vegetarian shit-stirrer For argument's sake, many of these are basic America's Test Kitchen / Betty Crocker / Irma Rombauer / Gourmet basics. There's nothing new under the sun, other than the tedious urgency with which Serious Eats approaches everything. And for argument's sake, I endorse/support the following: 1) Yes, use freshly-ground beef. Texture and taste are radically improved. Plus I doctor the bejeesus out of my burgers and comixing is easier with a meat grinder. 2) Cold meat definitely forms easier patties but fucking give it a rest. If you aren't making truffles or pie crust you can probably get by without refrigerating utensils. 3) Yes don't play with it like play doh but if you're grinding your own meat you have to get medieval on it anyway because it comes out of the grinder like breadcrumbs. I would go as far as to say that if you grind your own meat you have to overwork the shit out of hamburger to hurt it. 4) Yes salt the exterior because osmosis causes the surface to dry out and crust over better that's the whole point and if you salt the whole thing it'll be too salty. This isn't rocket science. 5) yes you should make your patties look like red blood cells. Recognize that between grinding your own meat, not working it too much, keeping it cold, salting just the surface and making it look like a red blood cell you're already overthinking it so fucking calm down while you're at it. Have a beer it's a barbecue FFS. 6) I mean yeah salt the outside but don't go crazy the whole point is to taste the goddamn burger. I use garlic salt. I can taste the difference between iodized and non-iodized salt but only when I put them directly on my tongue and if you're using that much salt you've already lost. 7) kk so if you ground your own meat and formed your own patties and manipulated the beef as little as possible them cookies are gonna crumble. Sorry. They just are. And flipping them all the goddamn time is going to launch beefcrumbs into the grill. Also it's tough to get grill marks if you're cointossing your burgers like a nervous gangster and yes you can taste those, you want to taste those. So if you've followed all the instructions up to this point? This instruction is going to give you taco meat. 8) I own two thermapens because my wife doesn't like how the first one conks out in the middle when you open it so she bought us another for Father's Day. I would say it is the number one most useful tool in the kitchen behind pans and knives. 9) jesus christ my wife and kid eat their burgers on rice. Let it the fuck go. 10) Fuckin' burgers are omelets for the fantasy football crowd. My burgers are goddamn sacrilege. They're about 30% onions by weight and about 5% fresh basil. There's like a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce per pound and ground pepper in them. They're best when topped with provolone. They are requested at barbecues a lot, I guess because most people just buy Costco frisbees? Or maybe it's because nothing is new under the sun and perhaps purists suck all the fun out of everything.
damn i really popped off on that one i gotta say i love serious eats but only because they attempt to explain why you should do the things they're telling you instead of saying "do it like this, jackass" - having said that it's unfortunate that kenji and co. have stunted child palates and only go full analysis on three-ingredient american staples like "the burger" and "the egg" and "the boiled potato" - and you know what, boiling potatoes with 2 qt water 2 tbsp salt 2 tbsp white vinegar makes some baller potato salad so i'm not hating but at a certain point it gets embarrassing to overthink some of this stuff to be honest the extreme basics of cooking from scratch will take you beyond the average and into the zone of "i feel this was worth my time to make dinner instead of buying smth premade" and that's good enough unless you have a hobbyist interest in cooking it's kinda like cosmo sex tips for food - you don't need to weigh each patty to make sure they're all exactly 12.5 grams each, just ask her "does this feel good" and you'll get there
They're so judgy tho. Food Network really ruined everything. The mantra prior to the fetishization of food was "the minimum number of necessary ingredients of the best quality available." But you can't bukkake all over that. So it was all about squeezing lemon juice through your fingers and separating eggs through your fingers and avoiding unitaskers and Dr. Science™ vignettes about maillard reactions and sous vide and scraping your goddamn teflon pans with your goddamn metal spatulas and nobody will care if you're throwing together a bagful of semi-homemade vomit if you can go whack whack whack whack whack with your serrated K-mart Rachael Ray cooking knives and turn an onion into dice like it stole your lunch money. The groceries suck too, of course. Why teach people to buy in season if they mostly slurp down Healthy Choice frozen entrees and watch Aarti's Party while they do it so they can feel half-alive. Not that it matters much anyway because it's all ripened on a container ship between Patagonia and Peoria. When there's little difference, taste or texture, between "grapes" and "tomatoes" you might as well pimp your "grape tomatoes". But yeah. If you have a few good ingredients on hand you can generally make any number of meals out of it. Four sauces, four proteins, two starches, all of American-style Chinese food. Don't let the secret out, though - we save that for "challenges" on Chopped and whatever the hell Gordon Ramsay is doing now. Step on the elevator have to cook on an electric range! The...Horrah My white trash barbecue food is fresh pineapple and chopped chicken thighs soaked in Mr. Yoshida's for a few hours. Served that up and like three different people decided to try it because apparently we're so busy freaking out about the proper way to use "steak rub" that we've forgotten that less is generally more. It's fucking sad. And these are the same people who wax fucking poetic about their Instant Pot, which they will use three times, and never realize that their grandmother's pressure cooker did the exact same goddamn thing without taking up a third of a counter. I can't buy rice crispies. Apparently the only place that has them is Target. Rice crispies treats? Yeah they're high-enough margin. But why would you make rice crispies treats, let alone just eat cereal? I can't buy Havarti. I can buy fucking Hatch Chile in eighty goddamn things but I moved a thousand miles so I wouldn't have to eat that shit ever again so fuck you, Kroger. No I don't wanna eat your gray-ass steak. No I don't wanna eat your gray-ass steak that you "finished" on the grill so that it would be slightly less gray. No I don't care that you boiled it in a plastic bag for three hours at a hundred and thirty five degrees. Actually, that's precisely why I don't want to eat your fucking gray-ass steak. Jesus, man, you spend $200 so you can photo-lab a piece of pork and then insist we go to a fucking restaurant where I pay extra because I have to cook my own food? And fuckin' Serious Eats is at Ten Things You Must Do To Your Burger If You Want to Date My Daughter and it just wears me the fuck out.
