Make Dinner: A Home Cooking Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

Make Dinner: A Home Cooking Manifesto

nytimes.com

47 pointsjcater44 comments

"The mission: to make each one of us a better cook."

I'm sure this website will help some people, but definitely not me. When I first started cooking, I wanted to start at step 1. But sites like these simply throw recipes at you without teaching you the techniques first. There's a tips section, but it's not connected to the recipes at all.

Luckily, I found Rouxbe.com a couple of years ago. I liked it so much I bought a lifetime membership (no longer offered). If your personality is like mine and you want to know explicitly how and why things should be done, I definitely recommend Rouxbe. For example, when learning how to pan fry, you're first taught how to properly heat a pan, what sounds to listen to when pan frying, how to adjust the temperature, what type and size pan to buy, etc. And of course there's a user forum with professionals to answer any dumb questions you might have.

A pan-roasted spatchcocked chicken is one of my favourite easy meals, it's rewarding to see it glorified in the NY Times. However, I'm a bit disappointed they'd use it to sell us on a 16,000 recipe database.

Is it really helpful to have 44 years worth of different dinners on your iPad? Isn't a simple and malleable classic like the chicken dish proof that all you need to get by are a handful of recipes and the skill to play with them?

(disclosure: I'm the founder of a home cooking tech startup, and biased against the recipe-library approach)

I'd love for recipe sites to have this feature where I can plan a meal for the week at office on a weekday during break time and the groceries required for the meal show up at my doorstep every week. The site can then track the nutrients based on the recipe and integrate with my health tracking apps to ensure that me and my family is getting the right nutrients and exercise... I wish...

Sorry, zemvpferreira, but this is for SirPulse:

SirPulse, if you happen to revisit this thread it looks like you were hellbanned about 6 months ago. FYI.

Personally, I like having the NYT equivalent of Epicurious on my iPad. But I don't necessarily disagree with your basic point. The 16K NYT recipe database is somewhat at odds with a KISS philosophy around cooking quick tasty weekday meals.

>It is a habit as easy to form as a bad one, and more beneficial by far.

>...

>Demonstrably it is more pleasant than a microwaved stew or takeout curry or a pizza delivered from miles away. Cheaper, too.

It's not "easy" or "more pleasant" if you're stressed for time.

Most of the article's paragaphs focus on techniques or process. It's as if they assume the reader is afraid of pots & pans. Or they think the complexity of combining ingredients paralyzes the reader with PTSD from high school chemistry exams.

The main roadblock isn't ignorance of techniques or lack of recipes. (Those are available with a few clicks of youtube or google.) The issue is available time.

We can read these cooking manifestos and all nod in agreement because the benefits make logical sense but the real issue is that the cookbooks and essays don't magically conjure up a nanny to pick up our kid from daycare so we can multitask the chopping of veggies and stir the tomato sauce. Or we're young unmarried 20-something and we're working 60+ hours a week to meet a deadline with no time slot to cook from scratch. (Sounds like those google catered meals makes a lot of sense for programmer productivity.)

By my personal estimates, home cooking requires 4x to 5x more time than ordering prepared meals (fast food or Whole Foods deli takeout.) It takes a significant amount of time to home cook even if you stick to those simple "cook in 30 minutes" type of meals. (Those 30 minute estimates never include shopping, meal planning, prep, and cleanup.)

One strategy to compromise between time and convenience is to cook a bulk supply of a meal (say big pot of quinoa) on Sunday and then eat it as leftovers for the rest of the week. It's a great idea to batch the prep & cleanup on Sunday and leave Monday-Saturday simply as microwave reheating days. The problem with that is many folks are turned off by eating the same thing every day.

Perhaps with all this trend around "sharing economy" like Uber, a web service can bring together the folks who have time to cook with the folks who don't that all live within very close proximity to each other. A web 2.0 manifestation of comparative advantage in economics. A handful of "home chefs" in the apt or condo complex shops and makes the meals while others pay for their portion. This may not work for suburban neighborhoods because getting in a car or walking 10 blocks can be too much friction (distance, raining, etc).

The problem is all this silly emphasis on cooking. You don't need to cook. There is nothing wrong with eating milk, fruit, and toast for a meal. There's nothing wrong with doing it every day.

>> There is nothing wrong with eating milk, fruit, and toast for a meal.

