Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

To perhaps be a bit more constructive, and to suggest a way forward...

I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel".

As a user, being able to select a difficulty level and see the differences not only allows me to learn new techniques at a pace that suits me while experimenting, it also teaches me more about the dishes and how recipes can be changed while keeping the spirit of a dish, or the flavour profile.

The best cooking videos on YouTube, people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John from Food Wishes dot com, tell viewers what's truly necessary, and what's not. What "makes the dish" and what they're replacing in the recipe themselves because they ran out of the proper ingredient. I've learnt so much from this sort of thing, and am far more confident both creating my own recipes and modifying existing ones, having been a to-the-letter recipe follower for many years.

View on HN

> I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel".

Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Learn to make 'mother sauces' straight away guys! They're simple and flavorful.

Yes! But that's something you can teach! Ricotta isn't traditional at all, but that's a trade-off you can choose to make. I think telling people that, presenting the options and trade-offs, and teaching each level, makes it all so much more accessible while still helping people appreciate the traditional side!

A good example is carbonara. So many people learn to make it with cream etc because they think it'll be easier, or the person they are learning from believes it's easier to make, but when you look at the differences it's actually barely easier to do than the traditional, or even harder in some cases, so why not just learn the traditional.

Haha this is very true :) Like bolognese, some of the cooking corners of YouTube contain chefs arguing about adding or not adding pancetta similar to vim vs emacs.

> Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying.

I'm not Italian, so I don't care as much...

Also, as the original comment mentioned, this is supposed to have different degrees of how easy/flexible/practical it is

If you take a beginner cooking course you'd normally learn bechamel very early on - it's the base of so many great meals. I mean, it's a white roux and milk. While I was half joking in my previous comment I'd expect the way an app would work is to start with easier meals (maybe a mac & cheese, as this uses a bechamel as the base of the cheese sauce) rather than adapt more difficult meals for simplicity. I thought I'd get away with this joke because the original commenter seems to know his stuff around the kitchen and would appreciate a classic comment about Italians and their sometimes intense beliefs in sticking to traditional cooking :P

A beginner cooking course of a specific cuisine.

Believe it or not there are tons more cuisines out there besides French all their their own prior knowledge, staples, customs, sauces etc.

Okay I concede this is Western, yes. But they're used all over, even if they get slightly adapted over time to the local area. I was learning Creole cooking the other month making a gumbo and it starts very similar to the espagnole mother sauce (a dark roux) with a modified sofrito (red peppers instead of carrots).

And also, if you look at the best cooking schools in the US such as Auguste Escoffier they also start with lessons on Italian and French cooking because of its influence on so many other cuisines.

This stuff is like learning variables and functions in programming - they're just core essentials and if you want to learn cooking, as you'd expect from an app-based course on cooking, you'd expect these to be early topics :)

Of course we're getting off track here because I was originally just joking with the OP as mentioned in another comment and seen in their reply. The Italians are stereotypically very protective of traditional cooking recipes (watch almost any Italian chef on youtube make a dish).

They are core essentials for the Western cooking tradition codified by Escoffier. The Indic tradition is different (and North India is quite different from South). There are at least four major groups of African traditions. I am being profoundly ignorant by referring to the Asian tradition - Northern Chinese is wheat-centered and Southern is rice-centered, and Thai flavors are quire different from Viet not to mention Malay...z

And none of them use the mother sauces except the Western tradition.

Humans have great diversity in food, and that is wonderful.

Not those mother sauces, and not by that particular name, but Indian cuisines do have the same "variations on a theme" structure.

A lot of North Indian dishes start with a base of tomato, onions, ginger, and garlic, to which various things are subsequently added. I think you could call that a "mother sauce", and people occasionally do: https://food52.com/blog/19216-does-indian-cuisine-have-mothe...

> Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Learn to make 'mother sauces' straight away guys! They're simple and flavorful.

I'm not Italian, but I'm willing to give the OP the benefit of the doubt in the following way:

Have you ever read a professional cookbook ? I (would like to) think that what the OP was saying is that "hardest" level would equate to professional cookbook instructions.

In other words, if you were to look at a professional recipe for Lasagne, it would simply list "n ml Bechamel" as an ingredient and the recipe would simply state "layer using the Bechamel".

i.e. it would not list out the Bechamel ingredients, and nor would it tell you how to make it. The professional cookbook considers that you are reading a recipe for Lasagne. And that as a professional cook, you already know how to make a Bechamel (or already have some in the fridge from your prep). Professional cookbooks do the same for stocks and other preparations such as crème pat.