The butcher here also sells craptons of hot sauce. It was a dude - DD - who passed on to his son - also DD - so it went from being "DD meats" to being "Double DD Meats" and it's now run by DD Jr's wife, who added a bunch of groceries. Prior to the pandemic they had like five kinds of havarti. It was awesome. They had the dill stuff, which I love, which she would buy in like ten pound blocks and then chop up into 3/4lb slabs that she'd sell I swear damn near at cost. Then covid hit and steadily the havarti went away. I asked her about it. "Will it be coming back when things are back to normal?" "Probably not. I don't have time to cut it up anymore and frankly, you and I are the only ones eating it."
and i don't remember where you mentioned it but vegan meat substitutes are actually popping off, i had some "sausages" that were shockingly good in both flavor and texture and i've kinda been craving them over the regular meat - i'm fine with eating the soy byproduct instead of the cow it would have gone to, it's actually praxis to cut out the middleman tbh smh btw
'twas chat. I think the sooner Americans realize that falafel is a better than eating a burger in effigy the happier we'll all be. There's plenty of delicious meaty things you can do with non-meat but in order to get it to where normies can access it easily we have to have Impossible Burgers.
Sometimes I wonder a couple of things like, does J-Kenji Lopez Alt write this from an absurdist or satirical undertone? Or does he actually, truthfully, believe everything he writes? The second is, who is the audience that reads this and goes YES, this is what I must be doing with my burgers?
Putting dozens of intense pretenders on cable and watching them freak out about cooking has had the effect of making everyday Americans freak out about cooking. It's the same problem we've always had with wine - there's so many varieties that people vapor lock and end up buying the shit with Snoop Dogg on the bottle. Everyone who wants to cook but can't is so fucking flummoxed by 30 years of Food Network that they think it's hard and they're all terrified of making mistakes. So "top ten mistakes you are making when you're just mashing fucking ground beef into a ball and grilling it" gets pageviews. It's fucking sad. Food and cookware people are pretty much at "you're going to have to work hard to fuck this up" but food culture is at "you're going to fuck this up unless you work hard." A baker that knows what she's doing will go "today is a bad day for pie crust." A baker that doesn't know what she's doing will read Serious Eats, follow everything semi-studiously and then beat herself up because apparently humidity is a myth. After all, if you refrigerate refrigerate refrigerate, Kenji insists your shitty pie crust is your fault. It's written this way because when we don't feel competent, we love do's and don'ts and because if you feel competent, you stop reading this shit. Cookbooks didn't used to have amounts or temperatures in them. Now? Now we have Alton Fucking Brown telling you that you goddamn better weigh your water if you want an accurate measurement.
"taken way too seriously" is the subtitle of cuisine from 1992 until now. American cheese is literally reconstituted cheese extract. If they sold it as "deconstructed colby" the steak-in-a-bag crew would be all over it. As it is, I have no problems with vanilla extract, I have no problems with condensed broth, I have no problems with cheese extract, it's just generally there are better options. The way to cure velveetaism is to put out cheese. Swiss, cheddar, provolone. Most people have no idea about wine so they'll drink whatever you tell them is good. Used to be people knew things about cheese, now you can't buy Edam unless you want it cracker-sized.
My dating game in the '90s was to hit up the wine department and say "recommend something I should be paying way more than $15 for but won't have to" and then go to the cheese department and say "recommend three things that go with this." Head to blockbuster, take the whole mess to her house, have a couch picnic, get laid. You are absolutely correct. Everyone needs more gruyere in their life. Around here we wolf Iberico because it's delicious on asian pear. Yet Kroger has absolutely no idea how to prepare sliced Havarti and if Boar's Head doesn't sell it, it's simply not available. I actually have a less puritan take on American cheese than just about anyone around me. The wife won't tolerate it. My daughter was asking for brie by name at three or younger. Me? I find waaaaaaaay too many ways snobbery has been weaponized so I let it go and mourn what's been lost.
...I'm reeling from the idea of a puppy eating a pound of iberico a week. Poor thing must have shit marbles. I would not change a word of your rant. Gimme the DL on cheese paper, though. There was an awesome hoighty toighty cheesemonger I went to once that insisted you had to wrap all cheese in cheese paper. "All cheese?" I asked, and he hedged a little with "All the cheese you're buying."
I’ll unabashedly admit to liking American cheese, but it’s not my favorite Mac-and-cheese cheese. That honor belongs to fontina. Fontina melts like cheddar, but has some funk to it—really lets you know you’re eating cheese in your Mac and not processed cheese product.