Of course you can. But you can build bonds around preparing food, sitting down and having a large meal that you can't standing around eating an apple. Pass down traditions and recipes.

Put pasta in a pan, fill it with water, put it on the stove on high heat. Put pasta sauce in a pot, put it on the stove on low-medium heat. Take out some ground meat and throw it in a second pan, put it on the stove on high heat. Put salt and pepper in the meat pan and stir it around with a wooden stick. When the meat is cooked, put it in the pot. When the pasta water boils, drain it and put the pasta in the sauce pot. Stir. Done.

You can replace ingredients in dishes like that for variety, like tofu for meat, cream of mushroom soup for tomato sauce, rice for pasta ('Minute' rice cooks in 5). But like you say, it's not about recipes, as you can find thousands of these online.

Time is an excuse. You have the time. Everybody has the time. Everybody has 10 minutes they can spend to make some food to eat. I don't care how many responsibilities you have, how long you work, how little you sleep, what you do with your free time, none of that. You have 10 minutes. Cook something.

The meal you described sounds bland and not particularly healthy. It's little more work than heating frozen food for little advantage.

That's absurd. I heard somewhere that Obama doesn't choose what he eats. He makes incredibly important decisions all day, every day. He can't be bothered to worry about what he's going to eat. Not many of us can make meaningful comparisons between our day-to-day and that of the POTUS, but I certainly envy the convenience of having my meals chosen for me. Cooking requires making a number of additional decisions. You suggest finding a recipe online. OK, well it will probably require ingredients that I don't have. Finding a satisfactory solution to the problem of choosing a recipe that maximizes tastiness and health, while minimizing grocery shopping and cooking hassle takes at least ten minutes for me. Inevitably, I need to buy four or five ingredients. Using up the leftover ingredients will further complicate future meal choices. Furthermore, cooking requires planning ahead of time unless you want to make a (10 minute minimum) trip to the store every day. So now I have to set aside 2-3 hours every week to make a meal plan, write a shopping list, and buy ingredients? Add an hour or more if you are not lucky enough to have a grocery store near your daily commute. And now I need cabinet and refrigerator space for all this and counter space to prepare the meal on.

Cooking's easy for you. Congratulations! It's not for me. You are out of touch with what day-to-day life is like for a huge swath of folks.

You are intimidated by something you don't understand, which is normal. But nothing is easy until you learn how to do it. You're intelligent, and just as capable of doing these things as anyone else. Are you going to walk around your whole life tripping over your shoelaces because learning how to tie them seems hard?

How condescending. I can cook. You vastly understate the tangible and intangible costs of home cooking.

Happy to see a cooking thing instead of a Soylent thing on HN (but to each their own). An article in similar spirit, but more focused on why you should consider cooking at home, rather than how you would go about doing so:

https://medium.com/lucky-peach/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-kn...

The problem with any of these things is that they're just recipes. What we really need is something that deconstructs cooking skills into easily learnt, repeatable practices.

It's like with the very recipe here - it's supposed to be for novice cooks, or those that never cook at home, to encourage them into home cooking, but at one point the recipe says:

"When the chicken has cooked through, take it out of the pan and pour off all but a couple of tablespoons of the fat in the pan, and make a quick gravy."

Novice cook thinks:

- how do I know when the chicken has cooked through?

- which bit is the fat?

- how do I make a "quick gravy"?

Instead, they should have created a "beginner's spatchcocked chicken" where you learn all of the principles of just that one thing, maybe you also learn how to make mash potato out of a packet or oven fries. Then "level 2" would go on to the gravy. And so on...

It's frustrating, as someone who is interested in cooking and is trying to learn, that there are a million and one recipes out there, but very few things that teach first principles. For example:

- how to properly season something (how do you know how much salt and pepper to put on)

- knife handling and care

- classic flavour combinations

- preperation of all meats, veg, fruits

- what you should always have in your kitchen (stock, garlic, chilli, etc.)

This is to name just a few. These million and one recipes just end up with you buying a bunch of herbs and spices you use once, then taking ages over preparing and washing up after; and some of them are basically the same with minor variations.

I think Ruhlman's Twenty is a great resource for the kind of thing you're looking for.

"All cooking comes down not to recipes but rather to techniques. In Ruhlman’s Twenty, cook, writer, and food authority Michael Ruhlman distills all of cooking into 20 fundamental techniques, illustrated with 100 recipes, and hundreds of instructive photos"

http://www.amazon.com/Ruhlmans-Twenty-Techniques-Recipes-Man...

