“Measure carefully, friends!” - Chef Jean Pierre on YouTube as he yeets in approximately random eyeballed quantities of everything.
My chef yells at me because I do this all the time.
Though he’s mainly mad because I didn’t measure a single fuckin thing and can’t recreate it
can’t recreate it
This is the main downside IMO
If your chef has a nose and taste buds he should be able to figure it out by remaking it a few times.
It’s not that he can’t recreate it, it’s that my coworkers can’t.
That sounds like you are making yourself indispensable.
also, if you do write down the recipe and try to recreate it on another day, it doesn’t work because your mood has changed and now the flavor doesn’t match anymore.
has happened to me many times now.
I cook by vibe mostly because I don’t have the items the recipe calls for. So I typically substitute whatever I have that I think fits or smells right. Works well 9/10, just when someone asks me what I used to make something, I have no fucking clue.
🔥🔥 people who don’t use spice 🔥🔥
i think that’s called Britain
Which is insane, how do you pillage most of the planet looking for spices to sell people and then have the blandest food in the world…
Rationing
Don’t get high on your own supply
You should come over and try my vibes based Cottage Pie. It’s subtlety spicy, meaty (or veggie depending on dietary preferences), full of flavour. Every time I have cooked it for people I have always gotten back compliments, clean plates and guests in a glorious food coma.
People who use the same spice for every dish.
I probably put herbes de Provence in too many things, but I like how it tastes.
I use salt and pepper, how could you say my food is bland?
Maybe you just have good and fresh ingredients. Don’t want to cover up the flavour of those, you want to just enhance them
me sniffing the spice of the coca plant
I don’t even measure my spices. Pure vibe. Mostly because recipes almost always feel like they don’t use enough of anything but salt.
“Can you share the recipe?”
“Nope!”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, I don’t remember.”
for me it’s easy because i mostly remember what i just made. but that’s also because i pay special attention to what i do and what comes out afterwards, kinda to do semi-structured research.
Some people would definitely not remember all the details, but yeah, this might not be an issue for others.
…that’s pretty much my improvisational style, everything eyeballed, nothing measured: sometimes things turn out amazing but of course the cost of those happy surprises is that i’ll never make it the same way again; couldn’t if i tried…
…i dated a girl who dogmatically followed published recipes, considered any deviations anathema to the authors’ labor developing them, and she was horrified to watch me cook…
It’s the only way to season food. If you’re good enough, you can just imagine the flavors, but I still have to rummage the spice cabinet and sniff to get the dish to taste just right.
I don’t even sniff them; I just remember how they taste/smell, and then I end up adding vanilla extract to savoury dishes and it tastes amazing
Fantastic.
You better get the hell out of my house immediately and never come back.
Critical is that HOW you learn this is trial and error.
Most people can imagine the result of combining two images, say a frog riding a turtle. We can imagine what a handful of wet spaghetti might sound like being dropped onto the hood of a car. We can imagine what a fluffy bunny that’s been rolling in sand might feel like.
But that isn’t just because those senses are somehow intrinsically better for synthesis and prediction. We just got a ton more practice with them. As kids we got to draw, we got to play with toys, we touched everything, we bashed all kinds of stuff together.
But most of us, we just got the food prepared for us with no awareness of the properties of the constituent ingredients.
You gotta act like a toddler in the kitchen to grow that part of your brain.
I binge watched a lot of Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares (the UK) one
The best tip ever given on those shows is Gordon Ramsay yelling “taste taste taste!” at everyone.
Tasting as you go is what improved my cooking the most. I also vigorously smell everything too.
I just grab whatever random spices I have that sound good and add a few shakes
Either of the “as directed” users are just cowards with no taste buds.
Why yes, I do put a little cayenne pepper in my chicken soup. Why do you ask?
If it doesn’t clear my sinuses completely how is it supposed to cure me? Of course it needs cayenne.
Cayenne goes on everything
That’s Frank’s
Isn’t this just a sign of inexperience? If you have been cooking for a reasonable time, you will know which spices to use when going for what sort of flavour.
yeah but there’s also a lot of people just seeing cooking as a chore and never really paying attention to it, therefore not learning much or anything at all.
it takes patience and a bit of dedication to actually learn cooking in a reasonable way. otherwise you’re just following recipe.
Considering the majority of flavours we experience are in fact smells, if you can cook by your nose you’re usually pretty safe on how the end result will come out.
I’m not a foodie nor a chef but I’ve been able to break apart and reproduce restaurant dishes just by smelling.
Wait until OP discovers that spices don’t always taste like they smell…
Terrible how they decieve us
tried beer for the first time yesterday, thought it would be better than the smell. Nope. Struggled through 3 sips then gave it to someone else 😭 I don’t really get alcohol tbh. Ive only had like 3 or 4 drinks but no matter what it is they all taste bad :/
So, the first thing you need to know about alcohol is it’s an intoxicating drug. It is a depressant, its short-term effects include reduced inhibitions which in the moment can feel like increased confidence, and overall reduction in physical motor skills, plus a mild euphoria. Also makes your face feel slightly numb. That’s most of alcohol’s selling point.
Alcohol on its own is rather unpleasant to have in your face. A lot of cocktail culture sprung up around hiding alcohol with other flavorings so they’re in any way pleasant to swallow.
