustment to figure out meals that aren't based around a set piece meat. ESPECIALLY in barbecue season.
posted by hearthpig at 8:36 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Cake mixes can be really good, and are nearly foolproof.

My hot take is related to this:
A duncan hines with some duncan hines icing is better than any wedding cake covered in butter cream and fondant I've ever had. It's not even close.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:45 PM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

"watching them read stuff on the internet and try to execute the recipe stepwise in real time just makes my brain bleed."

Oh my God, this is my husband. He just starts in at the beginning of the recipe, without even checking that he has all the ingredients first. HOWWWWWWWWWW? WHYYYYYYYYYYYY?

And then inevitably in the middle of the recipe when he's already committed half the ingredients, he's like, "Where do we keep the rye flour?" "WE DON'T!" "Where's the coriander?" "I don't cook with coriander so we don't have any unless we buy it special."

Or my all-time favorite: "What's cream of tartar?"
With dawning suspicion: "... did you separate the eggs?"
"Yeah, it said to do that, but I don't know what that is, so I just put the eggs in."
"Yeah, you're not gonna need that cream of tartar, and you're no longer making an angel food cake."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:50 PM on October 11, 2020 [17 favorites]

This notion that you have to have it all ground down to some kinda infinite smoothness seems beside the point to me.

What grinding down the pebbled surface does is vastly accelerate the time it takes to get a smoothly seasoned surface. You can definitely achieve the same thing with a few years of regular sauteeing/frying, it just takes longer to gunk up the pits of a non-smooth surface with polymerized fat.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:41 PM on October 11, 2020

WHO studies suggest that life expectancy is measurably decreased by consuming even moderate as low as 4 ounces per week.

Maybe, but I'll die with happy memories of well-enjoyed steaks and bacon and smoked pork and brisket. And crispy roasted-chicken skin, mmmmmm..... and juicy burgers, and pepperoni, and... (Homer salivating noises)
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:48 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

If you can cook things as well as those that come from a chef you're entitled to call yourself a chef.

No you're not, full stop. Sorry, I'm going to get a bit salty out of this. I think I might truly be possessed by Anthony Bourdain tonight. Hang in there, I'm going somewhere.

A chef is a specific role and title, and I'm saying this as someone who can cook food as good as a chef. someone one of the things I like to do the most in life is try a new recipe from scratch that's someone's favorite thing and then nail it down so hard that people often react with words like "This is the best whatever I've ever had in my entire life." and I would never even dream of calling myself a chef.

Shoot, I just tried making a proper brioche the other day without a stand mixer and I absolutely nailed it on the first try and they're better than our local baker's brioche. Buttery soft, perfectly tender crumb, nearly perfect shape and color.

But I'm not a baker. Why? Because I can't make 1,000 or even 100 brioche rolls every day that are almost exactly the same, day in and day out, and I sure as heck can't do it as fast as they can.

I like to bake. I am not a baker.

I've made people's jaws non-figuratively drop and their eyes bug right of their head and made them make weird orgasmic noises with my cooking and the mere thought of actually being a chef gives me so much anxiety I start clenching my teeth. The work load of a working executive chef is totally fucking insane and involves a lot more than just being able to replicate a dish or cook well.

In fact being a chef often doesn't involve much cooking or line work at all. Some executive chefs mainly sit in an office, do inventory and ordering. If they do any cooking at all it's to develop a new recipe and process, write that down, demo it to the kitchen brigade and then get back to the office ordering ingredients and kitchenware for the new menu item.

Calling yourself a chef because you can cook well is like saying you can call yourself a doctor because you can apply a band aid just as well as your doctor and ignoring all the other parts of being a doctor.

A chef is a very specific professional trade title that's been somewhat flexible in meaning, but it implies a bunch of things like being able to manage a restaurant, design a menu from a blank page and develop and document recipes and kitchen manual procedures. This includes the complicated task of procurement and shopping for stuff like seasonal and local menus. This means being a manager of staff and how to build and command a kitchen brigade. This means being able to sustain all of these tasks over and over again, day in and day out often for years, sometimes decades.

Please don't abuse the title of chef this way, it means something. It's a very difficult to earn honorific and professional title. It's not just about the quality of food you can cook.

I mean you can do whatever you want in your own kitchen and put on a "Kiss the Chef" apron and call yourself a chef if you like or whatever, but that stuff definitely will not fly in a commercial kitchen. If you really want to be friendly with the staff it's nice to be informed about what a chef actually does and what the word means, and not abuse the professional title of chef this way because it's a position that takes years and years of incredibly difficult work and 80+ hour work weeks to achieve the title and be able to honestly put it on your resume.


I have no doubts anyone here can learn how to cook very well, and I know from experience that MeFi has some fine cooks and even more than a few professionals. Cooking is a really cool and good skill to have and a very rewarding art to learn, and it's a great way to express love to your friends and family.

Now make 100 of the same dish and have it come out with consistently high quality every time. Now do it while doing 10 other menu items. Now do it while you have a mountain of dishes the size of a truck to wash. Now do it while also keeping up on prep and processing ingredients, dancing around your other kitchen staff and not crashing into each other while holding a really big, sharp knife or a huge pot of boiling water or soup or a hot pan full of grease.

Now do it knowing half your staff is probably hung over and maybe even stoned.

Or, hell, do banquet service for 500 seats three times a day at a conference or resort. That shit is bonkers. It's like going to war and the work never ends, and sometimes the kitchens of these places never close.

I remember the first really big commercial kitchen I ever worked in that was at a resort or hotel scale. We're talking like 7-8 double counter lines each 20 feet long. Three walk in fridges and a deep freezer, each as big as a studio apartment, and a dry storage room the size of a 1 bedroom house.

One day I made the mistake of wearing a pedometer on a really busy day, and it turns out I basically walked or ran about 8-10 miles that day, and I was just a barista and short order cook working a 6-7 hour shift. I probably hit as much as 4-5 miles even in the much smaller bar/bistro kind of kitchen I'm working now.

I go through shoes like water and use up a pair shock absorbing insoles about once a month. My knees sound like wet beach gravel in a sock.

If you can manage that you can call yourself a decent line cook or maybe entremetier, saucier, etc. Do custom orders diner style? Ok, you're a short order cook.

And being a competent line or short order cook isn't a small thing, either. It's skilled labor, sometimes even an art. It's ok to be a line cook and not a chef.

Still really want to call yourself a chef?

