Heat as a Rite of Passage in the Kitchen | Hacker News Reader

Heat as a Rite of Passage in the Kitchen

enthucutlet.com

75 pointsthunderbong29 comments

> “Want to learn to cook?”asked my mother, as she handed me a damp yellow kitchen cloth. “Start with learning how to clean.

My start of the adventure with cooking was making pizza dough and in first year the most visible progress was smaller and smaller amount of kitchen covered in flour after finishing

The breakthrough was going from "follow the recipe" to "understand how it works" (even if only on the very surface) and a bit of experience of what tastes good with what, and that was pretty much transformation from "I can make a decent food from recipe" to "I can pick what I have in fridge/pantry, maybe go buy one or two extra things and make something half-decent".

Never really experienced cooking with my parents (just helping around the food) but that's coz at that age my cooking was mostly "well I want to eat some pizza" and I only started cooking more stuff once I moved out.

> The breakthrough was going from "follow the recipe" to "understand how it works" (even if only on the very surface)

+1 to this.

I had the traditional learn-to-cook-from-mom/grandma experience. You help around the kitchen, ask how to make a thing, and get "Oh that? That one's easy, you just take a bit of this, a bit of that, simmer here, simmer there, add a dash of this other thing, wait for a while, and voila. Couldn't be simpler". Then you do it and it's like you made a completely different dish.

Repeat a few times and voila, you can make the thing. The thing barely has a name, let alone a recipe. Oral tradition passed down through generations.

You'll learn what it's called when you go abroad and wander into a restaurant based on your corner of the world. Oh _that_'s what I've been making this whole time! Yeah you forgot <secret ingredient>, restaurant, my mom makes it better.

Reading recipes for this sort of dish is always funny. It's like people don't even realize that half this stuff is based on "Whatever is easily available in the area during $season". Oh you're making risotto in summer? Sure! Use these spices. Oh it's winter? Use these other spices. Oh you're in Tuscany? Add this. Oh no it's France? Use these. But it's all the same underlying structure.

I wish recipes instead of usual waffle just had a paragraph of "why". The experienced can skip it, the novices will learn.

Like how you should only use 00 flour on pizza if you have hot enough oven while more usual flour works better if your oven doesn't go that hot.

I guess I should start looking for cookbook that goes into detail about process and not just dumps recipes on me.

I believe Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is such a book for layfolk like us.

Otherwise proper chef-ing textbooks. I used to work with a former chef and the details she could go into about why/how various processes work in cooking – wow. I learned something new every time we chatted.

You might enjoy https://www.seriouseats.com or The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt.

You would love Cooks Illustrated, then.

+1 on cook’s illustrated. I love how it goes into the why and also describes the process on how the recipe was formed.

Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is the classic in the genre of explaining how cooking works. Rather dry textbook style.

A sibling comment mentioned "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" by Samin Nosrat.

I cannot praise this book highly enough. If you enjoy food but don't know the fundamentals of cooking, it may actually change your life. Part 1 alone took me from "I need a recipe to make anything other than grilled cheese" to "I can go to a farmer's market, see some ingredients I like, and make something delicious with it".

She explains in great detail the "why" of flavor combinations, balance, different cooking techniques, when and how to season, and is full of obvious-once-you-read-it advice like using the right kind of fat and acid for the cuisine you're making. (e.g. olive oil and red wine vinegar: perfect for Italian dishes, totally out of place in a Thai stir fry — you want vegetable oil and lime juice)

I do sometimes search for recipes to get a vague idea of what proportions make sense, but I don't feel lost without them anymore.

That book absolutely changed my life for the better. I went from basically never cooking before (but loving food) to what’s turned into a years-long cooking and baking obsession.

Can’t recommend it enough!

Tangential thought.

Olive oil has been in Italy for a long time, you can make it manually and I guess the high quality stuff sold in nice stores is roughly equivalent to making it manually in terms of final product (maybe not as fresh or whatever but close).

Vegetable oil though… modern vegetable oil is generally very processed AFAIK, and it’s not at all like what Asians would have used to cook with before industrialization when most cuisines developed I think?

I wonder what sort of fat would be used, like, classically, in Thai cuisine? Still vegetable oil?

