What’s your ‘Heston’ experience?
Baking. Measuring isn’t fun. I’d rather wing it.
It’s absurdly easier with a scale. I don’t know why the US standardizes to volume.
Especially for things like butter. Who measures butter in a cup, America?! Unless you just have vats of liquid butter sitting around, in which case I guess scooping up a cup is pretty easy… But even then, weighing it out is better, I think.
fwiw 1 stick of butter = half a cup
We do sticks so it’s not that much of an issue.
But flour? The difference between sifted and packed is huge, it makes a huge structural difference, and people have genuinely written recipes measured pretty far across the range on density.
I came across an American recipe using cups of butter a week or two back, so obviously not everyone got the memo! Sticks isn’t so bad, but I do wish it was all just done by weight. Whenever I encounter recipes using sticks, I still have to convert it because butter is sold in different quantities here.
I agree about flour, it absolutely needs to be done by weight!
I’m saying it’s sold in sticks. The recipe is always cups or tablespoons, but 2 sticks is a cup and tablespoons are marked on the wrapper to just cut off.
Right, but in my non-US country, the recipe is in grams or ounces (ie, by weight) and butter is sold in different-sized sticks to in the US. So, whenever I come across US recipes, I have to do some kind of conversion that involves me looking up how much butter is in a cup, how big a US stick of butter is, or how much a tablespoon of butter weighs!
But how big is a knob of butter!?!?
Cooking is art. Baking is science (chemistry).
What? Baking is super easy. Follow the instructions. That’s all there is to it.
Recipe calls for 250g of sugar? Put in 250g. Not 260 (close enough). Follow the instructions. Works every time.
Seriously, using a scale instead of volumetric measurements is an instant level up in baking.
But that’s hard
I’m used to winging it while cooking
Precision is not in my food preparation repertoire
You can wing it with baking, at least for some types of stuff. Oatmeal raisin cookies don’t really take precision, as an example.
The pizza dough twirling thing.
Fun fact: acrobatics are made with lower hydration dough.
If you want dough with crispy outside and soft inside you’re looking for a 65-70% hydration. Acrobatics with this will rip it apart. To open a higher hydration dough you use this technique: https://youtu.be/xzbW8CZx538
I once worked at a Domino’s. It took making many pizzas to get to that point, but it was really satisfying stretching out the dough once you got there.
I’m pretty sure making Phyllo pastry by hand is a myth made up by grandmas for ‘Kids today have it easy’ reasons, like walking up hills both ways to school
I used to watch my yiayia make phyllo by hand. She would cover the entire kitchen table in butter, spread out the dough with a wooden dowel that I just remember using as a lightsaber every time she put it down, and spend hours folding and rolling and mopping melted butter across it.
So much butter.
Eventually her arthritis made her give it up and she started using the frozen stuff, but she loved cooking and she was proud to make everything from scratch.
The recipe wasn’t complicated, you just need a large enough clean surface that can be covered in butter and a few hours to spend making it. The result is very similar to frozen dough.
the space requirements is the real killer for phyllo and puff pastries. I dont even know if i could fit a wad of rolled out puff pastry in my fridge.
I unfortunately dont even have the space to roll out pasta or cookies, it makes me a little dead inside
The simple things are the hardest to master.
Pie crusts, US style biscuits, scrambled eggs, steak, and sauteed chicken breast. If you cook any of these things exceptionally, I respect your skills.
pie crust
…you mean put cold butter, flour, ice water, and a little seasoning in a food processor and blitz until crumbly? Or are you talking about making puff pastry from scratch?
I can make great macarons and croissants, but for the life of me I struggle with making perfect buiscuts
Honestly, the hardest part of cooking is the prep. Cutting everything perfectly, getting the right ingredients, making the right spice mix, making the sauces, and food that takes multiple days of prep. Cooking is the easy part, prep is the hard part
Edit: deboning anything is fucking rough especially fish, butchering anything is also rough and super easy to fuck up, making all the dough and noodles. I personally think a great chef on those cooking contests are just super good at prep and plating the food of course because it’s pretty in the end.
Hollandaise sauce.
Once you crack the code, it is easy peasy – but it’s very non intuitive until then. Either use a double boiler (I don’t recommend this approach, it makes it harder to tell whats going on, reduces your control and makes setup feel like a chorae) … or buy a few dozen eggs, a couple pounds of butter and a dozen lemons and just practice the sequence until it clicks.
The key is to control the temperature carefully, and keep that temperature homogenous and even… that means knowing how warm and cold your ingredients are, and steady whisking.
