Cooking is a lot like computing in reverse. Instead of being the programmer, you’re the cpu. Follow the program, and you’ll end up with the result the recipe provides.
The part of cooking where people look like they’re just tossing things together is much more advanced. Cuddle your recipe book while you cook, it’s your best friend.
I really recommend ‘The Joy of Cooking’ as a good book to start with, especially older editions. My ‘acid test’ of a general-purpose cookbook is if it has a real recipe for cream of mushroom soup or if it just says ‘add 1 can’. The older editions have the real recipe, as well as massive amounts of information not only about food but also about how to serve it.
My ‘acid test’ of a general-purpose cookbook is if it has a real recipe for cream of mushroom soup or if it just says ‘add 1 can’.
Why is this? It seems that people often cling to the “old way” of doing things even if the new way is faster and better because of some emotional attachment to the way they have always done things. No idea if this applies to you, but as someone who never cooks I’m wondering if this makes some real difference.
It seems that people often cling to the “old way” of doing things even if the new way is faster and better because of some emotional attachment to the way they have always done things.
With cooking, the trouble is that it doesn’t scale, or rather, the economies of scale come at the inevitable expense of quality. A home-made meal prepared by a skilled cook and with well chosen ingredients is guaranteed to be superior even to the output of restaurants, let alone to something produced on an industrial scale. (Especially when you consider that the home-made meal can be subtly customized to your taste.)
I think quality is to some degree subjective when it comes to judging a meal.
I know several people who are widely praised as great cooks, but I have meals at multiple restaurants that I prefer to anything I’ve had home cooked. I’m not talking about high-dollar places either. Just places your typical middle-class American has access to.
An overlooked factor in how nice something tastes at a given time is whether it “hits the spot”—if it’s exactly what you wanted. Since restaurants are usually consistent about what all goes into their food, you can become familiar with what spots those meals will hit, and get them at the best times.
Or you can learn to cook and hit the spot all the time ;) But it’s hard to reliably do it for someone else, so if you’re eating others’ cooking it may not accomplish this.
When I go to a restaurant, I almost always get the same thing I got last time with the thinking: “I may not like what I get if I get something new, and I already know I love X.”
My initial reaction to the idea of learning to cook is similar. Why go through the trouble, when I already love what I’m getting!
For certain sufficiently generic, low-value-on-variety preferences, learning to cook could be the last thing on your list for what you need to make your life better. (I dislike certain very common foods and food combinations, and I love variety, so while I can eat out I can’t do it that often and be pleased about it.)
I just want to point out that I have low-value-value-on-variety only when it comes to food preferences. :D
Other areas of my life are full of variety and I’m always seeking out more.
Also, just to expand on what’s happening here...
Whenever I have new dishes for whatever reason, I don’t automatically dislike them because they’re something new. For example, I recently found out how much I like red onions on a cold cut sandwich. I think what goes on in my specific case is that there are lots of things that I don’t eat now that I would probably like, but eating food I like consistently (by sticking to the things I know) is more important to me than finding the foods I haven’t tried but may like.
Of course, these aren’t absolutes. I will from time to time become tired of something and try something new.
I would suggest that even the best restaurant still has to optimize between making your food good, and being able to serve other patrons the same day. You’ll never get the culinary equivalent of a Sistine Chapel ceiling at a restaurant; it’d be uneconomical. You might get it for your birthday if your romantic partner is a chef, though.
A home-made meal prepared by a skilled cook and with well chosen ingredients is guaranteed to be superior even to the output of restaurants, let alone to something produced on an industrial scale.
Not even that skilled. Commercial cooking, including restaurant cooking, is the industry of turning mediocre (at best) ingredients into something people will pay a premium for. Have you ever seen a commercial cook’s eyes light up at the prospect of having actually good ingredients to cook with? I’m thinking of an old girlfriend: “I will make you the best meal ever. Buy this list of fairly basic ingredients.”
I don’t think that it is “old way” versus “new way”; but it seems clear to me that someone has to know the recipe. If you buy a pre-made can of mushroom soup, obviously the manufacturer must have used the recipe. And then there’s the issue if none of the brands of mushroom soup are of adequate quality for your purposes.