Your comment reminds me of this[1] video from sorted food where they make a recipe from an old professional cookbook. Instructions are very high level and without the context of 100 years ago it is difficult to know if they were successful in their creation. More detail recipes or at least pictures alongside might have given some of that context.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nWoI923LnY

> Your comment reminds me of this[1] video from sorted food where they make a recipe from an old professional cookbook. Instructions are very high level

Yes, the modern equivalent book might be (for example) Practical Professional Cookery by Cracknell & Kaufmann. 928 pages of pure text. Not a single illustration or photo.

Its a fabulous reference book. But certainly not for the noob, it requires comfort both in the kitchen and the style of recipe presentation.

The recipes are not quite as extremely terse as those in the 100 year old book. The ingredients are presented with their weights. But the method descriptions remain short and to the point, basically bullet-point one or two phrase statements.

We created Parsnip because we believe that even beginners can cook in this way (i.e. making a plate of scrambled eggs), by first understanding what they have to do and then following high-level instructions using those principles.

Rather than what currently often happens with novice cooks, which is blindly executing an algorithm without knowing what it's doing or why.

Not only do I not know how to make a bechamel, this is the first time I've heard this word or the expression "mother sauces". (Maybe because I'm only a quarter Italian?)

If we're going to gatekeep cooking behind a lot of prior knowledge perhaps it would be even more efficient to reduce the lasagna recipe to a single sentence: "Make a lasagna."

You can write programs and never know what an algorithm is. That’s roughly the equivalent. Someone with formal training in cooking will know the mother sauces, almost certainly, just like someone with formal training in CS will almost certainly know big-O notation.

If you want to learn this stuff, there textbooks on cooking. Not quite the same thing as a cookbook!

Fair. Just follow https://www.reddit.com/r/GifRecipes/ for recipes so you dont have to think.

I find those much more difficult and frustrating than a traditional recipe. I don’t like having to pause or scrub through videos to figure out what the steps are. I like having a list of ingredients, so I can do some basic mise en place and figure out if I need to go to the grocery store or choose a different recipe.

This really isn't gatekeeping! But if you're learning to cook there are fundamental things you need to learn. This is like the simplest sentences of learning a new language on Duolingo here, it's not some crazy term. Literally week 1 in many cooking schools, maybe week 2 after stocks. If you're trying to teach people cooking, you want to be taught the fundamental key steps to follow recipes no? How many start with butter, thicken with flour, loosen with milk? That's bechamel :)

Mother sauces is absolutely gatekeeping. You can get pretty far, and even know how to turn a roux into a béchamel without ever knowing it’s a mother sauce or that there are others.

We're talking about a course on cooking here, how is it gatekeeping to talk about cooking 101 subjects?

For what it's worth, you're the only one talking about a cooking course in this thread.

I wish more were! That's what I was hoping parsnip.ai was. I was really excited actually.

OP here. a16z has a thesis that education will go from

1. teaching in a class and taking a test, to 2. teaching in online videos and taking an online test, to 3. modular, choose your own adventure, at your own pace, software-supplemented, continual learning: https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/

That's what we're trying to do with cooking. If we succeed, it's going to be essentially replicating an apprenticeship but you don't need to find a master.

Can't wait! I cook pretty often and I'd love to up my game and work towards some more fine dining type dishes. I'd pay for an app that did that.

It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me.

It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French cuisine. But to insist people learn to make the French mother sauces from scratch before eg. tacos or curry seems a bit too narrow-minded for "Cooking 101" generally speaking. I think "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has the right idea here.

edit PS: there is almost always a non-gatekeepy way to say the exact same thing. "In my experience, a homemade bechamel adds an incredible homemade taste to lasagna. I'd definitely recommend learning about the French 'mother sauces' sooner rather than later!"

I do like Salt Fat Acid Heat too :)

But I really didn't think this thread would go this way, it was clear to me OP knew his way around a kitchen and was from Europe so knew enough about Italian cooking stereotypes to understand the intended humor.

Fwiw, you learn mother sauces after six weeks of knife skills at Auguste Escoffier in the US so you could definitely be right about 102 :)

You're doing a great job. Talking about mother sauces is definitely not gatekeeping, more like dropping knowledge on the uninitiated. It's the gateway to a vast (and in many ways overwhelming) beautiful world of classical cuisine.

Some people go their entire lives 1. not making scratch hollandaise 2. knowing it is a mother sauce 3. adding to the mother sauce to make bearnaise, etc

Honestly I don't know how using the phrase 'mother sauces' is gatekeeping, I think it's just really basic cooking. Might not know the term, but an app trying to teach you to cook should absolutely be teaching it to you. A big part of learning a new skill is learning the vocabulary to navigate that skill. It's weird to shy away from it.

At least in my case I do not think cooking jargon like "mother sauces" is gatekeeping. These discussions are a great way to learn about new things and I appreciate when people share their knowledge.

The part that seemed like gatekeeping was the part where they asserted that "a million Italians [are] crying. Because of you" in response to a commenter describing different methods of making a lasagna that require varying levels of skill.

