Why? Are they too complex for people to make at home?
Why? Are they too complex for people to make at home?
If you buy a recipe book or watch a cooking show from Japan or in China, you will see many recipes that are probably unrecognisable to westerners who did not grow up in an Asian household.
The split is mostly some ideology that certain foods are not worth the effort to recreate at home.
A lot of it is tool and stove constraints in a home kitchen versus restaurant kitchen (for example some fried noodle recipes require a hot stove).
The other is a belief that some skill is involved. Such as nigiri is not something made in a Japanese home, but eaten at a restaurant by a professional chef. To try at home would be a waste of ingredients, and a hubris of skill.
I don't make fish and chips or deep-fried chicken at home. I know my kitchen will be smoky and greasy, and I'll have a ton of leftover oil.
Croissants, or their cousin puff pastry are a pain in the ass unless you're making a big batch to freeze or sell. Making a dozen buns in a batch is not so bad, but it's hardly worth the effort to make only a dozen croissants.
Paella tastes best made in a paella pan, and naan is best when it's hot from a tandoor oven. Who's going to keep all that gear around for the one time a year you make paella or naan?
dim sum eating culture is around ordering many small plates to get a variety. any individual plate may have as few as three or four bite sized pieces on it. it is quite annoying for a family of four to make like twenty different dishes consisting of four bites each.
one for example is hand mincing; a fair amount of dim sum dishes are prepared by mincing meat using two cleavers, repeatedly, and sometimes kind of throwing it against a surface until it becomes springy in texture. there isn't really a mechanical equivalent for the home; a food processor completely makes the wrong texture, and so does buying pre-ground meat from the store.
dim sum is also similar to tapas where you are supposed to order a large variety of small dishes as a sort of feast. it is quite annoying for a family to make a dozen or twenty dishes consisting of four bites each.