It’s like the difference between a programmer writing his own routines or using a pre-packaged library. I think, in order to be considered a competent programmer, you should be able to write your own routines, even if you don’t have to in the majority of cases. A cookbook is open source for food. “Buy 3 cans of Kraft spaghetti sauce” is cheating.
If “add one can” is the new way of cooking then the new new way of cooking is to call up Sichuan Gourmet and order double cooked pork, mapo tofu, and a large white rice. Serves two.
The new way of cooking seems to be never actually touching your food before you eat it. Microwave dinner, slice the plastic and nuke. Frozen pizza into the oven and bake. Nuke the burrito. Ramen into boiling water if you make it the advanced way, or in a cup of cold water and into the microwave if you don’t.
Compensate for the particle-board taste with strong enough flavors and people won’t care. The most important things are ease of heating and not needing to wait.
Why do you say that frozen pizza and microwave dinner tastes like particle-board? There is no good reason why they should be inherently inferior to home cooked meals. Why couldn’t you put the ‘perfect’ dinner in a box and sell it? (I realize that there is no dinner that is perfect for everyone, but you could offer a wide enough array of choices to cover most tastes)
Of course, cooking yourself allows you to fine tune the seasoning, perhaps use fresher ingredients (although frozen ingredients can arguably be more fresh in some cases), and have more variation. There is a lot of crap out there, but I find that the quality of these dinners has improved drastically over the last couple of years.
Having said all this; I do enjoy cooking as well. It it seemed to me that your post showed some biases in need of correcting.
Frozen food is not inherently inferior to home-cooked food at all, given that you can freeze things you make at home without the universe imploding! I made a pizza the other day. Some of it is in my freezer now. It’s not as good as it was hot out of the oven, but it’s still a fine pizza considering I’d never made one before (future pizzas will be better). I used frozen spinach in the pizza because frozen vegetables are no less healthful or tasty (although there are some applications for which they are unsuitable, like roasting) and easier to keep around.
However, as a contingent, non-inherent fact about commercially available prepared frozen meals, they are often made with inferior ingredients (the details of the process are largely concealed from the consumer so this is likely to be financially worthwhile), designed for bland flavor profiles (to appeal to the broadest customer base), and loaded up with cheap tricks to make them desirable in spite of this blandness (inexpensive fat and starch and salt and sugar). The texture often leaves much to be desired as well.
There are lots of reasons for it to taste worse than real food. The companies that make and sell these things have to make them able to withstand conditions that normal food can’t. They have to add preservatives, freeze and possibly even refreeze the food, swap out really delicate ingredients for alternatives that lack flavor but have shelf-stability, and endure breakdown of the compounds that make real food good.
We will be able to overcome all of this with effective nanotech, of course. Right now instant foods are inferior because the companies aren’t selecting for taste, they’re selecting for cheapness of production and handling. Taste suffers, and they put enough effort into it to be ‘good enough’ and no more.
I probably do have biases regarding the issue, but I have more objective reasons as well.
It’s my real name, but since I chose it when I got my name changed you’re still not wrong.
I do mostly cook the food I eat from scratch, as long as you can accept ‘bought the meat and cheese from a grocery store instead of killing or milking the animal personally’ as from scratch. Mostly this isn’t because I’m that incredibly picky, but instead because for me time is abundant and money is scarce. (I am picky, but I’m not really anti-preservative.)
Yeah, I changed my name a while ago, and decided that as long as I was changing it anyway I may as well choose something fun. I’m hoping that my future will be as spicy as my name.
Most normal food can actually take freezing pretty well, and freezing should obviate the need for preservatives… what frozen foods are you thinking of that have preservatives in them?
Most frozen pizza does, I believe. I seem to remember ice cream having preservatives too. I think that preservatives are more likely to be in frozen food as the number of processing steps that it’s been through increase.
I’ll check later today on the pizza and ice cream, it’s been long enough that I don’t have a clear memory.