That seemed like an attempt at gatekeeping because it asserts that many people who are making a lasagna in any way besides their preferred method that relies on "mother sauces" is Wrong.

Yes, that WAS the joke. The easy recipe isn’t “real” Italian food. Italian people are often very prideful about their cuisine.

Someone could also claim the opposite that the “easy” version is cultural appropriation.

Jokes are hard nowadays.

It's true, jokes are hard. I've come to the conclusion that it's simpler to take jokes in discussions like these at face value. Sometimes statements seem to be framed as jokes as much for plausible deniability as humor. And as Gilda Radner says: "Humor is the truth, only faster!"

> Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you.

Is this cooking 101?

Mother sauces are "French cuisine 101", but not "cooking 101." A very large number of "regular" American home cooks have never made a Béchamel sauce.

I'd say it definitely is cooking 101. They're the basis for a tremendous number of recipes over the last hundred years. Americans being ignorant isn't really an argument.

It's basis for a tremendous number of recipes in French cuisine, which is only one form of cooking.

If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.

It's the basis for a tremendous number of recipes in all Western cuisine.

>If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.

Yes, and you'd learn bases like soffritto/mirepoix/holy trinity as well. They are also a part of cooking 101.

It's not gatekeeping. I wish I had someone teach me the mother sauces (or the base sauces of the French cuisine) because:

- most of them are ridiculously easy

- most of them go with most food

- most of them are required for most food

- most of them are the basis of many other sauces

- they are better than store-bought ones

Any recipe apart from maybe putting sliced cheese on sliced bread will be more complex than being able to make a sauce. How is it gatekeeping?

It's more gate-opening than gatekeeping.

> - most of them are required for most food

Most foods, or most traditional French cuisine? I've never even heard the term, despite cooking pretty decent food for decades.

Most Western foods! I mentioned in another thread that recently I started learning Creole cooking which starts with a dark roux followed by stopping the cooking process with the holy trinity. This is very similar to espagnole mother sauce and a modified mirepoix (peppers instead of carrots). If you take a cooking course in almost any Western country it'll start with traditional French and Italian methods as a lot of cooking styles evolved from that. Certainly a lot of cooks in the 18th and 19th centuries trained in France (and Italy) taking their skills back home, not to speak of colonization by the French and Spanish.

It's a fun way to learn history actually, following the influences of cooking techniques and trade. And the French were very influential here. The Spanish influenced Mexican cuisine when they conquered the Aztecs, and Spanish aristocratic chefs trained in France, so you can see modifications of classical French cuisine in Mexican prep edited to local spice profiles and ingredients. Etc... Just look at pan dulce!

French cooking is the C of programming in many ways!

> If you take a cooking course in almost any Western country it'll start with traditional French and Italian methods as a lot of cooking styles evolved from that.

Weird, I've taken a couple cooking classes in the Bay Area, and this never came up.

As the sibling comment said, most Western food will include some variation on the mother sauces.

"The five mother sauces include béchamel sauce, veloute sauce, brown or Espagnole sauce, Hollandaise sauce and tomato sauce." French ones are the same: "The five French mother sauces are: Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole, Hollandaise, and Tomato"

The techniques and ingredients you use for them are the basis for most sauces used in Western cuisine. You learn those five, you've learned all (or most of) western sauces.

It’s one of the first chapters in Julia Childs’s book for a reason. It’s fundamental technique, that’s really not gatekeeping. And some recipes do it but don’t tell you that’s what you’re making.

Mac and Cheese is basically a sort of béchamel, even the out of a box kind and I wouldn’t call that gatekeeping.

"Mother sauces" is not gatekeeping lol, its an industry term. It's no more gatekeeping than "data structure."

I don't understand at all, honestly - I see a term I don't know, I grab the googs and figure it out. My first reaction isn't to accuse the person who knows something I don't of gatekeeping.

It might be intimidating for a second (it's got an accented vowel!), but the concept actually seems welcoming.

A lot of cooking is essentially variations on a theme. If you can make béchamel, you're now also only a step away from a bunch of other sauces (Mornay, Soubise, etc), simply by adding different ingredients. The technique for making béchamel is similar for espagnole and veloute, but with different liquids in the first step.

Extracting out this general principle is, for me, a thousand times more comprehensible than memorizing that (((butter + flour) + milk) + onions) -> soubise but (((butter + flour) + milk) + cheese) -> mornay.

Saying that béchamel is a fundamental thing you need to learn is quite specific to a range of European recipes and traditions. You can make lots of fantastic things, from scratch, even involving Italian food, without any mother sauces.

I would argue that the real fundamental things for basic cooking are more like how to use a knife, how to sauté things, what happens to different veggies, meats, and herbs as they cook for various times and temperatures, etc.

