Things like this make me wish I had a more rural lifestyle and had the space for stuff like this. Cooking is great and all, you can do an awful lot with just tools you can store in a kitchen. But experimenting with ingredients, and man, tools is a whole 'nother level.
YouTube channels like Alex French Guy Cooking where he makes his own mozzarella, worked with other YouTube makers to create the best pasta roller ever made, a massive, amazing meat tenderizing mallet, and just the YouTube makers in general almost have me wanting to rent my one bedroom condo out so I can go live out in the sticks and buy cheap tools like a small 5# process cheese cooker, tear off my shirt and Hulk-transform into a mad scientist.
>> It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available.
I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/
I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to mention the significant amount to time spent in prepping and later, cleaning up.
That said, I agree that (with a bit of experience) this approach to cooking is a lot more fun. As a comment elsewhere on the page says, cooking for yourself could sometimes be a pain (especially after you get home from work) and thinking of it as a side project really helps.
> To make a slightly tortured analogy, I need a pre-assembled propane barbecue, because I have food to make. Other people want to go through the whole process of building their barbecue (or at least putting its pieces together), but I’d rather be cooking
>I really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way
Cooking is different things for different people. I feel like tech people see it as nothing but sustenance (yay Soylent!), so the idea is for it to be quick, cheap and easy.
For other people it's a hobby and they actually enjoy the process. Grinding your own grain or peeling grapes can increase the food quality, and it takes nothing but time, so why not? Same goes for buying better ingredients. We probably all waste a lot of money on things that aren't necessary, but we enjoy.
>I think it would be a miracle if any product could teach you how to cook and get you food in 5 minutes.
I mean, TikTok and Youtube do this with simple recipes by the thousands.
Good luck with this idea, but I think it might be targeted at a very precise type of user that is interested in food facts and maybe one day learning how to make simple dishes.
>> As I got more serious about cooking I donated a lot of extra pans and doo-dads. Previously, I would just collect things and as I learned more about what made something good and why, I could narrow down to 1 or 2 higher quality items (knives, pans, etc). As I learned more techniques, I needed fewer specialty items.
Same experience here. Conclusion : if we'd educate people better on how to cook rather than showing them hours of advertising on the latest magical tool to cook a steak, we'd make their life easier and so much more minimalist.
So, in my experience, if you learn to cook and accept that cooking takes a bit more time you mainly need (for french cuisine) :
- 1 or 2 frying pan (buy a large one, multi-ply, heavy stuff, it's expensive : around 150 euro each, but will outlast you)
- a cast iron casserole (for long cook)
- just one teflon-like pan for frying fish (frying fish without that is possible but requires a lot of fat)
- a few cooking pots (buy inox)
- a short knife (buy expensive, around 60€, make sure the blade goes to the end of the handle)
- a chef knife (ditto)
- a big wooden cutting board (it allows you to use your chef knife efficiently)
- 2 or three large bowls (inox or earthenware, no plastic)
- a hand blender
- a whisker
- learn to use your oven if you have one, it's very useful
- baking paper is very useful and cheap
the rest just comes from regular stuff (glasses, regular knife, spoons, etc)
with that material you can go a loooooong way.
(forget about KitchenAid, Cookeo, and many other things)
> What other tools have you spent a little extra on to get quality, if you don't mind me asking
At this point, pretty much everything. It's on my on-going todo list to write an article for my site about it since I added a cooking section awhile back. I found a community that's apparently been around a long time in Chowhound and that exposed me to a lot of the details, and I bought some representative cheaper items to experiment with and I learned a lot. Among other things I learned why gas is better than electric for a stovetop and the shortcomings of induction electric burners, which I had previously thought were marvelous. During the course of 2020 I really took cooking seriously and decided to go all-out, enrolled in online culinary school in my free time and learned how to do all the things I had previously neglected. I'm not a pro cook, this is just for at home, but with new techniques and new understanding of what is available it became really obvious what the shortcomings of my tools were and where it was making certain recipes I wanted to try impossible or massively more difficult.
The short version of what I would probably write is that your priority order for paying for quality should be pretty much:
1. Knives
2. Cookware
3. Ovenware
4. Anything else that is exposed to heat
5. Everything else
The most interesting thing I discovered though is that quality is more about materials and construction than price, and a lot of the best stuff is actually really affordable if you buy through restaurant supply houses instead of on Amazon or similar. Additionally, many of the best quality products aren't sold in the US for odd reasons, especially in Cookware, or at least are hard to come by. Personally I ended up with a pretty eclectic collection of cookware because cookware sets might get you where you need to go, but are never going to be optimal for each item.
For instance I found that for doing a lot of stocks and soups, a disc-bottom stock pot (Fessler is my preferred brand there) was significant better than other options because it made heat control easier to prevent burning the soup and made it heat so evenly it didn't require constant stirring. But by the same token when I wanted a good saucepan, clad stainless steel is better than all other options, and for a skillet it's hard to beat single-piece construction carbon steel or cast iron, although the 7-layer clad stuff is close. For a dutch oven nothing beats enameled cast iron. In my opinion for disc-bottoms, Fessler is the good stuff, for clad it's All-Clad or Demeyere, for cast iron it should be Field or Lodge, for enameled cast iron it should be La Creuset or Staub, and for carbon steel I'm a huge fan of Solidteknics.
Unfortunately, no cookware set is going to be this exact, so it's better to buy one piece at a time and focus on the most essential and most used pieces. I think everybody should have a really high quality 2 qt saucier or saucepan, a good skillet, and a dutch oven, and a stock pot. You can get everything else over time if you find you need it.