Possibly coconut oil or other nut oils, if it was possible to press it manually prior to industrialisation. If not then animal fats like lard and tallow.

Good point, those are both very common in tropical Asia. Also palm oil. I was mentally putting all of those in the 'vegetable' category.

"and a bit of experience of what tastes good with what, and that was pretty much transformation from "I can make a decent food from recipe" to "I can pick what I have in fridge/pantry,"

This is where I'd love to get, but I have no idea how. I guess it's just experience and trying things out, but this is definitely the goal.

Great article.

I wouldn't say I'm great, but a lot of my cooking doesn't follow any recipe very closely. I'm dead certain that when some recipe says "1/2 tsp of pepper" the chef who wrote it never measured it until asked to write it down. Then he or she tried it once or twice just to check that it really worked with 1/2 tsp. Then went back to just throwing some in.

I think it's actually more fun that the food isn't the same each time. Maybe in a restaurant people really expect it to be, but at home? Nah. It's a human activity.

And then there is me who thinks of a recipe as a formula for a drug and then gets disappointed when it doesn’t work out

Baking has that kind of precision to it, but cooking mostly doesn't.

Has it, though? Factors like temperature and humidity influence the outcome of baking however often are not included in recipes. To be fair an approximate temperature for proving is sometimes given.

I wish ovens had that kind of precision, though.

From observation, what you get in a household oven is a bang-bang controller flipping a heater on and off, trying to keep the temperature within a rather wide window around the set point, as measured at location that is not close to the food you're baking. Between humidity of the product, humidity of the environment, and built-in "eco features" in the oven, this will make the baking process be all over the place.

Oh, and the timers that come built into the ovens and induction stoves? They tend to go slow or fast around a minute over ten minutes, or worse.

Whatever baking has, it's not precision. Even your basic DIY overflow soldering oven is better, because it at least gives you control over temperature curve and visibility into the process. I'm yet to see a household oven that tells you what the current temperature inside it is.

> I wish ovens had that kind of precision, though.

Anova Precision Oven does! [0]

As a bonus, it's appropriately sized for cooking for 1-3 people and heats up much faster then any "normal" oven I've ever had.

[0] - https://anovaculinary.com/products/anova-precision-oven

I wish I knew about it a year ago, maybe I could've convinced my wife to get one. I'll keep an eye on this brand from now on, as well as the keywords they use, for the next time I'm searching for an oven (or kitchen appliances in general).

Have you tried the sous vide mode? That seems novel.

I have, it seems to work as it should. You put food in, it comes out uniformly heated to the specified temperature :-)

I can't compare it to a traditional immersion circulator, as I've never used those.

For pizza, I have a pizza steel (I know, way overpriced for a sheet of metal) and preheat the oven for a LONG time, then use an IR thermometer to check its temperature.

But you're right, oven temp controls are crap.

> I'm dead certain that when some recipe says "1/2 tsp of pepper" the chef who wrote it never measured it until asked to write it down.

Yeah, there isn't a correct amount of pepper anyway. You might like it more or less peppery. Not all ingredients are flexible like this, but many are.

And measuring flakes or grinds of something by volume will yield varying amounts depending on how it's milled or broken down. How hydrated it is. How packed it got during shipping.

One could measure by weight, but again, moisture will impact this. The genetics aren't well controlled, so the potency per unit weight varies, along with flavour profile. Some chemicals evaporate quickly, others slowly, and that can also change depending on humidity and temperature.

Pepper isn't 1 chemical. What grinds my gears is when someone says a recipe has too many flavours, ignoring that they've added hundreds of flavours via 1 ingredient.

> At enthucutlet we aspire to tell fun, unusual, heart-warming, and surprising stories in the vast realm of food in India. Organized into seasons like your favourite Netflix show, each edition of enthucutlet delves into an idea that is thought provoking and is at the centre of all the features in it. These are contributed by a diverse set of writers ranging from economists, to neuroscientists, to food experts and everyone in between.

I was tempted to say that's so niche, but India's so massive maybe it's not, either way - I love it, will bookmark/read more.

That was delightful and touching. Now I'm hungry.

sweet essay, living the life

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