Ok, but I want to see you design a full service menu, open and run a successful restaurant for at least 5 years. I want to see dozens and dozens of hand written recipe books that you've developed. You should be able to compete and place in an Iron Chef style competition and show global knowledge in the three major schools of cooking and much more without having to resort to any recipes at all. This goes way beyond knowing how to prep for and execute a recipe or why you don't generally put garlic in chocolate chip cookies, it means having a global knowledge of food, food history, culinary arts and sciences and how to bring them all together into a successful business enterprise.

Now try doing this every day for weeks, months and years. Work a double shift open to close, then pull a clopener and maybe another double shift the next day. And the day after that. Maybe do this for like 6 years of 80+ hour weeks.

Also keep in mind that most professional executive chefs I've met that were worth their literal salt were absolutely miserable human beings that were so stressed out and overworked that they weren't just addicted to alcohol or other self medication strategies, they were also often addicted to antacids from the lifestyle, stress and bad diet.

Do feel free to call yourself a cook, even a good cook or whatever you want, really.

To be honest you don't really want to call yourself chef even if you don't wish to respect the professional title as an honorific.

The people who have earned that title have worked their asses off for it and I would like people to respect and understand this.
posted by loquacious at 9:58 PM on October 11, 2020 [43 favorites]

As a professional who worked my way up from dishwasher, attended school and fought for every bit of experience I have . . . I can't thank you enough for that.
posted by kaiseki at 10:11 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

My hot take: genetics have a LOT less to do with whether or not you like cilantro (or asparagus, or whatever) than habit and experience.

I can definitely taste cilantro. When I was young, it tasted like *metal* to me. Same with celery. Something high and sharp yet *lingering*. I can still taste this, but now appreciate the way it complements other flavors in food.

I now like bittermelon. It's a gourd, not a melon, but whatever. It's bitter to the point that if you tried it without warning, you'd think someone had poisoned your summer squash. If you have it cooked right, and you're hungry enough, you eat past that initial shock, and then begin to appreciate what that bitterness can do alongside salt and umami.

I used to pick onions and bell peppers off of pizza. Onions are full of sulfur compounds, and extremely pungent. We don't eat raw onions like apples, but they're ubiquitous in so many cuisines, and we generally get used to them by adulthood because they're everywhere, and they have so much good going on with them that we see past, and then begin to enjoy, the harsher aspects of them. The same is true of anyone who ever learned to like black coffee, or strong liquor.

Hotter take with overgeneralization: I think people can be more tolerant of other people if they can practice overcoming instinctive dislikes, including revulsion. Controlling your instinctive reaction to unfamiliar food can be practice for controlling your instinctive reaction to unfamiliar people and their behaviors.
posted by pykrete jungle at 10:51 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

I can definitely taste cilantro. When I was young, it tasted like *metal* to me. Same with celery. Something high and sharp yet *lingering*. I can still taste this, but now appreciate the way it complements other flavors in food.

I'm not sure how to connect this to your observation about the metallic taste of cilantro you experienced as a child, pykrete jungle, but cilantro has a reputation as a powerful chelating agent in India, and is widely used in 'natural chelation' metal toxicity treatments there.

Did your family use aluminum cookware when you were a child? That might account for it under an assumption that the chemical environment of your mouth plus the food you were eating caused aluminum to be released from the cilantro as you ate it, or that cilantro with a metal ion in its claws itself tastes metallic, but of course most commercial cookware is aluminum these days, as I understand it.
posted by jamjam at 11:33 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

DO NOT purchase a perfectly cylindrical blender. It is basically a food gun, that will get shit all over the fucking ceiling, and you may end up scalded by a rain of hot vichyssoise. I, um, read that somewhere.

And definitely stay away from those rifled blender jars.
posted by myotahapea at 1:18 AM on October 12, 2020

Not sure if reverting to eating peanut butter & jelly for lunch during this plague is a faux pas or not.

If eating two slices of bread with something in between them is somehow a 'faux pas', or childish*, then millions of people are committing this 'faux pas' every day of their lives. It's not a faux pas, it's food. Do you people even see how incredibly US-centric this thread is?

Here's my hot take:
Bread for breakfast and for lunch is good and just. It's not the only righteous path, but it is certainly one of the righteous paths. Millions of people all across Europe can't be wrong. Well, at least not on this.

*'Reverting'?! WTF?
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:52 AM on October 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

It's a humorous reference to how PB&J is a staple of kids' meals rather than adults', so eating that particular thing is kinda going back to childhood. It has nothing to do with sandwiches in general or US-centrism.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:09 AM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

Super hot take that I'll probably regret saying out loud: all American cooking fads are ways to add flavor to essentially flavorless ingredients.

Almost all Americans only have access to industrially produced chicken, fish, vegetables, and fruits that taste like cardboard and water. Even the fresh herbs from the supermarket have no taste. So American cooking is obsessed with adding hot sauce, umami, and huge amounts of dried spices. It focuses on preserved flavors that come from smoking, pickling, and brining. Just add more butter, garlic, bacon, MSG, salt, and pepper!

Techniques that focus on showing off the flavor of quality fresh ingredients in season aren't fashionable, because they don't work if you try to make them in the US.
posted by fuzz at 2:26 AM on October 12, 2020 [8 favorites]

Harvey Kilobit: It has nothing to do with sandwiches in general or US-centrism.

Wait, were my comments in this thread supposed to be measured and reasonable? Then I may have misunderstood its purpose.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:41 AM on October 12, 2020 [7 favorites]

I rarely sully extra mixing bowls by combining dry and wet ingredients separately and then mixing. I know the reasoning for this, but can't be bothered. For a batter I mix the dry ingredients, make a hole in the middle, mix the wet ingredients in there, and then incorporate the dry. For cookie doughs I cream the butter and sugar and add other wet ingredients, then try to sprinkle all the dry evenly over the surface before incorporating.
posted by St. Oops at 2:51 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

You want to know how to cook something? Google it, read the first page of recipes (skipping past all the bullshit food blogger SEO padding before the actual recipe), and take the median, completely ignoring any weird ingredients or steps that appear only in one recipe. They're clearly not important.

I've long desired a sort of recipe aggregator that would do this for me. Give me the basics about ingredients and process, and maybe some ranges, and some options. Since moving abroad necessitated quite a bit of subsitutions and creativity to recreate the food I grew up with, I could probably count on both hands the number of times I follow a recipe to the letter per year. And I am the primary household cook, preparing 99% of the family meals.
posted by St. Oops at 2:59 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

I eat chicken fat from the roasting pan with a spoon.

I fry bread in the leftover bacon fat and the put peanut butter on it (and the bacon if it lasts that long). It's a glorious grease bomb.

