- Please note that I am not some sentient pair of mirrored Oakleys. I like to cook. I like fancy food. I know making cool food isn’t always easy. If you wanna spend 30 minutes scrambling eggs at low heat because you wanna be French for a day, go wild. But for years, Bon Appétit has embodied pretty much everything everyone hates about 21st century food culture. Bon Appetit is your a--hole brother-in-law, watching you sear beef chuck on the stovetop and just DYING to commandeer the tongs. It is never happy with you, and it is always happy to vocalize that never-ending discontent. I remember reading a print issue of the magazine and one bit of callout copy inside read, “You are frying your eggs in olive oil, aren’t you?” And I was like, WATCH YOUR F--KING TONE WITH ME OR I’LL CUT YOU GOOD WITH MY WÜSTHOF.
who gives a shit about edam applesauce or any magazine or newspaper in the year 2020 there are about two things in the world that don't suck and eggs is one of them, ok, eggs sustain me i will eat an egg whoever or however puts it in front of me when i make eggs for myself i will only ever do it one way i fry them in butter until the white is mostly set and the yolk is runny, then i salt and pepper them this is the only way i cook eggs when eggs aren't just a single component in something i know exactly how long it takes and how hot the nburner should be and how.much butter because i only do it one way who needs a recipe for an omelet eggs are like the cheapest food ever and even when they get all fucked up they're still at least edible people who write recipes or guides for eggs are stupid motherfuckers almost universally just cook the egg until it's the way you want it to be i will punch anybody! don't fight me! I'll cry!
if it's possible to read it to the tune of carameldansen you should, but if not listening to it at the same time will be fine the only good thing to come out of the food network, by the way, is the one picture where a bottle of estradiol is photoshopped onto a counter next to ina garten and the caption says "if you can't make your own estrogen store bought is fine"
I just watched like four videos of that and it solved the existential question of last week, namely "why does Persona 5 exist", but I am no happier knowing. The only good thing to come out of the food network is the goddamn Kwanzaa cake and you know it.
the persona 5 blame chain is the void that one guy was talking about when he was staring into it or whatever i like the kwanzaa cake because it gives good insight into the cultural death of middle-aged white americans, but my personal favorite that i just remembered is the "two shots of vodka" video also the fact that every ripoff of chopped is more entertaining than chopped - did you see that one show on netflix where it's basically "chopped but everything is an edible"? i watched that whole series
Hang on there, missy - the whole problem is that middle-aged white Americans have never before been required any awareness of culture other than their own. This is the principle reason they all hearken back to '67. Certainly: there were minorities around but they weren't required to care about them, let alone empathize with them. You also need to keep in mind that for the past ten years, that's what Andrew Cuomo went home to. Then she traded up to the CEO of KB Home because of course she did. I'm a reality TV snob. I don't watch the shows at the level I work, let alone those beneath. Chopped can't pay me half the rate I expect to be paid. Back when we had cable we'd wake up on Saturday morning and argue with the Food Network but we haven't had cable since 2006.it gives good insight into the cultural death of middle-aged white americans
the thing that annihilates me about that recipe is just how little each of it actually matters - the curse of recipes is that they never focus on the things that are good to know when you want to make something. it's the same way that math education is conducted in grade school - there's no understanding of why, just "do this and this just like i'm doing" there's this fucked up sense where it's not about teaching at a certain point recipes are amazing as general guides for something you've never cooked before, but only as that, and after you make something once you should use your own experience and experimentation to make your own recipe based on what you like, for your personal use what in gods name is this monstrosity - why "european style butter"? why "fleur de sel"? what if i use some offbrand soft cheese, will that ruin the whole thing every step sounds like it was written by an insane person this is a pizza
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ I have a friend whose husband is the house chef for Lord & Lady Ismay. For my wedding she gave me a first edition of The Gentle Art of Cookery, circa 1925. It pairs nicely with Eduard de Pomaine's French Cooking in Ten Minutes in that early cookbooks didn't actually have amounts. Or temperatures. It was basically "mix these things, then these things, then stir until this happens, then serve with burgundy." "European style butter" means kerrygold and it's yummy. But it's yummy on toast. There was a time we called it "finishing butter" but there was a time we called them "criminis" instead of "baby 'bellas" because God is dead. I find the same people insisting I buy unsalted butter are the ones who routinely use metal utensils in nonstick pans. It's like "have you... had unsalted butter on toast you fuckers? Why don't you just goddamn assume that everyone is using salted fucking butter and cut the goddamn salt?" That fleur de sel thing. Again, "finishing salt" and again, never intended for cooking. I mixed that. It was dope. Unfortunately the bit where Joe Bastianich absolutely lost his shit on that poor girl for 10 minutes about how truffle oil represents the worst in cooking didn't make air but when I asked him about it he went on for another ten minutes.what in gods name is this monstrosity - why "european style butter"? why "fleur de sel"?
