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by vncecartersknee 1543 days ago
As I've gotten more into cooking as I've gotten older it's frustrating how often people don't really understand why they do things the way they do when they cook something, yet will doggedly insist that it must be done that certain way. As I've started to watch more and pay attention to youtubers who explain why they do things in a logical and rational way, even if you're not interested in that particular recipe, the correctly explained and justified techniques will be beneficial in many other things you cook.
1 comments
pottertheotter 1543 days ago
The problem is the pros do this all the time as well. There are plenty of top chefs that were taught something when they were young and they continue to do it and preach it despite evidence that it’s not true.
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giraffe_lady 1543 days ago
There are also cases where the thing the chefs were doing was correct, even if they didn't know why or had the wrong reason. This is both the pro and the con of tradition-based crafts.

Anyway where were they even to get this information? Kenji has been influential the last few years, and he builds very heavily off of McGee, which came out in the mid 80s. It's been only like two generations of chefs here since evidence like this was even partially available.

Before that, and still mostly, the intersection of science and cooking is driven by the needs of the industrial food system. Whether you can apply that to restaurant cooking probably depends a lot on your personal background and skill set, but most cooks I've worked with would be lost trying to read an academic food science paper and apply it to their work. I definitely would be.

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jghn 1543 days ago
That's a big part of the problem. Another issue is they're working in professional kitchens, and things aren't the same as they are for a home cook. Yes there are things a home cook can learn from pro kitchens, but a lot of other things don't translate.

One thing I love about folks like Kenji, Brown, Gritzer, McGee, Cooks Illustrated, et al is they approach their experiments from the perspective of a reasonable home kitchen.

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