You can adjust recipes. It is hard to adjust cans. For instance, I think I would find that many commercially available mushroom soups use chicken stock. I can use vegetable or mushroom stock if I make it myself. (Or I did before I detected my mushroom allergy, anyway.)
It’s a measure of depth of information, I guess. If a cookbook has directions on preparing cream of mushroom soup, then it’s really likely to have other very obscure recipes. Also shortcuts like dumping in a can of soup mean that the end result won’t taste as good… not important most of the time, but nice when you want a treat.
It’s not so much that it’s an old way that makes it good, it’s more that the long way just gives a much better result that has a really short shelf life. I want at least the option to make the better version.
For what it’s worth, I am a supertaster, and I’m picky too.
FWIW, knowing how I react to other foods, I predict with a great deal of confidence that I would not care, or that I would even prefer, the recipe with soup from a can.
Seconded on “The Joy of Cooking”; it covers topics from the very basic to the very advanced. I found the left-hand side of that spectrum extremely useful when I was just starting out cooking, when I had “silly” questions like:
What does “broiling” mean?
What should a decent cutting board be made of? (There are a surprising number of cutting boards out there that are made of totally useless materials like glass).
How do I tell a good tomato from a bad one?
And so on, all those things that it seemed like I ought to already know, but didn’t.
I have a preference for the Fannie Farmer cookbook, personally. I regularly flip between my 1918 edition and my 1986 edition to see how cooking styles, preferences, and procedures have changed. The 1986 edition also has some excellent sections on the process of (for example) baking in general, rather than just a list of recipes.
Cooking is a lot like computing in reverse. Instead of being the programmer, you’re the cpu. Follow the program, and you’ll end up with the result the recipe provides.
The part of cooking where people look like they’re just tossing things together is much more advanced. Cuddle your recipe book while you cook, it’s your best friend.
I really recommend ‘The Joy of Cooking’ as a good book to start with, especially older editions. My ‘acid test’ of a general-purpose cookbook is if it has a real recipe for cream of mushroom soup or if it just says ‘add 1 can’. The older editions have the real recipe, as well as massive amounts of information not only about food but also about how to serve it.
Edit—please disregard this post
Why is this? It seems that people often cling to the “old way” of doing things even if the new way is faster and better because of some emotional attachment to the way they have always done things. No idea if this applies to you, but as someone who never cooks I’m wondering if this makes some real difference.
With cooking, the trouble is that it doesn’t scale, or rather, the economies of scale come at the inevitable expense of quality. A home-made meal prepared by a skilled cook and with well chosen ingredients is guaranteed to be superior even to the output of restaurants, let alone to something produced on an industrial scale. (Especially when you consider that the home-made meal can be subtly customized to your taste.)
I think quality is to some degree subjective when it comes to judging a meal.
I know several people who are widely praised as great cooks, but I have meals at multiple restaurants that I prefer to anything I’ve had home cooked. I’m not talking about high-dollar places either. Just places your typical middle-class American has access to.
An overlooked factor in how nice something tastes at a given time is whether it “hits the spot”—if it’s exactly what you wanted. Since restaurants are usually consistent about what all goes into their food, you can become familiar with what spots those meals will hit, and get them at the best times.
Or you can learn to cook and hit the spot all the time ;) But it’s hard to reliably do it for someone else, so if you’re eating others’ cooking it may not accomplish this.
Interesting point!
I suspect I’ll have a problem though.
When I go to a restaurant, I almost always get the same thing I got last time with the thinking: “I may not like what I get if I get something new, and I already know I love X.”
My initial reaction to the idea of learning to cook is similar. Why go through the trouble, when I already love what I’m getting!
I suppose food just isn’t that important to me.
For certain sufficiently generic, low-value-on-variety preferences, learning to cook could be the last thing on your list for what you need to make your life better. (I dislike certain very common foods and food combinations, and I love variety, so while I can eat out I can’t do it that often and be pleased about it.)
I just want to point out that I have low-value-value-on-variety only when it comes to food preferences. :D
Other areas of my life are full of variety and I’m always seeking out more.
Also, just to expand on what’s happening here...
