Hmm. Something to try next tomato season.
"Welcome to serious eats. There's exactly one way to do something and it's the way we're telling you. Despite the fact that cooking is contentious and subject to a great deal of interpretation, we're right and you're wrong and anyone who disagrees can fuck off." Ever made one of their recipes? They're completely joyless. If they were car dealers they'd sell Volvos and make you feel bad for considering that you might want a car driven by someone other than a sour-faced bureaucrat.
I've made one or two things from there and been pretty happy, but then again I'm not really one to follow a recipe exactly. I'll admit that their recipes can come off as a bit too authoritative at times and the opinions presented can be strong, but they do post updates on techniques when they find better ways to do stuff.
It's not the recipes, it's the discussion. It's the attitude. It's their whole way of doing things. Take, for example, their take on cornbread. "Why cornbread shouldn't have sugar." Okay, why shouldn't it? Other than the obvious answer (because it's gross)? Well, we go through a long, roundabout explanation for why Southern cornbread sucks but spend zero time on talking about what the rest of the country does and we reveal that back in the '50s white housewives couldn't find anything but masa even though they didn't know it was masa so they fucked with the recipe because the recipe was fucked. Why add sugar? Because the cornmeal sucks: Okay, so if you're using modern stone-ground meal that doesn't suck, it doesn't need to be sweet. And if you're using cornmeal that does suck, you should probably add sugar (if that sweet whang is what you want, I guess). But the article is "the real reason sugar has no place in Cornbread" and then they finish with this: ...pretty militant statement for an article about how fucked up ingredients have been and how cooks have been adapting, no? Compare and contrast with the way allrecipes treats cornbread: every comment has something or other they tweaked and it all worked out just fine. And that's why I hate SeriousEats. I don't care if you're making a scallop souffle - there's no recipe on earth you need to be that dickish about. It'll work most of the time. And attitudes like SeriousEats are the kind of thing that makes people think you have to "mince" garlic rather than crush garlic or else you're making slop. Grinds my gears.High-volume steel millers started using corn harvested unripe and dried with forced air, which had less sweetness and corny flavor than its field-ripened counterpart. "You put sugar in the cornmeal because you are not working with brix corn," Roberts says, using the trade term for sugar content. "There's no reason to add sugar if you have good corn."
And you shouldn't use a grain of wheat flour or sugar. If you start with an old fashioned stone-ground meal like the Anson Mills' Antebellum Coarse White Cornmeal, you'll have no need for such adulterations.
Yeah, dude. a good garlic press is a blessing. A shitty garlic press is a curse. Anything that says "zyliss" is shit. Actually, looking at Amazon the only ones that aren't obviously shit are the Oxos and having seen those in person, they're kinda shitty. I have a Messermeister and it doesn't fuck around. I also have a peeler. And yes - it's easy to mince garlic. It also makes your fingers stink. It also makes you avoid the little tiny cloves, whereas with a press you throw seven or eight of them in at once and go sqwoosh. I was in the "mince not crush" camp until I met the Messermeister. Then I got it.
Shit man, that Garlic press looks like it plays for keeps! I wonder if there's a difference (however slight) in taste depending on mice/crush, sort of like the whole shaken/stirred argument for Gin.
I thought we'd looked into that but I was mistaken. I suspect you "bruise" garlic a lot more by pressing it rather than mincing it, but the state of knives I see in most kitchens you're doing a fair amount of bruising anyway. I will say this: thin-sliced garlic fried is definitely different than mashed garlic fried. Both are better than the stuff in the jar.
Chef here, I consider food mills to be indispensable kitchen equipment. Great for all sorts of things from sauces to jellies/jams to mashed potatoes. If you are looking for a decent mill this one should suffice. Most of of the mills available are tiny and meant for jams and jellies. They are meant to be used only a few times a year. That one I just linked to is larger, more durable and more versatile. Also that price ain't bad at all. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
Thanks and thanks for the link! A buddy of mine is a chef, but when he's off work he keeps his cooking simple. When cooking for yourself, do you make the effort? Personally, I think my friend could make more of an effort but I guess that's tough with a bellyful of Jack, but I mean, once he got so drunk he forgot to cook the chicken in his chicken salad sandwich and missed work for two days.
Heh, that story about your friend sounds about right. It's tough to force yourself to cook outside of the job when you do it for so many hours a day. Honestly it's not so much the cooking as it is the clean-up. I always thought,"If I had a dishwasher (a person not a machine) I would cook more at home." Then you have to take into consideration that a) many of us live alone or with a single partner and b) we usually get 2-3 meals a day at work -- and you have a situation where that person simply doesn't have food in the house. That was my situation for about 5 years. My fridge had alcohol and condiments. My pantry had crackers and cans of soup (for when I got sick). But that's when I was working 18 hour days after opening my own place.
Oh man, that's really great that you opened your own spot. A friend of mine opened her own cafe and it seems to have a lot of customers, but according to a mutual friend of ours who works for her, the cafe doesn't make much money because of mismanagement and a lack of business savvy. How do like owning a place rather than working at one?
It was fulfilling and fun but honestly, it was so much work that I couldn't see doing it for long. I opened the place with 2 friends and we ran it for a little over 7 years. Then my dad took ill. I sold my stake in the business to my partners and left to care for my parents, until my dad was feeling better. That was 2 years ago. 17 years in the biz and I'm not sure if I really want to go back. I have 2 pretty good job offers available from friends but now that I'm out, I don't know... I kind of feel like Peter Gibbons in Office Space, "We don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way!" That life is rough, man. That's a shame about your friend. Mismanagement is the #1 restaurant killer. I've got stories that you wouldn't believe.
Haha, I bet you do! I think that's pretty big of you to sell your stake to take care of your parents; it's a lot to take on. 17 years is a really long time to be in any industry and I completely understand wanting a change. In fact, I am in the middle of such a change myself. I'm applying for grad school for 2015 and in the meantime, it looks like it's back to teaching ESL and working in bars to make money. That said, I used to live in Vietnam, teaching English and two of the people I met over there were an older couple who worked for the same school. They lived down the street too, so I got to know them pretty well. Bruce used to own a shoe factory and was very much a button-down business man for a really long time. Anyway, through he and his wife teaching in Vietnam, they were able to put their house in Canada up for rent and live the way they'd always wanted to. Another guy was teaching to earn money while learning tattoo removal in Thailand, since I guess that's a growing business in England. I don't know what your situation is, but if teaching abroad is something you might be interested in, I can put you in touch with some people and give some insight about how to get that all started. Teaching English abroad is great, it's just that I have my ambitions and I'd like to take a swing while I've got the energy. Teaching is something I'm sure I can always fall back on at any rate.
But this is that type of thing! Well, I guess I'll have to try it out for myself. I read an account of one chef (I forget who) who talked about his training, beginning in his teens. He talked about pushing hot tomatoes through a big wire strainer with a wooden spoon. I like cooking, but fuck that!