...yeah but when you use it you're kind of capping the meal, you know? It's delicious because it's basically "cheese flavor concentrate" and hydrogenated oil. It's the oreo cream filling of cheese. Whatever you mix it with, it's going to be "velveeta and" because all the cheese-like characteristics have been left at the factory. You mix a bunch of cheeses together and you've got... a continent's worth of cooking, really. But you mix "velveeta and" and it's going to be Tex Mex.
America's Test Kitchen is associated with the fantastic Cook's Illustrated, not the maligned Bon Appetit. From my non-expert perspective, ATK does hire people who "know things about cooking" which doesn't seem to be the case with BA or other Condé Nast publications.
I have several ATK cookbooks. My mother-in-law likes to give them. They're like the Consumer Reports of cooking: they will evaluate each and every little thing on nine different parameters and then come up with an aggregate score. This is great if you agree with their parameters and if you think they should all be equally weighted. ATK recipes tend to be overdetermined. They are full of asides about how you must do this and you can't do that but it's often things like "be sure to set aside a third of the butter to incorporate in two minutes." They're also unremarkable: if you would like to make the unweighted average of eight different Philly cheese steak sandwiches they will give you step-by-step instructions. However if you follow them more or less you generally get a decent meal out of them. Gourmet had a different approach. They'd try 50 different variations and then say "do this one it's the best" rather than refining. You could certainly fail: I had to buy ingredients for a creme soup three times because my girlfriend at the time kept curdling it. If you pulled it off, though, you either liked it because it was delicious or hated it because it wasn't your taste. There was no law of averages. Nowadays it seems like most recipes are "here's a bunch of ingredients our sponsors paid for next to a picture of something made completely different that photographs well." I long for an era where Pinterest Fails isn't a genre of entertainment.
Eggs are, I think, the Rorschach Test of food snobbery. You cannot be a food critic or food observer or food "ie" or anything other than an uneducated lummox if you do not have deeply held opinions about the proper way to cook a fucking egg. How combined? Not just combined. Not just very combined. Very, very combined. How combined is that? "(there should be no strands of egg white remaining, but be careful not to incorporate too much air)" OHHHHHH SHIT because you sure wouldn't want to end up with a Poulard Souffle! Or, let's be frank, a "fluffy omelet" or "super fluffy omelet" or "extra fluffy omelet" depending on whose search terms you're trying to monetize on Google. I've had eggs cooked badly once. I was at summer camp, and the counselors decided that cracking several dozen eggs into ammo cans, shaking them vigorously and throwing them on a roaring campfire would be delicious. They were mistaken. That we were camping next to a sulfur hot spring did not improve the situation. But other than that, foodies'n'eggs are as amusing a combo to me as the Japanese and their ice.Whisk eggs in a medium bowl until very, very well combined
At the risk of scoring myself on that Rorschach test, eggs are just a great thing to hammer on for cooking education. You find a lot of kitchen novices that would do something like throw a frozen chicken breast in a cold pan, crank the heat on high, and wonder why it comes out like rubber. You have to make an effort to get them to understand things like the starting temperature of the pan, the heat, and length of the cooking time aren't all interchangeable. Eggs are great to illustrate that because they're quick, accessible, and change a lot depending on how you tackle it. If you can get a novice to the point where they're making good french-style scrambled eggs or omelets, then they've focused on the ingredient and process enough to get that egg-whisperer sense, and that bodes well for all their future cooking endeavors.