I eat chocolate chips without cookie.
posted by srboisvert at 4:56 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've long desired a sort of recipe aggregator that would do this for me. Give me the basics about ingredients and process, and maybe some ranges, and some options.

There is a series in The Guardian that does this: it looks at a given food, and reviews all the recipes and critiques them and the differences and then synthesises the best of them into one single recipe. It's a real triumph of empowering people to make decisions about how to cook and work with food.
posted by ambrosen at 5:05 AM on October 12, 2020 [11 favorites]

The people who have earned that title have worked their asses off for it and I would like people to respect and understand this.

I have mad respect for professional chefs but this kind of gatekeeping can be incredibly harmful. How many women and minorities have been told "You can't call yourself a real chef because you haven't done X"?
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 5:42 AM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

There is a series in The Guardian that does this:
I love that series! But I want more of a sort-of search engine that skims online sources, aggregates the content, and presents the results in a table of sorts. My process otherwise is very much like confluency's or showbiz_liz's but I'd like to be able to refer people to a site that does this for them instead of having to explain the way I (and clearly others) think about recipes. I mean, saying "hybridize Kenji Alt Lopez and Mark Bittman and Ina Garten's spice rubs (based on local availability) but follow Alton Brown's process" to make this chicken will get you some strange looks.
posted by St. Oops at 6:05 AM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

this kind of gatekeeping can be incredibly harmful
That is absolutely true, but it's not really related to the point being made here, which is merely that many people misuse the word "chef." It's not a term of respect; it's a particular position, like "office manager" or "crossing guard."
posted by neroli at 6:54 AM on October 12, 2020 [7 favorites]

I've long desired a sort of recipe aggregator that would do this for me.
Get copies of Joy of Cooking and Betty Crocker Cookbooks. Many editions of Joy of Cooking will teach you how to prepare game. Totally solid basics. I don't cook game, but Joy of Cooking is a good cookbook, and really good reading.
posted by theora55 at 7:27 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

You never really know how other people taste things, but the cilantro debate is especially confusing to me as a person who both loves cilantro and understands the "soapy" criticism. To me, cilantro tastes soapy the same way rosewater tastes soapy -- like, I just tell my mind that it's supposed to taste that way and everything's good? I tend to like strong flavors, and I live in a place where most herbs grow well. (Bay leaf is probably the only herb that doesn't taste super-strong to me, but I put it in everything vaguely saucy that cooks for more than 10 minutes because I just assume that it must be doing great work as a basal flavor that I don't quite notice.)

I agree on the "don't toss spices like clockwork" thing, and suspect it's a "rule" that exists so people don't end up with decade-old spice blends in their cupboards. Obviously, try to use what you have in a timely fashion -- but it's not hard to use your own judgment to tell when your seasonings taste more like dust than spice. There might also be a useful distinction here between whole (unground) spices, ground spices, and dried herbs here. I'm a big fan of fresh herbs, and think most people who like to cook should try to free up a corner somewhere and grow their favorite fresh herbs. And ground spices do lose flavor quickly. But unground spices...guys I have 2 year old nutmeg that tastes great. I have a case of embarrassingly old cardamom that I still make syrup out of!

The biggest difference between how I cook and how my mother cooks is that I never wash chicken before cooking it. I remember my grandmother scrubbing (raw, fully plucked, and prepared) birds, so I definitely assume that's a generational shift. I don't bleach my kitchen sink enough to want to introduce extra bacteria around it, and from what I understand washing the bird probably won't do anything better than fully cooking it. Also I'm gross and lazy? But yeah, don't wash your prepared poultry.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:02 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Get copies of Joy of Cooking
I use my Joy and my How to Cook Everything together with their Swedish equivalent and other cookbooks in the same manner as I google recpies: I look for commonalities and get a feel for ranges in ingredients and processes and then wing it. These books provide singular data points which maybe should be weighted due to their ubiquity and reverance in our kitchens, but they do not provide the depth or potential for insight that a broad spectrum of recipe sources would.
posted by St. Oops at 8:12 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm a big fan of fresh herbs, and think most people who like to cook should try to free up a corner somewhere and grow their favorite fresh herbs...

Completely agree and also wanted to add that it's fine to grow fresh herbs and not worry too much about keeping them alive. Things shifted for me when I thought of growing as extended preservation of something that'd spoil in the fridge. Buy plants, cut off what you need when you need it, if it gets weird or over/underwatered or infested with weird bugs you have to look up on the internet, treat it as disposable, get a new one and start again. Much less stressful than constantly doting over a plant that wants to die.

Also, green onions kept in water on a windowsill can be trimmed and will regrow repeatedly, and stay fresh far longer than in the fridge.

The biggest difference between how I cook and how my mother cooks is that I never wash chicken before cooking it.

Jacques Pepin says something to the effect of "I don't wash poultry. If anything is surviving on that chicken after a trip through a 400 degree oven, it deserves to kill me".
posted by mikesch at 8:28 AM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

This morning, with much trepidation, I cut an avocado the short way, as Rash suggested, and... it was okay.

It did turn out to be one of those disappointing avocados with a disproportionately huge seed, and I'm not saying the Rash Method caused this, but I'm also not saying it didn't.
posted by moonmilk at 8:29 AM on October 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

This morning's announcement of James May's new cooking show seems to be fortuitously timed.
posted by Fiberoptic Zebroid and The Hypnagogic Jerks at 8:57 AM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

You know the length of time it takes to cook your favorite noodles to a perfect al dente?

I cook mine like three or four minutes more than that and I am not sorry.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:06 AM on October 12, 2020 [8 favorites]

For a batter I mix the dry ingredients, make a hole in the middle, mix the wet ingredients in there, and then incorporate the dry. For cookie doughs I cream the butter and sugar and add other wet ingredients, then try to sprinkle all the dry evenly over the surface before incorporating.

I haven't ever seen it done, and done it myself, any other way, nor read, as far as I can remember, recipes telling you to use separate mixing bowls for dry and wet. This may be partly due to kitchen space and inventory being less extensive in the places I grew up than in the US.

Anyway, I haven't had disappointing results that can be attributed to the Single Mixing Bowl Method.
posted by Stoneshop at 9:13 AM on October 12, 2020

It's perfectly fine to cut up spaghetti with a fork and knife rather than trying to mess with that fork-twirling thing.
posted by Preserver at 9:33 AM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

Completely agree and also wanted to add that it's fine to grow fresh herbs and not worry too much about keeping them alive.