Whenever I have new dishes for whatever reason, I don’t automatically dislike them because they’re something new. For example, I recently found out how much I like red onions on a cold cut sandwich. I think what goes on in my specific case is that there are lots of things that I don’t eat now that I would probably like, but eating food I like consistently (by sticking to the things I know) is more important to me than finding the foods I haven’t tried but may like.
Of course, these aren’t absolutes. I will from time to time become tired of something and try something new.
If you’re willing to pay enough, you can get insane numbers of cooks working on a single dish at a restaurant.
As compared to a really good restaurant, a home-made meal is only better because you’re not paying the chef or the rent.
I would suggest that even the best restaurant still has to optimize between making your food good, and being able to serve other patrons the same day. You’ll never get the culinary equivalent of a Sistine Chapel ceiling at a restaurant; it’d be uneconomical. You might get it for your birthday if your romantic partner is a chef, though.
Not even that skilled. Commercial cooking, including restaurant cooking, is the industry of turning mediocre (at best) ingredients into something people will pay a premium for. Have you ever seen a commercial cook’s eyes light up at the prospect of having actually good ingredients to cook with? I’m thinking of an old girlfriend: “I will make you the best meal ever. Buy this list of fairly basic ingredients.”
I don’t think that it is “old way” versus “new way”; but it seems clear to me that someone has to know the recipe. If you buy a pre-made can of mushroom soup, obviously the manufacturer must have used the recipe. And then there’s the issue if none of the brands of mushroom soup are of adequate quality for your purposes.
It’s like the difference between a programmer writing his own routines or using a pre-packaged library. I think, in order to be considered a competent programmer, you should be able to write your own routines, even if you don’t have to in the majority of cases. A cookbook is open source for food. “Buy 3 cans of Kraft spaghetti sauce” is cheating.
So is canned soup with excess sodium the culinary equivalent of a pre-packaged routine library with bad built-in assumptions?
If “add one can” is the new way of cooking then the new new way of cooking is to call up Sichuan Gourmet and order double cooked pork, mapo tofu, and a large white rice. Serves two.
The new way of cooking seems to be never actually touching your food before you eat it. Microwave dinner, slice the plastic and nuke. Frozen pizza into the oven and bake. Nuke the burrito. Ramen into boiling water if you make it the advanced way, or in a cup of cold water and into the microwave if you don’t.
Compensate for the particle-board taste with strong enough flavors and people won’t care. The most important things are ease of heating and not needing to wait.
Edit—please disregard this post
Why do you say that frozen pizza and microwave dinner tastes like particle-board? There is no good reason why they should be inherently inferior to home cooked meals. Why couldn’t you put the ‘perfect’ dinner in a box and sell it? (I realize that there is no dinner that is perfect for everyone, but you could offer a wide enough array of choices to cover most tastes)
Of course, cooking yourself allows you to fine tune the seasoning, perhaps use fresher ingredients (although frozen ingredients can arguably be more fresh in some cases), and have more variation. There is a lot of crap out there, but I find that the quality of these dinners has improved drastically over the last couple of years.
Having said all this; I do enjoy cooking as well. It it seemed to me that your post showed some biases in need of correcting.
Frozen food is not inherently inferior to home-cooked food at all, given that you can freeze things you make at home without the universe imploding! I made a pizza the other day. Some of it is in my freezer now. It’s not as good as it was hot out of the oven, but it’s still a fine pizza considering I’d never made one before (future pizzas will be better). I used frozen spinach in the pizza because frozen vegetables are no less healthful or tasty (although there are some applications for which they are unsuitable, like roasting) and easier to keep around.
However, as a contingent, non-inherent fact about commercially available prepared frozen meals, they are often made with inferior ingredients (the details of the process are largely concealed from the consumer so this is likely to be financially worthwhile), designed for bland flavor profiles (to appeal to the broadest customer base), and loaded up with cheap tricks to make them desirable in spite of this blandness (inexpensive fat and starch and salt and sugar). The texture often leaves much to be desired as well.