> It's frustrating, as someone who is interested in cooking and is trying to learn, that there are a million and one recipes out there, but very few things that teach first principles.

You'll probably love the books by Michael Ruhlman, if that's your desire:

1. The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

2. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

3. Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook's Manifesto

Before you go and buy a book, you should check out ChefSteps:

http://www.chefsteps.com/

It's linked to Modernist Cuisine, which is also linked to Nathan Myhrvold, who isn't popular here (for good reasons), but it's really a good resource for cooks -- comprehensive and pretty reliable. I haven't really looked into their basic stuff but it's always getting new content so even if they don't have what you are looking for now they might in the near future.

Completely agree; learning to cook shouldn't be about cooking different recipes, it should be about generalizing the lessons from each one. That said, I think an effective way to learn it is just to try cooking a million different things and keeping notes (mental or physical ones).

My best resource is foodwishes.blogspot.com. His videos focus completely on watching the ingredient, never himself, and I feel like he does a pretty good job of always explaining why we are adding in a spice or choosing a particular cooking method, or when you can feel free to improvise with your own preferred flavors. And there's also a good variety of different dishes, so its not just one type of cooking. I have been following recipes from foodwishes for about a year and I feel I've learned a lot (for an amateur) about how to cook.

Try out America's Test Kitchen (http://www.americastestkitchen.com/). I find there way of explaining things very easy to understand.

Cooks Illustrated has online cooking lessons that have a strong technique focus. I haven't subscribed but I've seen looks good. I think they came out with a book with a similar focus as well.

Compare an article or tutorial on 'Make a Twitter clone in <cool language> in an hour!' to this 'recipe'.

No programming tutorial is going to start with turning the computer on, how to use a web browser...it's the same thing that's implied here.

If I were introducing a complete newb to cooking, the last thing I would do is have them do a whole chicken with gravy, etc.

I'd have them cook something very simple. Potatoes, chicken breast, maybe some eggs. There's a lot of things that can go wrong and a lot to learn with each of those.

I agree completely. The article's principle is great, but the specific recipe they describe is a disaster waiting for happen for a newcomer.

I found chicken to be the hardest meat to learn to cook: underdo it and you have salmonella, overdo it and it's cardboard. A well-cooked chicken is a delight, but it's a pretty narrow range. I found beef and fish to be much less scary meats as a novice since undercooking them is less of a risk. You can't undercook salmon, you can just end up with surprise sushi.

Likewise, I love making rouxs, but it took a number of tries before I had an intuition of the cook time/temp before and after adding the fat.

> - how to properly season something (how do you know how much salt and pepper to put on)

It's hard to have precise rules for that because every piece of food is different. Chickens aren't made in a factory (yet), so each bird will be a bit bigger or smaller. You kind of just have to learn it by taste and practice.

> - knife handling and care

I find youtube videos are really great for technique. Just search for "how to chop/prepare <ingredient>". I can cut a bunch of fruits, vegetables, and animals now with confidence.

Taking care of knives is harder. Video doesn't do a good job of showing tactile details like how much force to use on a honing rod.

> - classic flavour combinations

What I do whenever I'm in the mood for something is look up a bunch of recipes for it. If you compare them all, you can kind of get a feel for the ur-recipe that underlies them. Look at a few of those and you'll quickly get a feel for what things go together.

> - what you should always have in your kitchen (stock, garlic, chilli, etc.)

This depends a lot on what cuisines you favor. I think the absolute basics are salt, pepper, oil, butter, flour, and a few aliums (garlic, onion, green onion, etc.). If you have those, you can take damn near any vegetable, throw it in a skillet, and sauté up something tasty.

I'm always surprised by how far "add to pan on medium heat with butter, salt, pepper, and garlic" gets you.

Consider picking up a copy of the Joy of Cooking, or another good encyclopedic cookbook. In Joy, at least, the recipes are fairly concise -- but there's a wealth of other info in there: how to tell when specific vegetables are ripe, cuts of meat and their uses, etc. It's one of the only reference books I actually use, in any genre.