Yes! I grew herbs from seed this year and now that I know which ones I use a lot, I'm planning to start succession planting them: start a few new seeds of each type every month or so, use up the oldest one when the next oldest is ready, move on. Much easier than trying to convince your lone basil to JUST STOP MAKING FLOWERS ALREADY JEEZ
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:37 AM on October 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

I have a community cookbook from about the same time that has the cheese dip made by combining Velveeta and Ro-Tel tomatoes

Kraft used to make shelf stable two-pound American blocks (foil wrapped, vacuum sealed) that sat on the grocery shelf next to the shelf stable two-pound Velveeta blocks. Ro-Tel cheese dip is so much mellower with American than it is with Velveeta - that sodium citrate super twang is just too much for me. You could test this yourself by going to the deli and having them slice a couple pounds of white or yellow American cheese, and using that with your Ro-Tel instead. American cheese also has the superior melting, non-seizing characteristics of Velveeta engineering.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 9:51 AM on October 12, 2020

I make the Ro-Tel dip with Land O'Lakes white American cheese and prefer that strongly to Velveeta.
posted by Daily Alice at 1:12 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

I don't wish to attack your hill without good reason, but why is it?

Replace X with Y: if you are out of X, use Y instead.
Substitute X for Y: if you are out of Y, use X as a replacement.

(for "out of", substitute "dislike", "are allergic to" or equivalents according to taste)
posted by Stoneshop at 1:14 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Frozen peas are better than canned but canned green beans are better than frozen. It¡¯s a mystery.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:16 PM on October 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

It¡¯s a mystery.

Uncanny, I'd say.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:18 PM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

My hot take is that buying hummus ready-made from a grocery store is like buying bottled water when you have perfectly safe and abundant drinking water coming out of your faucet.

Folks. For real. Hummus takes TWO MINUTES including cleanup and prep! Also it costs about $1 in ingredients to make what Sabra sells for $8. Come on! How is there a market for this?!

> canned green beans are better than frozen.

is this sarcasm? :O
posted by MiraK at 1:25 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

> I make the Ro-Tel dip with Land O'Lakes white American cheese and prefer that strongly to Velveeta.

You've got good company, there.
posted by ardgedee at 1:33 PM on October 12, 2020

Food faux pas (I think): Tomato soup is a staple I eat a couple of times a week, at least recently. Store brand's is fine, though I prefer to take the extra two minutes to make it from tomato paste, a teaspoon or so of roux, salt, pepper, and milk. Eaten with soda crackers, or if I'm feeling extravagant, Fritos. Cheap, quick, easy, only one pan to clean, and oh-so-satisfying.

(I gave up on Campbells a few years ago when they changed the recipe again and it became overly, obviously sweetened. After some experiments with making it from scratch, I settled on the tomato paste version, which is almost as quick as from a pre-canned soup, and imho a much better tasting soup. Still feels like a cheat compared to homegrown tomatoes and hours of work.)
posted by Blackanvil at 1:59 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

I *like* the texture and flavour of frozen carrots.

Haven't bothered with roasting a whole turkey in years. Instead, I bone out the breast leaving as much of the skin on as possible, book-open the thicker part of it to make a flat rectangle of roughly equal thickness.

Bone out the thigh and book-open the thicker part to make a rectangle. Season both, place thigh on the middle of the breast. A couple strips of thick-cut bacon in the middle, sometimes.

Roll it all up, stretch the skin around to hold it together and pin. Rub down the outside of the skin with (aged) balsamic vinegar.

Takes less time to roast, the temperature delta is consistent, you get some crispy skin with each cross-section cut, the bacon in the middle obviates brining, and you get both white and dark meat.

Drumpsticks can go in the oven at the same time, the rest goes to make stock for stovetop dressing/ stuffing (using the included internal wobbly bits) and gravy. Pan drippings get deglazed and added to the gravy to super charge it. The stock takes longer to make than the turkey rolls.
posted by porpoise at 2:20 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Folks. For real. Hummus takes TWO MINUTES including cleanup and prep!

Not if you don't have a food processor it doesn't. I tried making it with a mortar and pestle. It did not go well.

But on that note: I got a mortar and pestle for Christmas, and after a few weeks of experimenting it has become essentially a single-purpose garlic masher... and if it every breaks I will buy a new one just for that purpose. I love it. You know how long it takes to UTTERLY PULVERIZE INTO PASTE five cloves of garlic with a mortar and pestle? Less than 30 seconds. It's wonderful. I will never mince garlic again.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:25 PM on October 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

My culinary hot take: spaghetti carbonara is the perfect breakfast food.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 2:26 PM on October 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

A few Thanksgivings ago I had to find a new turkey recipe to accommodate a garlic-and-onion allergy, and I found the recipe I will be using forever going forward.

Basically it boils down to:

-Melt five sticks of butter. Mix melted butter with an entire bottle of white wine and some herbs.
-Soak a bunch of cheesecloth in the butter and wine mixture.
-Cover the turkey with the soaked cheesecloth and start baking.
-Pour the butter/wine over top periodically until you run out, then switch to basting with the drippings.

Dry? Aww, poor baby, your turkey is dry? You must not have experienced the sheer POWER of BUTTERWINE.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:32 PM on October 12, 2020 [23 favorites]

Spatchcocking is the only way to roast poultry.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:51 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

> St. Oops:
"You want to know how to cook something? Google it, read the first page of recipes (skipping past all the bullshit food blogger SEO padding before the actual recipe), and take the median, completely ignoring any weird ingredients or steps that appear only in one recipe. They're clearly not important.

I've long desired a sort of recipe aggregator that would do this for me. Give me the basics about ingredients and process, and maybe some ranges, and some options."

I swear I remember a post within the last month or 2 on reddit that was highlighting a site that did this.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 2:51 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Spatchcocking is the only way to roast poultry.

NOT IF YOU BUTTERWINE
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:53 PM on October 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

"My culinary hot take: spaghetti carbonara is the perfect breakfast food."


Awww, fuck yeah!
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:54 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

is this sarcasm? :O

Nope. Sincere. But it¡¯s a completely moot point since I can get fresh green beans year-round. I choose the Chinese long beans sometimes since there¡¯s fewer ends to trim but they do have a slightly different flavor and texture. They¡¯re my go-to for green bean casserole which my kids demand on holidays.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:57 PM on October 12, 2020

Will look into that butter wine thing¡ªlooks good!¡ªbut roasting poultry whole or stuffed is just more work and less satisfaction.

I admit that I do persist in whole stuffed turkey for holidays just for the ceremony and tradition of carving at the table. But I should give that up; it¡¯s not worth it.

