The one that constantly pops into my head is where I saw a woman making ceviche. Except she didn’t add salt directly to it. Instead, when it was time to start cutting everything, she pulled out a 10lb block of pink Himalayan rock salt from her fridge “that you can get from any specialty salt store” and used that as the cutting board so the dish would absorb some of the salt.
I was just stunned. In what way is that any better than just adding salt? In fact, it’s far worse since you have no way of controlling how much salt is going into the dish. And what the hell is a specialty salt store?!
Also, if you’re using one of your ingredients as a cutting board, how are you supposed to clean it for its next use?
To be fair, it’s a block of salt. Not only would microbes have a hard time surviving on it, but you can just run water over it and the top layer will dissolve away.
Or from a recipe blog. 14 paragraphs about how to make real traditional Italian recipe, and the blogger is 1/8 Italian and went on a 1-week trip to Italy 7 years ago so only they know authentic Italian food.
And they ate at McDonald’s the entire time they were in Italy.
This is why learning substitutions is one of the greatest things you can do as a cook. Screw your bougie recipe I made it for a quarter the price with one pot.
I recommend procuring a PDF of “The Flavor Bible” great for learning substitutions and what flavors go with what.
Exactly. Llama tears work as a substitute for alpaca in a pinch (just need to add a bit more salt).
Kevlar or due diligence may be needed when approaching llamas.
I’m not prepared to make a llama cry.
Not even Kuzco?
Fuck that. Tears from any hoofed mammal will do. Hell, I’ve used rabbit tears before and I could barely taste the difference.
Great. Now the dish turned out bad. Was it the substitutions? Was it the recipe itself? Did i mess up somewhere? Did i need to adjust things based on the subs? Guess well never know~
At this point why even follow a recipe
part of the skill of cooking is learning why a dish working. rather than tasting some and going “this tastes bad”, you should be thinking “what is not working here?” too much or too little salt? did you overcook the meat? do some of the flavors clash? a major skill in cooking is being able to identify why your meal didn’t turn out how you wanted it to, and then hopefully finding out how to fix or avoid that.
i think following the recipe to the letter can weaken that skill because you just kinda uncritically follow the steps in front of you
I use recipes more as guidelines or inspiration.
This is why I love Josh on Mythical Kitchen making shit with ingredients bought from 7-11. The beef jerky 7-11 “beef wellington” actually looked and sounded like it was delicious. 🤣
I want more like that, and less of the talk show-like stuff (Last Meal and now they’ve also made their Hotdog is a Sandwich podcast into videos).
You have to be careful you’re not on a specialty diet website looking at recipes, the other day looking at this white-lady recipe for butter chicken which is “so authentic” you “need to try this one” if you’ve never had butter chicken before. Then she’s like, I cut out most of the cream and butter and it still tastes fine! 😒 Still 14 ingredients, many of which I’ll not use before they expire. Pass.
Me with every recipe:
- search for “substitute for x”. x10. Weirdly, the only substitute I have is nearly always basil. I think search/AI is trolling me.
- search for ‘ratio of dried x to fresh x’. x10. I can get ratios of 1:2 to whatever you want. Then there are AI generated pages that tell you everything about life, the universe and everything, except the ratio of dried x to fresh x Normally have to wade through x10 of those…
Cook. Eat.
After: I rate this as meh. x10. And I’ll need to buy more dried basil. Big basil must be making a fortune!
Generative AI has made learning cooking from the internet such a terrible experience
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I disagree. GenAI at least gives you a recipe that might work, and not the author’s life story, the dish’s convoluted origin story and a half-hearted list of ingredients buried under an avalanche of bullshit missing the fucking measurements. Those were around well before AI.
I miss the times when shit was readable and I didn’t have to screenshot instructions off of TikTok recipes.
Before AI I used to figure the recipes I was browsing had at least been cooked by somebody before being posted to the internet. Of course there’s no guarantee that that was ever true, but now it’s much harder to tell, especially when looking for recipes that use a technique that’s new to me. I have a hard time trusting something outside of my expertise that an LLM produced
Totally agree that the recipes stuffed with filler content suck pretty hard too. I would usually open the loaded recipe articles in reader mode, scroll to the very bottom, and copy-paste their contents into a note somewhere to avoid the bullshit when I’m actually preparing the food
At least they make food, these baking shows now everything is pretty much inedible, at what point is it food and at what point is it just arts and crafts?
…now emulsify the yack milk and the African camel ear bits using the kitchen air premium deluxe 3kw solar powered table top heavy duty roller mill. Be sure to only use the titanium cored rollers with proper Rhenium coated Molly gold platinum surface finish with the Wineth Palthro pronounced (gwyneth paltrow) titie and vagina print pattern.
I’m glad they added the emoji at the end, I wouldn’t have known what to feel about it otherwise
That’s your cue to laugh.
Oh god, is Facebook still there?
They absorbed Whatsapp and Instagram and rebranded to Meta
Go back to sleep and pretend this is all a dream
Here’s the thing. Until I got married, I never kept food for very long in my fridge. I pretty much went out and bought exactly what I was going to cook to have enough meals for the week. I’d cook all that up on Saturday night and be good to go.
Are we sure we were watching a cooking show and not how to summon bougie demons?