Knives are kind of similar, don't buy a set, buy individual knives. Everybody could honestly get by with just two good knives if they take care of them, a chef's knife or gyuko of some kind and some kind of paring or utility/petty knife. With knives there's a lot to learn but some of the good starters are really reasonably priced and are honestly good enough you may be fine with them for the rest of your life. You really can't go wrong with Tojiro VG10 knives if you want stainless steel or the Dao Vu knives if you want carbon steel and are okay taking care of it. Both are very reasonable, like under $100 for a knife (typical high-end knives are > $300). There's certainly reasons to buy something more, but honestly these are what I use as "daily beaters" in my kitchen and I only have one more expensive knife and while it's fantastic, I use the Tojiro just as much if not more. What I definitely recommend against is buying expensive sets you find at Williams-Sonoma or whatever, because they're very much not worth what you paid for them, even if they're decent.
In any case, once you buy quality stuff you really do need to take care of it properly. I have a calendar reminder once a month on a Saturday to do "kitchen maintenance" which is when I do things like treat my Boos cutting board with mineral oil and wax, oven season the carbon steel and cast iron pans, and deep clean all the clad stainless steel stuff with barkeeper's friend or white vinegar, and sharpen my knives, among other things. Other than that, day to day, you should do research on how to take care of things. Cast iron isn't really as finnicky as people make it out to be, for instance, and if you take care of it properly it's really amazing to cook with, knives are easy to care for properly as well. For the most part the main thing is most of the quality stuff is intended to be hand washed, not go in a dishwasher, or if it's dishwasher safe you should still rinse and wipe it dry afterwards to ensure it doesn't leave any caustic residues from the dishwasher.
The long version of this is something I'll write some day maybe.
Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio.
I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing.
(Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)
> I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :(
I mean that’s pretty much what supermarkets sell right? Ready meals that can be heated, which are effectively cooked the same way as at the home but just on an industrial scale. Or pasta that’s pre-made and pre-filled and you just have to heat and add some sauce that’s already pre-made.
Im in the UK where we have services like Cook that are good quality meals you can heat up.
>Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.
The main point of owning things is that you get to use them when you want to use them.
People keep those things in cupboards because when they decide on a whim to make pasta they do just that. The same goes for all the rest - having cars, houses and so on.
Unless there's some kind of Philip K Dick-style machine that near-instantly delivers good X to your apartment through a vacuum tube or something, that as-a-service bs won't fly. No one wants to wait hours (on the best case given our current logistics network) after deciding to make pasta to actually get the pasta machine.
> Of course this requires that you learn to cook, and have the time to do it.
True, although personally I think cooking is one of life's greatest joys! Making things from scratch that taste good and make people (i.e. your family) happy is worth the time, imo, and I try to do a couple good meals a week :)
>I've been cooking for 30 years, I've made a living out of it, and no it's not that simple. You talk like someone who has never cooked anything outside of a microwave.
Okay come on here, you know I did not post this to attack cooking as a profession. I have no doubt that you can make a tastier dish then I can.
My point was only that the basics of cooking is incredibly easy. One pot meals for example are exactly that, dump things in a pot and cook them. Even screwing up the order in something like Chili will still give you an eatable, tasty meal.
>You talk like someone who has never cooked anything outside of a microwave.
I have, and generally they act like it's a hard undertaking, so I give them easy recipes. Chili, Bratwurst, Curry, these are all meals that can be made in a limited number of dishes on the cheap. Serve with rice, and you can drastically cut your food cost.
EDIT: Honestly, I thought you were saying I hadn't talked to people who haven't cooked outside a microwave. I didn't realize you were actually attacking me. I've cooked quite a bit outside of a microwave, thank you.
>> I'd argue that one area of invention that has continued is essentially outsourcing home tasks in areas like food prep rather than creating new appliances to do them in the house.
Actually if you do it right, it can take around 2-2.5 hours each week to freeze meals for the whole week
On the other hand, while there are some tasty ,high quality frozen foods(like the french chain Picard) , they're more expensive , so people still make their own.
> Soups are great. But they take a long time to make
I should really experiment with slow cooker recipes, though I am (probably overly) worried about the fire risk of leaving a cooking appliance on unattended (either while away or asleep.)
> I learned that 7-11’s fried rice is made using real woks with an elaborate setup of robotic arms to toss the rice with the wok and spatula.
I would not mind seeing how that setup is implemented!
The vast majority of the odd robotic cooking contraptions I've seen on YouTube have almost always been bespoke once-offs (eg, someone's homemade project). Something that actually scales and is cost-effective would very likely be constructed very differently, and likely genuinely interesting and insightful to observe.
> Should I learn to make pasta from scratch? No, that’s crazy. Nobody cares if you can make pasta from scratch and it’s not going to make any money.
I stared at this for a long time in complete disbelief thinking "But it's so delicious!" And I guess, if you do it for friends or acquaintances it will give you prestige, you will be the prestigious person who makes totally awesome pasta. Although personally I would rank doing something nice for people above the prestige you might get from it, so I guess the article is not for me.
Things like this make me wish I had a more rural lifestyle and had the space for stuff like this. Cooking is great and all, you can do an awful lot with just tools you can store in a kitchen. But experimenting with ingredients, and man, tools is a whole 'nother level.
YouTube channels like Alex French Guy Cooking where he makes his own mozzarella, worked with other YouTube makers to create the best pasta roller ever made, a massive, amazing meat tenderizing mallet, and just the YouTube makers in general almost have me wanting to rent my one bedroom condo out so I can go live out in the sticks and buy cheap tools like a small 5# process cheese cooker, tear off my shirt and Hulk-transform into a mad scientist.
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