A couple of years I even boned and stuffed a turkey so that I could just carve it like slicing a cake. Boning a whole turkey without breaking the skin is a real project! I wouldn¡¯t stuff a turkey that wasn¡¯t brined, though. I don¡¯t think you could cook it through without ruining it otherwise. But then again brined turkey is kinda a whole different thing than unbrined and let¡¯s just say there were differences of opinion on that in my family.
posted by sjswitzer at 3:09 PM on October 12, 2020

Boning a whole turkey without breaking the skin is a real project!

Ah, I remember the days of glove boning turkeys. /turducken
posted by porpoise at 3:27 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

metafilter: I don't wish to attack your hill without good reason
posted by hearthpig at 3:52 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

The mention of the ease and cheapness of homemade hummous above made me realize I want to share the following:

Our household became more or less vegetarian (ovo lacto occasionally fish) although I admit when I am off on my own I do cheat occasionally...but not as much as I thought I would.

In any case: I have always enjoyed bean cookery generally (moosewood etc) and also have housemade hummous down to about 10 minutes but we have historically relied on canned beans. I have figured out during the covidiocy that it's a pretty easy workflow to soak (yeah, I think it makes a difference) and boil maybe 4 cups of beans every weekend and freeze them in jars in their own cooking liquid, 2 cups at a time. Vastly cheaper and so much more flavorful than the canned variety. Practically speaking this requires a number of medium jars and probably an upright freezer, but I have a regular cycle now where every weekend I do chickpeas, then black beans, then kidneys, then navies, repeat. if you forget to take the jar out the day before it can be bulk defrosted in a microwave in maybe 20 minutes. No it's not as convenient as a can, but VASTLY superior IMNSHO.
posted by hearthpig at 3:58 PM on October 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

If you want perfect chick peas, pressure cook them. No soaking necessary. Dried chick peas are ready for salads or stews after 45 minutes or so in the pressure cooker. For hummus keep them going for two hours and they¡¯ll be falling apart to the point you don¡¯t need to peel them.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 4:15 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

One last hot take: Eggs Benedict should be served on crumpets.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 4:37 PM on October 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yes, crumpets > ¡°English¡± muffins
posted by sjswitzer at 4:41 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

@hearthpig - My thoughts were going in the same direction, I think I'll try doing that also! I love canellini and kidney beans, maybe will try garbanzo too, I used to like them.
posted by rainy at 4:43 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

I was offered a free garlic press and refused it. Smashing with the side of a knife is faster and easier and way less clean-up.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:44 PM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

Idk, the other flavors in hummus (tahini, lemon juice) are strong enough that I can't taste the difference between canned chickpeas vs. pressure cooked.

Not if you don't have a food processor it doesn't.

A blender works just as well, especially if you don't mind a slightly saucier consistency rather than the usual sludgy paste. I didn't own a good processor either until recently. Hummus occurred regularly regardless.

On that note, baba ghanoush is the exact same recipe as hummus except roasted & mashed eggplant takes the place of mushed chickpeas. Baking time aside (you slice an eggplant in half and bake it face down in a tray at 400F for 20 minutes), this is even less effort than hummus because you don't even need to dirty up a food processor: the eggplant is easily smushed with a fork.
posted by MiraK at 4:45 PM on October 12, 2020

>Not if you don't have a food processor it doesn't.

>>A blender works just as well

...I also don't have a blender.
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:47 PM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

In the 70s everybody had electric can openers. WHY?
posted by sjswitzer at 4:50 PM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

@oboe_adjacent_duck, I was all set to move into pressure cooker territory this august when I started doing tomatoes again, and it turns out the most recommended brands of pressure cookers and pressure canners have been backordered for most of 2020.
posted by hearthpig at 4:51 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

You want to know how to cook something? Google it, read the first page of recipes (skipping past all the bullshit food blogger SEO padding before the actual recipe), and take the median, completely ignoring any weird ingredients or steps that appear only in one recipe.

Automating this would be an absolutely fascinating natural language processing project, and I am in no way planning on starting it because it would drive me insane.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:02 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Instant Pot is the pressure cooker for the rest of us. Stop holding out. It¡¯s pretty good!
posted by sjswitzer at 5:23 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Agreed, and don't sweat the fancy bells and whistles - most of those are nothing more than preset timers, and have extremely limited utility. Easy enough to just press Pressure Cook, enter a time, and let it do its thing.

Also don't bother trying to saut¨¦ in it, the inner bowl has a concave bottom and a small diameter and it's just way easier to saut¨¦/brown whatever is needed in a separate pan.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:31 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Not a hot take, but... Put onion skins in your broths for color. Put a small tomato in your broth to clarify it.
posted by sjswitzer at 8:40 PM on October 12, 2020

Being adventurous with cardamom will up your game in both sweets and savories.
posted by sjswitzer at 8:45 PM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

I got adventurous with cardamom once, and now I'm a cardadad....
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:04 PM on October 12, 2020 [7 favorites]

Being adventurous with cardamom will up your game in both sweets and savories.

Toss a pod in with your coffee before you grind it. It's incredible.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:04 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

MiraK, I have questions. My food processor¨Cmade hummus is never as creamy as storebought. I've tried canned chickpeas and chickpeas cooked from dry. I've varied the amounts of olive oil and lemon juice. It makes no difference; the results are always just slightly grainy, like the food processor has not so much mashed the chickpeas as chopped them into tiny yet noticeably discrete bits. Any advice (that doesn't involve buying a blender)?
posted by aws17576 at 9:31 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

@aws17576 if you have a stand mixer, it might work even better than a blender..
posted by rainy at 9:39 PM on October 12, 2020

If you¡¯re not happy with the texture of your hummus you need a proper food mill.
posted by sjswitzer at 10:29 PM on October 12, 2020

Metafilter: If you're not happy with the texture of your hummus
posted by Windopaene at 11:00 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

This article claims chickpeas have translucent skins that are the source of the graininess chickpeas can impart to hummus, and that you must remove them.
posted by jamjam at 11:08 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Life is too short to spend that much time husking chickpeas. Or at least that's what I've always found when making hummus; rub the skins off a couple of handfuls, pick through the resulting detritus to separate peas from skins, think "to hell with this", dump 'em all in the blender as-is.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:12 PM on October 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

n the 70s everybody had electric can openers.

No they didn't. Only in the late 1980's.

WHY?

Because my mother was starting to have motor problems due to neurological degradation.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:15 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have mad respect for professional chefs but this kind of gatekeeping can be incredibly harmful. How many women and minorities have been told "You can't call yourself a real chef because you haven't done X"?

