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So, I was a professional chef for ~15 years, I took some breaks here and there but I've kept a roof over my head by being a competent kitchen employee for most of my adult life. It may surprise some of you, but chefs google recipes very frequently. Many of us keep a handy written notebook with "best ofs" and go-to recipes we use all the time, but we get online quite a bit when developing something new. I've been cooking from home a lot lately and have been reminded of just how loving terrible 90% of online recipes are. Here are some reasons why! 1. The Ubiquitous 4 minute onions: "Sweat onions until golden, 4-5 minutes" and similar lies are the scourge of many online recipes. "Golden" onions take time, a lot of time. In fact, I'm caramelizing some onions as I write this post. My guess is most people don't want to put 90 minute cook times at the top of their recipes because most folks are just holding on for dear life and want a recipe they can bang out for their family in 20-30 minutes. I feel that. But you aren't going to get beautiful sweet onion flavor without slowly sweating your onions for at least 15 minutes. 2. Don't brown the garlic I see this a fair bit too. Recipes call for garlic to be toasted in the pan before adding vegetables. If garlic goes brown it can become bitter and overpower your whole dish. Very few applications are going to call for toasted garlic (I'm sure some will come back at me on this), but for 90% of one pot style dishes you won't be toasting poo poo. Unless you are this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MURPf_6r8z4 Just sweat your garlic after adding your vegetables until its fragrant, and then deglaze and add other ingredients. 3. This loving poo poo  This is kind of well worn territory but nobody cares about how your husband Steve just rides the lawnmower for hours to avoid your cooking. Nobody cares that your son is Coeliac. We can sense the quiet desperation through our phone screens, Karen. Give it a rest and give me the loving Jambalaya recipe* 4. Recipes that are really just Ads This one probably pisses me off the most. I'll be looking for say, a chicken pot pie recipe in earnest when I come across something promising. It has all the trappings of a home cooked recipe (long meandering tales about childhood weekends in New England, that loving weird sloppy cursive font that's on every wedding invitation, the word "mommy" in the URL). HOWEVER, once I get to the actual recipe the first item on the ingredients list is "Pillsbury Croissant Dough". Now, as a professional of course I have a shortcrust pastry on hand, but the whole recipe just always seems to take 2nd fiddle to the fact that its an ad for a frozen dough product. gently caress pillsbury.  fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou Anyway, If anyone has any particularly horrible examples of lovely overwritten recipes I'll gladly scream at them with you in this thread. Or, if anyone has some cooking questions I'll happily answer as well. *I have a Jambalaya recipe if any goons would like to attempt it. Its quite good, but a bit of a mission. You can get drunk while making it which is fun. PM me.
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Apr 1, 2020 09:29
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 06:34 |
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