Two ways to do it:
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Whisk together eggs, water and lemon juice until the mixture thickens, and then add melted butter slowly (your slowest and most foolproof method)
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Whisk your eggs to aerate them, set them aside. Melt your butter, remove it from the heat and add your (cold) lemon juice and water. Should be about room temp now. Whisk it together and drizzle in the eggs, whisking constantly. Then put it back on the heat and whisk it steadily till it thickens, which will be quite soon.
The first path is the correct way, in that it minimizes the risk of putting the eggs into a hot pan (and curdling them), but it’s also slower and more involved. Basically, any way that ensures the eggs are about the same temperature as whatever gets mixed into them, and heated up gradually from there, works.
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The key is heat control. You need the butter barely melted when you mix in the egg yolk and you need to mix everything together before the egg yolk cooks by itself.
That’s it in a nutshell. If I’m in a hurry I melt the butter, whisk the egg, add the cold lemon juice to butter just as it finishes melting and now it’s room temp, pour the egg in and whisk. Uses only one pan, one bowl and the whisk, takes about 90 seconds. Just gotta be paying attention.
Sous vide can make this easier
For me personally, literally all cooking. If it’s more complex than boiling pasta or using an air fryer, I’m useless at it.
And I find it so hard to motivate myself to get better because I often fuck up and have to throw out food when I try something new in the kitchen. Plus I’m usually cooking because I’m actually hungry and want to eat, so that risk factor of knowing I might need to start over and make something else if I screw up isn’t something I want to deal with.
Try stir fry.
Chop veggies, or if you’re lazy get one of those party trays of pre-chopped veggies. Throw in frying pan with oil. Continually taste test for doneness (helps with hunger). Broccoli might need to be steamed (cover the pan for a minute or so until it’s bright green). Then season with whatever. You can buy pre-mixed seasoning.
Do the protein separately. Cube chicken or pork and fry until it’s not raw. Or just toss it on a George Foreman and cube after.
Rice in a rice cooker.
Presto.
Even easier-fajitas : onions and bell peppers cut about even and cooked for a bit in a bit of oil ( even a splash of water works) with a packet of fajita spice mix from the store. Cook a little longer for less crunch). Rotisserie chicken for the meat. Tortillas and cheese slices with rice if you want- boil in a bag is a-ok.
Or try frozen veg + golden brand Japanese curry. Same chicken and rice as above.
Stir fry is easy, but tricky to master the different cooking times. (These dudes might be selling themselves short, but who knows)
Yeah my stopping point is similar. If I fuck up then I have no food and still have to clean
Stir fry is a good way to start. It’s pretty hard to fuck up and pretty easy to clean up.
Exactly! And worse yet, if you fuck up, the cleaning is often more time-consuming
Noodle stretching
I do that every day
Is it getting longer?
Only thing I’ve run into so far that I still wasn’t happy with after 3 tries is French macarons. They were definitely edible, but still not close enough to the real thing.
I would recommend Adam Ragusea’s method, they may look ugly but they taste great. His video also does a great job of teaching the fundamentals of macarons, which you can apply to making prettier macarons later. I’m a macaron master now!
Hahaha. I guess I might have some unreasonably high expectations of myself. Most of mine tasted okay and looked much better than his. I did 3 batches of batter, and for each batch of batter, I had at least 3 trays of cookies, so I tried different cooking times/temperatures. While some of my issues were more along the lines of appearances (lumpy, browning, cracking), the bigger issue was with cookies being too dry/crumbly or too chewy/tough. It was almost a year ago, so my memory is a bit hazy now, but I might still give it another shot when I have access to a good kitchen again.
Anything that requires a professional grade oven. Your home made pizzas won’t cook the same. Despite them having their own charm
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Tourné cuts
Stop watching Food Network or the myriad of food channels on YT. Cooking ain’t that hard.
Can you follow the most basic of basic directions like “preheat oven to 350F” or “mix ingredient X with ingredient Y”? Yeah, of course you can. But it is in the food industry’s best interest in making it look far more complicated than it really is.
Lmao you’re out of your mind. There’s no big conspiracy of the food industry making cooking look harder than it is. I got really into home cooking from watching all those cooking shows and YouTubers and then trying the recipes out myself. Virtually every cooking content creator out there makes content because they want to share the love of cooking, not scare people away from it. Channels like Binging With Babish, You Suck At Cooking, Alton Brown, J. Kenji Lopez Alt, etc are all fantastic resources for people who want to learn to cook.
You ever try to make rough puff pastry? Good luck with that. Let us know how easy it is.
That looks a lot like filo dough. I’ve made cheese pie and spinach pie before. It’s not that hard. I don’t like spinach though.