Woah, hold up. This is totally not what I was going for with my rants on this, and my kitchen manager and de-facto chef is a woman that I have deep respect for.

And I know she wouldn't call herself a chef in the accepted terms of culinary arts and industry even though she's our menu designer and kitchen manager, because we've talked about the term and whether or not she's a chef, and it has nothing to do with her gender or class status and everything to do with the depth of actual working experience.

She rejects the title of chef over kitchen manager because she has a specific niche in plant-based and focused cooking and is not experienced in, say, pastry or baking work, or desserts, or global knowledge of cooking and so on.

Yes, there's a huge amount of gatekeeping, sexism and misogyny in the industry and I can talk about this at length, but this isn't the point of my concerns about the dilution and misuse of the term chef.

A chef isn't a cook. A chef is the chief of the kitchen brigade system that designs and runs the whole system of how staff will cook a particular menu. In some restaurants the chef even designs the dining room from seating and decorations down to the serveware being used, and can be the final decision maker about staff even above a restaurant owner, general manager and other ranked employees.

Set aside the sexism, racism and classism of the system and you're left with a very particular definition of what chef actually means and what it implies.

I've been working in kitchens for years now and the number of people that I've met that I could legitimately call a chef I can count on one hand and have enough fingers left to work my line, and half of these people are women or AFAB.

There aren't many industries out there that have readily accessible parallel terms. Maybe a diagnostic doctor, or master machinist or other apexes of industry would be parallels.

It's a super nebulous term and definition, but at this point I know a chef when I work with one. They have a depth of the culinary arts that will utterly boggle your mind even before you start to address their work ethic and output.

Yeah, I'm getting super serious and fussy about food and the culinary industry but chef means something.

The working chefs I've met have so much experience and knowledge about food that it starts with the soil that any given food is grown in to the chemistry and science of cooking and it only ends in the aesthetic presentation on your plate and you paying your tab and walking out the door.

Try to think about it like this: I've met a lot of incredibly smart, experienced and knowledgeable people in many industries. Programmers. Electrical engineers. Engineers of all stripes and schools. Doctors. Geneticists. Artists. Musicians. Carpenters, builders, welders and other trades.

None of these industries hold a candle to the intelligence and historical depth and breadth that I've experienced with an accomplished chef. These people are on a whole different level and so far in my experience they're just as at home discussing literature as they are designing and researching a menu.

I'm real bright and really hard working, and working chefs are basically the smartest and hardest working people I've ever met, and I know people who have worked at JPL or CERN or MIT. They're so bright and so dense that it drives me fucking crazy trying to keep up with them.

They're some of the smartest and hardest working people I've ever met. Even the accomplished chefs I've met tend to defer from the title outside of work and their place in a kitchen brigade system because it specifically means something in the culinary arts and restaurant industry,.

I'm mainly trying to share this insider knowledge that "chef" doesn't mean what most people think it means.

Chef does not equate directly to the definition of "the person who cooked your food" at all in the same way that "nurse" doesn't equate to "doctor" even though a nurse does most of the actual work.

Calling yourself a chef while cooking at home without a kitchen brigade to command is kind of like calling yourself a Colonel or General without an army to lead or a war to fight.

From inside the industry it's super weird that someone might call themselves a chef even if they're cooking fine dining grade recipes at home, and if you really want to compliment the staff of any given restaurant you'll avoid the term "chef" simply because it makes the line cooks and grunts on the front line like me and my coworkers super uncomfortable, if only because we're all actively trying to avoid becoming a chef at all in the first place because we recognize and respect what that means.

This isn't gatekeeping. It's defending a particular history and meaning of the term, and it has nothing to do with gender or cultural race, just like someone who has earned a doctorate in any given field means something about the depth of their knowledge or experience.

Chef doesn't mean cook, even though a chef cooks food.

If anything chef isn't about food or cooking ability at all, and is merely a descriptive title or honorific like "Doctor" or "Sargent " that denotes their place in the chain of command in the kitchen brigade system.

I'm really trying to point out that "chef" doesn't mean "cook" out of the box, that it's ok to not call yourself chef, that it's ok to call yourself something else, instead, even if you're a fantastic cook at home or in a commercial kitchen.

If you aren't leading a kitchen brigade by definition you can't be a chef. It's right there in the working definition of the term chef.
posted by loquacious at 11:18 PM on October 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

I bet you could blow the skins off lightly blanched chickpeas quite easily with a low power water jet - something like a super-sized water pik, say.
posted by jamjam at 11:26 PM on October 12, 2020

American cheese also has the superior melting, non-seizing characteristics of Velveeta engineering.

This fails to move either of these products up off the very lowest tier on the 'edibility' scale.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:59 AM on October 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

I swear I remember a post within the last month or 2 on reddit that was highlighting a site that did this.
Link please!
posted by St. Oops at 1:00 AM on October 13, 2020

From my point of view, chopping garlic is no big deal, but getting the skin off the cloves is a pain. What methods do you prefer?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:38 AM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

From my point of view, chopping garlic is no big deal, but getting the skin off the cloves is a pain. What methods do you prefer?

The separate the small kernels, whatever the hell they're called, put them between two metal bowls, and shake the hell out of them for a minute method reliably works for me. I'm told it doesn't always work for other people and other varieties of garlic.
posted by eotvos at 5:13 AM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Skins.

re: garlic skins, if you're chopping it anyway, cut the ends off the cloves and smash with your fist or the flat of the knife. the skins can be easily separated away from the result.

re: smoother hummous. Never tried a blender so do't know what that factor is, but I do separate off as many of the skins as I can accomplish easily in 2 or 3 minutes. (the "we had a deal, Kyle" technique). Definitely makes a difference. Also my recipe uses a bit of water to get to the right consistency (after the oil and tahini are added) and I normally use the bean cooking water when it is still a bit warm, which may help(?)
posted by hearthpig at 5:34 AM on October 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

No they didn't. Only in the late 1980's.

Uh, we had an electric can opener during my childhood, which was in the 1970s. I don't know why we had one, I can only tell you why I don't (because I was broke as fuck for much of my adult life and a manual one was cheaper).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:51 AM on October 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

> From my point of view, chopping garlic is no big deal, but getting the skin off the cloves is a pain. What methods do you prefer?

