Any time I read an article title like this, I imagine the 'experts' to be 4 old retired farmers meeting for their morning coffee at McDonald's and jackjaw.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Science of Cooking
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We're focused on cooking and the science behind how it changes our food. Some chemistry, a little biology, whatever it takes to explore a critical aspect of everyday life.
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I see more young people with more skill than ever thanks to Kenji, ATK, and babbish.
Kenji did turn me from a kid whose parents can’t cook to a woman who cooks really well and rarely goes out to eat
I'm a big fan of the food lab.
A lot of cookbooks give you the steps, but not enough tell you what steps are most important, and what, specifically, you need to be paying attention to get the best results. The food lab does stuff like telling you how the salt changes the chemistry of scrambled eggs, then do samples of "cook immediately after scrambling", "wait 3 minutes", "wait 5 minutes", "wait 15 minutes" and show pictures of how it changes the outcome, before telling you his conclusions.
When you understand the core bits, it allows you a lot more flexibility and variety in how you do the surrounding bits. (I like Flour Water Salt Yeast for bread for the same reason.) Too many cook books are more recipe books that don't teach the fundamentals.
Yeah, he’s been a regular on serious eats since I was a teenager
Yeah, I think overall, skill is going up, but I literally don't know any millennial (or younger) couples where both people do not work. I can make a hell of a good meal out of anything, as can almost all of my peers, but the mental load and time required to effectively plan and execute a range of meals throughout the week is just too high for most people who work. Most traditional poor food is just stuff that takes time and/or labor to cook. Braises and barbecues, porridges like grits or oats, soups and stews.
I might grab some of whatever I see on sale at the grocery store, but I'm not planning anything ahead of time unless there's a special occasion meal.
To take advantage of a ham going on sale, you need to plan one meal of ham + sides, and the ham likely takes a few hours to warm up. Another meal after could be baked beans with ham (which require overnight soaking) to be planned ahead, and several hours of baking. Another meal might be pea soup with the ham bone, another meal that takes a while to prepare. Most people just don't have the time for that. When I want to make baked beans, I end up just buying a small chunk of country ham at a greater markup.
Nah, that's insane. Both my wife and I work 40 hours a week and raise a toddler.
If you are doing 60 hours weeks sure that's valid but at the risk of being called boomer that's some bullshit. It takes 2 hours tops to shop every week and a half hour to make a decent meal. You have plenty of time to do that on a 40 hour week.
Groceries cost more too, ya dumb fucks
The article covers that: “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can't afford a basket of groceries.”
My brother in Christ, try reading the article.
It is not a skill issue that cabbage is more than a dollar per pound. Medieval pottage is too expensive now.
Right but what if the cheapest food is idk, something like celery root? I think the idea w/the thesis of the article is that a skilled cook can adapt to whatever ingredients are cheapest at any moment.
I think I’m a decent cook but I also think I need to improve because when I’m in the produce area and have no idea how to use like 15—20% of the options there. E.g. celery root, cactus, and ½ dozen things I don’t even recognize.
Sorry, but my point was even shopping cheapest only is getting too expensive now. Poor people have always been buying cheap produce only. That strategy doesn't help when the floor for prices is rising. So if something as basic as cheap as cabbage—the canonical broke peasant food—is like $1.25/lb where it used to be $0.25/lb, the problem isn't the %15-20 of vegetables you don't know how to cook!
I wouldn't say we lost cooking* skills. A lot of us just don't have time to cook.
Indeed.. now that we can simply enter a couple ingredients into a search field and get countless recipes, and also w/Youtube, I would expect people to be better equipped in recent decades.
Lots of food is criminally overpriced right now.
It's also that in the past not every member of the household worked. You can save money by baking your own bread but it takes time people don't always have.
Weren’t bread machines all the rage because you just dump in the ingredients and it’s autopilot from there? I see a lot of them at 2nd markets and in dumpsters, so I wonder if their usefulness was overestimated.
I bake my own bread, you don’t save money…totally agree with the point though