You might try something like whiskey and coke, I’d specifically go with American or Canadian whiskies here; scotch doesn’t really bring the right flavors for this. There’s a reason Jack Daniels or Crown Royal are stereotypes. Vodka can also be a way in; it doesn’t bring a lot of flavor of its own so adding it to fruit juices can get you used to booze within familiar flavor profiles. Don’t worry about sticking to posted recipes, drop a tablespoon of vodka into a tall glass of orange juice and see what it does, then start upping the ratio.
Get used to that, you may then start exploring cocktails, getting into wine or beer, or neat spirits.
It’s a bit of am acquired taste but beers are by far not all created equal. There’s a stupid amount of diversity and large differences.
But if you don’t enjoy it don’t feel the need to force yourself.
…let me introduce you to single cask-strength malts: one drop, drawn delicately through your lips, let diffuse across your palate by capillary action, that’s how i learned to appreciate alcohol for the first time after four decades of not getting it…
…the great thing about cask-strength sipping whiskies is that one bottle can last years if kept properly sealed between pours…
It’s an acquired taste.
Unless it’s an IPA, they’re gross and if someone drinks them then I assume they’re just suffering to be pretentious.
/s?
As for other booze, just make it like something you like to drink. Fruity vodka and sprite is banging. Rum and coke is a classic. I like creamy stuff so I put vanilla vodka, bailey’s, and milk together.
The double IPA, the “I’m not an alcoholic” drink of choice.
A lot of IPAs are gross. Some are quite good. Bitterness is the most maligned of all tastes. Tons and tons of bitter things that people love and every one of them is a love/hate acquired taste thing.
Grapefruit, bitter melon, bitter black coffee, any sort of bitter beer (IPAs aren’t the only one), heck even burnt sugar!
The biggest problem with IPAs is that crappy/inexperienced brewers use the bitterness of hops to cover up brewing defects. This leads to really gross aftertastes or overwhelming bitterness and only hipsters like drinking that crap.
For a hot minute there near the end of the Obama administration, craft beer was a thing in this country and we had some excellent beers. Then Trump got elected and I haven’t seen a craft beer that wasn’t an IPA or a token jet black “oatmeal stout” since.
The “craft” part got killed in the commercialization of the genre. So it’s become the modern version of Pabst. And there is a contraction of micro breweries at the moment as beer drinkers are slowly learning to pass on all the crap out there.
One of the weirdest takes I’ve ever seen. Bravo and well done for somehow working politics into this!
It’s a thing that happened and I’m not sure by what mechanism. 2018, lots of microbreweries and brewpubs most offering a wide variety, by 2021 you’ve got seven IPAs and one token stout on the menu.
Oh I don’t disagree with you. I’ve looked for decent non-IPA microbrews and have been puzzled at the lack of selection! I just wasn’t aware of the timing.
We’ve moved on to sours or IPA/sour combos. I drink them because they are delicious to my palate. Always drank my coffee black even as a kid. I like bitter.
Honestly I fucking hate the term hipster. I’m not hip, I’m a laborer in my 40s. It’s just another way for people to divide each other.
IPA haters rise up
It’s not that I hate IPAs, I don’t per se. I’ve home brewed IPAs for myself even though I prefer ales. The problem started with micro breweries trying to out do each other in seeing just how much hopps could be jackhammered into a beer. And it’s turned beer drinkers in pretentious snobs because they have no clue in what the reason is for IPAs to even exist in the first place or even how it’s supposed to originally taste.
Yeah I don’t actually hate IPAs either but as you said, finding one that does not contain an ungodly amount of hops is pretty rare nowadays. I like APAs more because they seem to have been spared by that trend so far
Im not usually a fan of alc but I do enjoy rice wine (korean flavored ones) and choya plum wine. Maybe you could try those? They’re moreso a sweet alcohol and doesnt have that weird earthy bitter taste imo
Beer is definitely an acquired taste. Plus there is a big fad around IPAs lately which are stupidly bitter even by beer standards
I fucking haaaaaaate hops, i hate the smell, i hate the taste, i also hate beer because i can literally smell the fermentation and it smells rotted.
Plenty of other ways to get turnt out there my friend
Beers are very much an aquired taste. There’s your commodity beers and your piss beers from the big national brands like Pabst, Miller, Coors, etc. which largely are trying to sate a pallete that never liked the moonshine from the prohibition era (and all are crap in my personal opinion. It’s good for getting you buzzed and that’s about it), then there’s your microbrews which will vary wildly in style and flavor (if it’s on tap you can just tell the bartender you’ve not really had beer before and ask what they recommend and if you can try it before you commit to a full glass) and then there’s the stuff people don’t talk enough about: ciders (it tastes like apple juice but with a sharper, fuller flavor!) mixed drinks (again, ask the bartender if you’re unsure), and probably some other ones I’m not thinking of before you move onto the whiskeys and bourbons.
So basically it’s a wide world of alcoholic beverages and honestly people don’t encourage experimenting enough
Yeah for anyone interested in trying the more flavor focused hard liquors (I’m a bourbon and scotch lady myself) I recommend starting with just a few drops. The ethanol can overpower everything else until you learn to taste through it, and try to taste for the flavors mentioned. In whiskey you can often taste not sweetness but the reminisce of sweetness and a mild vanilla like flavor, these are from the corn heavy mash and the oak barreling respectively. Scotch should have a flavor reminiscent of a campfire, that’s the peat.
And the taste changes with salt, with heat, with boiling, with cold extraction (like an overnight marinade). You really just have to experiment.
Once pepper cooks into a meal it’s a whole 'nother thing and miles above what it tastes like when added at the table
Onion is my favorite expression of these differences. It’s completely different between a stew, fresh, pan fried, grilled, or reduced with sugar.