The applicability of this solution depends on where you live, but in the summer I buy a dozen or more bulbs of locally-grown garlic at the farmer's market. The skins are thick and stiff and separate easily from the cloves, so it's not much effort to clean them all. Then the cloves go in the freezer, so using garlic in a recipe just requires taking a couple cloves out of a plastic container. Freezing affects the texture, though that doesn't matter in the slightest if you're going to be mincing or baking them (which is how almost all garlic is used in my kitchen). It's actually an advantage when they're getting pureed uncooked in salsa or hummus. The cloves also taste better; they are sweeter and lack the harshness of most grocery store garlic.
posted by ardgedee at 6:06 AM on October 13, 2020

Uh, we had an electric can opener during my childhood, which was in the 1970s.

Not only is the past a different country, a different country is one as well.
posted by Stoneshop at 6:51 AM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

> St. Oops:
">?I swear I remember a post within the last month or 2 on reddit that was highlighting a site that did this.
Link please!"

I can't find it! I'm beginning to think I dreamed it!
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:40 AM on October 13, 2020

DO NOT purchase a perfectly?cylindrical?blender. It is basically a food gun, that will get shit all?over?the fucking ceiling, and you may end up scalded by a rain of hot vichyssoise. I, um, read that somewhere.??

I think the often curved/tapering bottom end - directs the flow upward - and the lack of a locking lid have a lot to do with that, too. For pur¨¦eing things (soups, tomato sauce, the carrot-parsnip dish I made for Thanksgiving yesterday) I always use my Cuisinart - flat bottom, though of course the container is cylindrical, and the locking top. ??My cousin has one of those Ninja blenders that¡¯s square rather than cylindrical and has a locking top and could probably crush gravel; she mainly does smoothies in it. I¡¯ve tried it for other things, it¡¯s OK, but the Cuisinart works just fine for me and is more multipurpose. And I have only so much counter and storage space. ??
posted by Philofacts at 7:58 AM on October 13, 2020

American cheese also has the superior melting, non-seizing characteristics of Velveeta engineering.

This fails to move either of these products up off the very lowest tier on the 'edibility' scale.??

Yes, 67 million French eyebrows just raised. (Add in another 8 million for Qu¨¦bec.)

??¡°Velveeta engineering¡± - there¡¯s your problem right there. Yes, food involves chemistry and physics, but¡­
posted by Philofacts at 8:14 AM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

You can peel garlic easily by shaking it.

I've found that takes far more physical effort (and makes a lot more noise!) than cutting off the base, smashing the clove with the side of a knife, and shaking it out of the now-loose skin. I can do 6 or 8 cloves that way in the same time it takes to frantically shake the hell out of them - and even then I still end up laboriously peeling a few stubborn cloves, plus they still need smashing afterward anyway.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:57 AM on October 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

I wonder if some of this garlic peeling disconnect just has to do with the type of garlic you use. My current grocery store has a slightly different kind of garlic than my previous stores carried - it still just says "garlic" but the unpeeled heads have purple streaks on them rather than being pure white, and they're a bit smaller and squatter and less chubby-looking.

With the fat white garlic I was used to before, the cloves would have these awful translucent membranous peels that would stretch and tear and stick to your fingers, making it a horrible chore to peel them. But with the purple kind my current store carries, each clove's peel is brittle and papery and dry, and once you chop off each end of the clove, it basically falls right off.

I never even put this together until you all made me think about it. I hadn't made the connection between "hey, this garlic looks different" and "I'm so good at peeling garlic now!"
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:10 AM on October 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

Could be, now that you mention it. I've heard about 2 types of garlic, softneck and hardneck. I've always found softneck in the grocery stores I frequent.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:26 AM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh yeah, that photo shows exactly what I'm talking about!
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:37 AM on October 13, 2020

For garlic, I throw the whole head in the microwave for about 20 seconds, then straight to the freezer until it can be comfortably handled. Chop the top off, and the cloves practically fall out.

I don't recall where I heard of this technique and why it works. I want to say it's because the garlic cloves expand in the microwave and then goes back to regular size (or slightly smaller). So, they kind of push the skins off while they are nuked. I could be completely wrong on that, though.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:30 AM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

> Yes, 67 million French eyebrows just raised. (Add in another 8 million for Qu¨¦bec.)

Let us not be hoist by our mock-cheese petard by the native land of the Kraft Dinner.
posted by ardgedee at 11:31 AM on October 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

Uh, we had an electric can opener during my childhood, which was in the 1970s..

I had one until it broke, vintage 1980s or early 1990s. I loved it, just a button click to open cans, and it hung on the bottom of a cabinet so it was easy to find. It also had a an auto knife sharpener, which was the only time I ever sharpened kitchen knives. Blasphemy in this thread I know.

I don't eat much food from cans anymore, or I'd probably buy one again.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:37 AM on October 13, 2020

DO NOT purchase a perfectly cylindrical blender. It is basically a food gun, that will get shit all over the fucking ceiling, and you may end up scalded by a rain of hot vichyssoise. I, um, read that somewhere.

I think the often curved/tapering bottom end - directs the flow upward - and the lack of a locking lid have a lot to do with that, too. ...

I've messed around with Osterizers quite a bit, and came to the conclusion that the blades are beveled so that they will cause the food to shoot up, which seemed strange until it occurred to me that if they pulled it down, the equal and opposite reaction could conceivably make the jar jump off the blender base.

The really old Oster blenders out there have blades that can be removed from the rotating shaft by unscrewing an acorn nut, and it turns out you can put them back in upside down, which should suffice to make the blender pull the food in the jar down instead of shooting it up, but I never got around to testing that out thoroughly because the noise of blenders started hurting my ears too much.
posted by jamjam at 12:06 PM on October 13, 2020

DO NOT purchase a perfectly cylindrical blender. It is basically a food gun, that will get shit all over the fucking ceiling, and you may end up scalded by a rain of hot vichyssoise.

Alright, I'm gonna ask - was this blender somehow missing a lid?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:33 PM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Blending hot items often results in the lid being blown off. Science!
posted by jessamyn at 1:38 PM on October 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

Remember when the NYT or somebody claimed you could make guacamole with peas? That's still a hot take, right?
posted by Biblio at 2:24 PM on October 13, 2020

Loving this thread!

Re: fresh herbs: if you are fortunate enough to have an Asian and/or a Middle Eastern market near you (lucky me, my Persian and Chinese markets are across the street from one another), you need never waste money and plastic packaging on those not-so-fresh fresh "regular grocery store: herbs again. I buy armfuls of dill, basil, parsley, lemongrass, chives etc for the same price as a few sad little plastic clamshells.