There are lots of reasons for it to taste worse than real food. The companies that make and sell these things have to make them able to withstand conditions that normal food can’t. They have to add preservatives, freeze and possibly even refreeze the food, swap out really delicate ingredients for alternatives that lack flavor but have shelf-stability, and endure breakdown of the compounds that make real food good.
We will be able to overcome all of this with effective nanotech, of course. Right now instant foods are inferior because the companies aren’t selecting for taste, they’re selecting for cheapness of production and handling. Taste suffers, and they put enough effort into it to be ‘good enough’ and no more.
I probably do have biases regarding the issue, but I have more objective reasons as well.
Edit—please disregard this post
I might be starting to see why you picked the name Cayenne.
It’s my real name, but since I chose it when I got my name changed you’re still not wrong.
I do mostly cook the food I eat from scratch, as long as you can accept ‘bought the meat and cheese from a grocery store instead of killing or milking the animal personally’ as from scratch. Mostly this isn’t because I’m that incredibly picky, but instead because for me time is abundant and money is scarce. (I am picky, but I’m not really anti-preservative.)
Edit—please disregard this post
If you wish to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Your legal name is Cayenne? That is super-cool. Or, you know, hot like burning capsaicin.
Yeah, I changed my name a while ago, and decided that as long as I was changing it anyway I may as well choose something fun. I’m hoping that my future will be as spicy as my name.
Edit—please disregard this post
LILY: Chantarelle was part of my exotic phase.
BUFFY: It’s nice. It’s a mushroom.
LILY: It is? That’s really embarrassing.
BUFFY: It’s an exotic mushroom, if that’s any comfort.
Most normal food can actually take freezing pretty well, and freezing should obviate the need for preservatives… what frozen foods are you thinking of that have preservatives in them?
Most frozen pizza does, I believe. I seem to remember ice cream having preservatives too. I think that preservatives are more likely to be in frozen food as the number of processing steps that it’s been through increase.
I’ll check later today on the pizza and ice cream, it’s been long enough that I don’t have a clear memory.
Edit—please disregard this post
I bet that’s googleable.
You’re right! http://www.redbaron.com/pan-pizza.aspx—The dough contains TBHQ. That’s the only one, so it’s relatively reasonable as far as preservatives go.
I looked at several varieties of ice cream, and none that I found had preservatives. Lots and lots of emulsifiers, but no preservatives.
Edit—please disregard this post
You can adjust recipes. It is hard to adjust cans. For instance, I think I would find that many commercially available mushroom soups use chicken stock. I can use vegetable or mushroom stock if I make it myself. (Or I did before I detected my mushroom allergy, anyway.)
It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that there’s a way to make ‘partially hydrogenated vegetable and/or soy bean oil’ stock.
Edit—please disregard this post
It’s a measure of depth of information, I guess. If a cookbook has directions on preparing cream of mushroom soup, then it’s really likely to have other very obscure recipes. Also shortcuts like dumping in a can of soup mean that the end result won’t taste as good… not important most of the time, but nice when you want a treat.
It’s not so much that it’s an old way that makes it good, it’s more that the long way just gives a much better result that has a really short shelf life. I want at least the option to make the better version.
For what it’s worth, I am a supertaster, and I’m picky too.
Edit—please disregard this post
Interesting.
FWIW, knowing how I react to other foods, I predict with a great deal of confidence that I would not care, or that I would even prefer, the recipe with soup from a can.
Seconded on “The Joy of Cooking”; it covers topics from the very basic to the very advanced. I found the left-hand side of that spectrum extremely useful when I was just starting out cooking, when I had “silly” questions like:
What does “broiling” mean?
What should a decent cutting board be made of? (There are a surprising number of cutting boards out there that are made of totally useless materials like glass).
How do I tell a good tomato from a bad one?
And so on, all those things that it seemed like I ought to already know, but didn’t.
I have a preference for the Fannie Farmer cookbook, personally. I regularly flip between my 1918 edition and my 1986 edition to see how cooking styles, preferences, and procedures have changed. The 1986 edition also has some excellent sections on the process of (for example) baking in general, rather than just a list of recipes.