As for the mother sauces, they’re prepared ingredients that one might make at home to use in various recipes. There are plenty of other examples: stocks, various things that can be made out of eggs, various Asian sauces, hot sauces, various cooked garlic preparations, sofrito, etc. Béchamel is just one example.

I think we may be coming at this from different perspectives.

You clearly know a lot about food and seem to enjoy it, which is fantastic!

I do not cook professionally so the idea of me spending literal weeks in a cooking school or reading cooking textbooks sounds fun but also incomprehensibly decadent. My partner and I spend about three hours per week on meal planning and prep for our family, and we typically end up cleaning the kitchen concurrently with cooking. Because of this we end up cutting a lot of corners and incorporating meal kits and frozen food into our weekly rotation.

If I could improve the nutrition and/or taste of my meals by spending an additional ~15 minutes a week I would consider it, so Parsnip seems like it might be relevant to me.

But I assume that anyone who talks about "taking a class" or "reading a book" or "learning to make all the master sauces" is coming at food from a wildly different perspective that is probably wonderful for them but not particularly relevant to my life where I get home and have about twenty minutes (less if there's traffic) to figure out how to turn the ingredients from the fridge into something my kids will eat.

Mother sauces are a French thing. They're béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomate, and mayonnaise.

Some stuff can be made shorter by just saying things like "deglaze the pan" instead of "pour some flavorful liquid such as stock, broth, or wine in this hot pan that you think would compliment the taste of whatever you're cooking and make sure to scrape the brown bits while at it." It's the same thing as programming, one might say to a professional programmer to "sum these items" while a beginning programmer would get "write a for loop with an accumulator variable, and for each iteration of the loop add the item to your accumulator."

They're both the same thing, it's just that one is more succinct.

Since this topic is learning how to cook, let me plug my favorite Youtube chef, Alex (FrenchGuyCooking). He has a whole series on mother sauces (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURsDaOr8hWX1T2WSXhPw...), which is how I learned about them. He does a great job of making deep dives interesting and approachable.

He's amazing!

there is one to learn with real chefs. there is even a hardware that you put on top of your cooking station to record. you get back a full review of every step you did. from how to slice perfectly, to keeping your utensils neat.

cookwithmoment.com

i am sure they have a english page somewhere and you can order in euroupe. but for some reason it is showing up only in portuguese

Cool! I took a course with Leiths that's similar (16 weeks of online classes where you record and get feedback from a chef) and Rouxbe for a longer vegan-based cooking course (with good support and reviews by chefs), both during covid. Leiths is pretty affordable as you can pay monthly.

Once I leave the Bay Area and move back to Europe I'm keen to take an extended work break and complete a 'proper' cooking course at Le Cordon Bleu for fun but realistically I don't think I can just take 6 months out of work and spend 22k on a hobby! https://www.cordonbleu.edu/london/diplome-de-cuisine/en

For me it's showing up in Japanese... I'm interested, but there's no obvious way to get anything in English.

I don't know why. i know it is a Japanese company but I don't why the English site is not showing up. that's a shame.

if it was a bit more affordable I would certainly use every week.

> Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Learn to make 'mother sauces' straight away guys! They're simple and flavorful.

You don’t need to know how to make a bechamel to know how to make a lasagna.

( Beside this, making a bechamel is time-consuming and a lot of Italians just use the prepacked ones you find in every supermarket all over Italy. )

Well, not to brag, but this is exactly how Julia Child did "the way to cook". First few episodes were all fundamentals like how to dice, chop and julienne vegetables, how to quarter a chicken, your mother sauces, how to cook an egg, and so forth. By the end she's doing full on delicious recipes. I highly recommend it, and gamifying that system to me, would be awesome. Go Parsnip

italians regularly use store bought béchamel for their (our) lasagna. Don't be gatekeepy!

So, we actually built this in an earlier version of the product. Here, you can see 3 variations of shrimp tacos in increasing complexity by famed southwestern chef Mark Miller:

https://beta.parsnip.ai/module/E8pxMsWM22jlTzhqMPhf

This is a great idea, but it turns out you can't get product traction without actually a scaffolding for teaching the basic knowledge first. So we had to work on that, and we plan to return to this theme you suggested later on.

That looks awesome for me as an experienced home cook, but I appreciate what you mean.

This thread went into the weeds, but I think this core idea is great. Usually I skim recipes for three things, the title, picture, and the main ideas, it'd be interesting to have recipes presented at that high level of abstraction.

Jacques Pepin's book La Technique often refers back to earlier basic recipes to construct more complicated recipes, kind of similar to this idea (I guess nearly all cookbooks do this, but it seems like Pepin's does it more than usual).

> J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John

The 2 of them are true OGs of food media education on the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com