Related: Penzey's and Savory Spice Shop allow you to get small FRESH quantities of basically anything. McCormick's etc at the grocery store are a: usually too big and b: god knows how stale even when you buy them.
posted by cyndigo at 2:26 PM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

if you are fortunate enough to have an Asian and/or a Middle Eastern market near you (lucky me, my Persian and Chinese markets are across the street from one another), you need never waste money and plastic packaging on those not-so-fresh fresh "regular grocery store: herbs again. I buy armfuls of dill, basil, parsley, lemongrass, chives etc for the same price as a few sad little plastic clamshells.

....The little plastic clamshells are actually more than enough for me, however. What the heck do you do with the rest when you've cut the two tablespoons you need for your recipe off that enormous armful of dill?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:00 PM on October 13, 2020

What the heck do you do with the rest when you've cut the two tablespoons you need for your recipe off that enormous armful of dill?

You can dry them if you have the space, make compound butter, freeze them in olive oil, or specifically with dill, this:

https://www.vickypham.com/blog/hanoi-fried-fish-with-turmeric-dill-cha-ca-la-vong
posted by mikesch at 3:10 PM on October 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

What the heck do you do with the rest

Or you can bump the seasonings WAY up from the paltry amounts specified by the recipe for awesome results! :)
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:57 PM on October 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

My Whole Foods charges $2.99 for a .66 ounce clamshell. That's $4.53 an ounce, which works out to a whopping $72.48 PER POUND. A small bunch of anything at my markets is usually less than a buck.
posted by cyndigo at 4:08 PM on October 13, 2020

brownie box mix yields a better result than 99% of brownie recipes, and is infinitely hackable. That one percent, though...those brownies are fucking worth it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:51 PM on October 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

That one percent, though...those brownies are fucking worth it.

For your consideration, the King Arthur Baking Company's Quick and Easy Fudge Brownies recipe. It may be the Platonic Ideal. I reproduce it in its entirety to draw attention to my favorite cooking instruction of all time, step number 2.

1 cup (120g) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
3/4 cup (64g) unsweetened cocoa, Dutch-process or natural
1 3/4 cups (347g) sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon espresso powder, optional; for enhanced chocolate flavor
3 large eggs
8 tablespoons (113g) unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup (50g) vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 375¡ãF. Lightly grease a 9" x 13" pan (for thin brownies); or an 8" square or 9" square pan (for thicker brownies).

2. Put all of the ingredients into a large bowl in the order in which they're written. Stir, then beat the mixture until it's smooth.

3. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.

4. Bake the brownies for about 25 minutes (for the 9" x 13" pan); 26 minutes (for the 9" pan), or 31 minutes (for the 8" pan), or until they're just barely beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan. A toothpick inserted into the center will come out clean or with a few moist crumbs clinging to it; you shouldn't see any wet batter

posted by mikelieman at 10:05 PM on October 14, 2020 [7 favorites]

Hot take: KD with half and half instead of skim milk probably shortens your life but makes it awesome instead of poor kids food.

Celery is kinda boring but celery LEAVES are an amazingly flavourful herb (this year I grew Soup Celery in the garden, which is just basically celery leaves).

Like tomatoes home grown celery is amazing. Nice dark green and crazy flavourful.

Everybody had field peas but they weren't allowed to take food stamps for shelled peas, only the ones in the pod.

Da Fuq? Are food stamp recipients banned from using them for frozen corn/peas? Anything canned? White rice (milled)? Do they have to mill their own flour? Roast and grind their own coffee?

Why the fuck are electric elements in old stoves never actually LEVEL?!?!?!?!?!?!?!


Often the owners of cheap accommodation don't bother leveling ranges. Actually strike that, lots of people don't bother leveling their range. Add in universal replacement elements instead of proper replacements and ya, things are going to be wonky.

Can your own tomatoes and have the best of both worlds.*

Nods at 48 quarts and 36 pints on the shelf.

What the heck do you do with the rest when you've cut the two tablespoons you need for your recipe off that enormous armful of dill?

Dill specifically freezes really well. Around here it is ready in the garden way before cucumbers so I freeze a couple gallon size ziplocks every early summer for use in the fall.
posted by Mitheral at 8:33 PM on October 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Blending hot items often results in the lid being blown off. Science!

Ah, that would explain the height. But yeah, it was a disaster every time. The third time it covered my counter in half-frozen margaritas, I calmly unplugged it, picked it up, and chucked it out the kitchen window into the yard. That was a fun party.
posted by sexyrobot at 2:52 AM on October 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Just reminded me of a college get-together where everything was relaxed and cool until suddenly the ceiling was covered in frozen grape daiquiri mix.
posted by bonobothegreat at 6:22 AM on October 17, 2020

My only question is WHY you would cut the avocado around the fat middle? I don't see any benefit to this.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:22 AM on October 18, 2020

The benefit is when you only use part of the avocado. Sure, store the rest in the refrigerator for later use -- but I don't want to use any bad-for-the-environment plastic wrap, with which it's so annoying (impossible, really) getting a good seal with a conventionally-cut avocado. Instead, after lopping off the solid top of avo-goodness, simply invert the avocado, placing the cut side down on a small dish, and into the fridge.
posted by Rash at 7:46 AM on October 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Got it. I have never failed to consume an entire avocado. :)

However, after thinking about it for 3 seconds, this method would be no different if you used the regular cutting method? So I am still confused. I don't see how it would be different but okay.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:54 AM on October 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

The cut section has smaller area to either make a seal with the dish, or be sacrificed to the air.

Optimising for fridge space and wastage.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 7:28 PM on October 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Great thread!
My life has changed after I decided to do the mise en place thing in my home kitchen. As a part of this, if I have a big bundle of herbs, I always wash, dry and prep the whole bundle and then refrigerate or freeze what I don't need in airtight containers. That means a lot of work one day but very fast delicious food the other days.
(Those of you who don't get much taste out of herbs are probably not using enough of them, or getting them from greenhouse growers using artificial growth medium instead of earth).
+ 1 for sharp knives.
This is the best can-opener, not least because it is very easy to clean.
I love all of the kitchen stuff, the fancy cookware and the machines and all that. But there is a thrill to be able to cook for a large party on a single burner and with just a battered wok, a cutting board and a knife. Or over a live fire in a stewpot, slicing the carrots directly into the pot, granny style.
Turkey (the bird) is something I avoid, if I can.
And sorry, but I am one of those people who say you should buy a whole chicken if you are broke and make it last for several days. I'm broke now, and I have been broke often before. I have learnt how to cook for my family from real food because I want my kids to grow up healthy even though we don't have the money. Incidentally that makes me like literally billions of people who are not living in the US or other countries dominated by big-ag. Cutting up a chicken takes less than five minutes and saves lots of money.
posted by mumimor at 2:11 AM on October 19, 2020