I really like the idea. It seemed an odd recipe to start with though. "Ask the butcher to take out the backbone if you’re nervous about doing that yourself." No it's not hard; it would take me a minute or two with my poultry shears. The NYT has a great back-catalog of recipes but I thought this intro did a poor job of persuading non-cooks that this is almost as easy as getting takeout. (And, truth be told, a lot of cooking will take more time than takeout when you factor in planning, shopping, and cleaning--even if you keep things relatively simple.)

I think this is great! My only comment is I wish that the first example was something where meat wasn't the centerpiece. As a culture, we already consume so much more meat than is sustainable, maybe a good home cooked meal where a grain and some vegetables are the centerpiece might encourage fixing that problem, as well as being all around easier to cook!

I sort of like the idea but it still seems too complicated for the mere mortal.

How about the 100 best, simplest ingredients, easiest to cook?

You should check out Ramsey's Ultimate Cookery course (or 100 recipes to stake your life on). Last time I checked most of the episodes were on Youtube. Consists of simple recipes while showing basic techniques (e.g. in one of the first recipes, he shows how to properly cut a bell pepper).

What do you see as complicated about this dish?

I guess it's not that complicated but the whole chicken and large (preferably cast iron) pan threw me off. Serving a whole chicken strikes me as a rare occasion at most US dining tables (vs boneless breast, etc).

It really shouldn't be. Whole chickens are one of the most cost effective proteins you can work with, and they're not at all difficult. They're a much better option than packaged boneless chicken breasts.

Regarding meal planning: this one calculates the nutritional information and provides an estimated price for each day, helps put everything in perspective https://spoonacular.com/weekly-meal-planner

Flagged for spam. I don't care if it's the New York Times or not. What does this have to do with anything?

I upvoted this. It's not spam; it's a recipe and a call to action.

It's a fluff piece.

That's a much more subjective judgement than "spam". Meanwhile: I took a note to go cook a spatchcocked chicken under a weighted plate this week, so it didn't set my "fluff" detector off at all. And I cook 5 nights a week.

Here, though: if you though that piece was fluffy, I'll give you an antidote. The single best cooking video on the Internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAekQ5fzfGM

I'm not sure about the 'best' qualification. That's way too complicated, not many people have the patience to learn and the time to do all of that. Just buy the chicken from the store cut up (and, I don't know about you guys, but where I shop, I can get the meat guy to cut anything up for me for free...). A lot of times machines are doing this stuff anyway, so cut up meat is pretty affordable. I particularly don't like cutting up my own meat because my hands up smelling weird, I have to clean up and wash the cutting boards, knives, etc. quickly (or else they start stinking up very soon), etc.

This video isn't "how to cut up a chicken".

Here's a video on how to cup up a chicken: http://www.nytimes.com/video/dining/100000002155362/cutting-...

The great thing is you can make chicken stock with it. Add the chicken stock to the pilaf rice you're making, which goes great with the chicken!

Oh my. Didn't watch the whole thing right now but from the title I know where it was going. One of Ruhlman's books describes a week-ish long cooking test at the Culinary Institute of America that gets into making all sorts of things like this. I cook a lot but this type of cooking is at least as far beyond me as I'm beyond someone who can barely boil an egg.

I don't ever make galantines, but I do bone out a couple chickens every week, and he's right: when you get the knack, you can bone out a chicken in a little under a minute without trying.

The commentary might be interesting. Look at the obvious analogy with learning code.

You can look at 16000 source code files, perhaps with a decent search engine, and with some heuristics and guts copy and paste into an app. This is the exact clone to the ml and mg of stir fry recipe #1415

Or you can learn some syntax and techniques and idioms and just kind whip something together out of thin air. No one has ever made a stir fry quite like this one, probably ever.

Cooking is just like coding. Oh and the two options, both for coding and cooking, are not binary exclusive BTW. And some things like pastry or food safety you can't just make up on the fly and expect success, there's always some mix and match.

To say this NYT app makes a strong statement on one side of the debate while ignoring the other is an understatement. I think it does a disservice to cooks and coders to not at least mention the alternative strategy.

You can make a mcdonalds burger with a formal detailed recipe. You cannot make a gourmet meal that way, in my opinion.

Part of the hacker mindset is constant learning, self-improvement, and cultivation. And that needn't be limited to coding. Many other skills should also be applicable.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -Robert A. Heinlein

Read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Pertinent parts: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did." Also, this is an article about the New York Times creating an app and website about cooking. Maybe it gratifies your curiosity, maybe not, but that's what is has to do with.

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