Here's the thing, though: eggs are indeed quick, accessible and change a lot depending on how you tackle it. But unless you're an abject failure in the kitchen, what you end up with will be edible. More than that, an egg you overcook you can call "country style" while an egg you leave runny and semi-translucent you can call "continental" or "classic" or I mean fuck I once mixed Gordon Ramsay referring to fuckin' runny goddamn scrambled eggs as "the Ownly Propah Maythot of cooking EGGs!" And that's my point: the principle point of cooking eggs is not to show someone the right way to cook eggs, it's to insist that everyone else is doing it WRONG. Nobody sets out to say "here's A way to make an omelet, they all set out to say "here's THE ONLY LEGITIMATE METHOD UNDER GOD'S SCOURGING SUN to make an omelet" and it's such fucking bullshit. If you watch the whole episode of that Julia Child omelet, she goes on to tell you that if you put anything in your omelet it's not an omelet. If you let it sit you're a savage. If you do it any other way than the way she shows you, you aren't making an omelet you're making scrambled eggs. So this bullshit snobbery goes back fifty plus years - we can't blame it on the Food Network. But it definitely delineates how much of "cooking" is arguing about what isn't cooking.
Counterpoint: you don't watch Julia Child (or any cooking personality) to get "edible". Her whole shtick was this is what real French cooking is so listen up. That's the appeal. You're watching to learn how to produce a particular product. "Do it this way. Or just don't. Whatever, it's still food" just doesn't jive with the raw purpose of the thing. If we're talking at a bar and I'm railing you about your omelet technique, then yeah, that's bullshit, but of course that's how it is in cooking shows. Jacques Pépin is distinctly not that way in the above video though: here's two styles, one is not better than the other. Here's how you make each. But also, implicitly: each one is different, and if you respect the craft you can distinguish them and make each one on purpose.
French cooking is that which can be condoned in reference to any book written by Escoffier. That's all it is, nothing else. If you stray too far from one of his seminal texts than it isn't classical French cuisine. There is nothing else to it. I find Escoffier hilariously pompous and impractical. I don't have the three days it would take for me to properly make one of his recipes. I don't have the moral fortitude to correctly make sttock his way.
We could talk about "other foodies" and say anything we want, but I don't see what your seeing in the provided fodder. I'd also challenge your assumption that these elaborate rituals are valueless for the end product. You're looking for an empirical breakdown, but lots of chefs just don't work that way and don't need to. Or rather, what you call a ritual is what takes the place of empirical knowledge that enables them to make a recipe consistently well. It's not necessarily a purity of the art thing. Most people have an auntie that never measures anything but makes a consistently amazing Meat Pie or some other thing, and the only way she could convey the recipe to you is "watch and do exactly as I do". Ignoring the ritual in that case is like those morons on recipe sites that comment: "I substituted tofu for ham. Terrible recipe. One star".
That is not at all accurate. Julia Child rose to prominence as a counterpoint to the proliferation of TV dinners. WWII basically created an entire culture and an entire ecosystem of frozen and prepacked food; the rise of the supermarket coincided with the downfall of fresh ingredients and local specialists. Julia Child's "whole schtick" was that you could take ingredients and make food without having to mix carrots and jello. More than that, early food network started with Sarah Moulton, who started out as one of Julia Child's assistants. Except eggs. In foodieism, cooking with eggs is a "whatever it's still food" task. But cooking eggs is fucking fundamentalist.Counterpoint: you don't watch Julia Child (or any cooking personality) to get "edible".
I guess it depends on what foodies we're talking about. The above Jacques Pépin video is great. Two styles, basically the same ingredients, radically different results. I had seen that video years back when I was first honing my omelets, and it made me think: "shit, there's way more I can do with eggs".