[polar8]

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/

I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never dream of using at home.

[dredmorbius]

Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)?

Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004).

I find some restaurant meals strike me as far better than others. Taquerias, Thai and Vietnamese food, better vegetarian restaurants (say, Greens in SF), for example. Specific choices such as sides, beverages, alcohol, and whether or not the restaurant permits smoking (some parts of the US still allow this barbaric practice) would likely be huge confounding factors.

I'm not discounting home-cooked meals, and generally far prefer them myself. But overly-broad, undifferentiated analysis is ... not especially illuminating.

[dustincoates]

> Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004).

There may be associated negatives, but Super Size Me is a terrible piece of evidence of it. Spurlock not only intentionally ate far more than any normal person would, but also declined to mention in the movie his copious alcohol consumption. (Not that I expect someone to admit to their alcoholism in a movie, but when you're making a polemic about how what you consume is bad for you, not mentioning that you're drinking a lot of alcohol during the same period isn't great!)

[dredmorbius]

TBH I was mentioning SSM more as an exemplar than as hard science, and there are plenty of other indicia (rigorous or anecdotal) which suggest a consistent fast-food diet is other than health-inducing. I'm not aware of Spurlock's alcohol consumption during the trial, and there is the fact that he reversed much of the damage at the time following his partner's dietary advice (she is a dietician AFAIR).

If you've any links or references to share I'd be interested.

[ghaff]

I don't unless I'm traveling but eating a couple modestly portioned meals a week which, yes, you can do in the US, is healthy enough as part of a basket of options. And often better than whipping up a lot of things you can make with 15 minutes of effort from the grocery store.

[ghaff]

I also suspect that a lot of the people who are eating out in restaurants all the time are on planes a lot and at late business dinners, many of which are determined by "safe" customer choices like steakhouses. (Though, without further info, I also suspect to it defaulting to fast food on an absolute basis.)

[dredmorbius]

Also: truckers (largest single occupational category in many classifications), cabbies, trades workers, etc., etc. If you're in a captive market, whether that's airports, convention centres, motorway service areas, lunch wagon, lunchroom, etc., your choices are going to be limited.

On business travellers vs. truckers, I'm finding ~ 3.5 million truckers in the US, who all but certainly eat on the road at least one meal per day (local) and more likely 3+ (long-haul). <https://schneiderjobs.com/blog/truck-drivers-in-usa>.

For corporate travel: there are ~400 million long-distance business trips annually <https://www.trondent.com/business-travel-statistics/>. Trips-per-person is harder to find, though one source gives 6.8 trips/year, which gives 60 million travellers/year. So that's more than truckers ... but it's a lot fewer trips (and meals). I'd put money on there being more trucker meals-out than business travelers'.

Fleshing out further: we really want trips per year, for each classification. I'm going to assume truckers are on the road 250 days/year (roughly 5 days/week) ... we'll do variance after in case I'm wrong. That gives 3.5 million * 250 or 875 million trucker trips/year, more than double the business air travel number. We could cut trucker travel in half and still be somewhat above the business air travel trips figure.

[ghaff]

Whatever the exact number, it's probably safe to say that directionally way more "meals out" are grabbing some variety of fast food than some variety of upscale/fine dining. Not all that fast-ish food is unhealthy/bad but a lot is as a steady diet. Which just reinforces the point that drawing a broad brush eating out will kill you doesn't have a lot of support. Eating at a nice restaurant once a month is almost certainly not a killer.

[dredmorbius]

I tend to agree on all points.

The truckers vs. business travellers comparison was mostly me just trying to suss out what the relative magnitudes of those were. Information's sketchy, but inferences can be drawn. That was independent of your points, which are valid and insightful.

And yeah, the idea that 1) most "restaurant" meals are fast-food franchises and 2) that's not especially healthy on a consistent basis, as well as that 3) specific choices about menu items can have a major impact are ... fairly self-evident. Pity the study doesn't seem to address those, at least based on the unembargoed bits at the shared link above.

[Larrikin]

There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home.

You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and that's just talking about average restaurants. You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.

Sure eating a fast food burger and fries everyday will be heavy, but even something that simple can be difficult to match compared to the restaurant. Grinding your own meat, double frying the fries, finding/making decent buns, etc.

Food is one of the few activities that can be very enjoyable daily. It's usually cost saving to cook yourself and there's a lot of good stuff you can make at home. But you're missing out on some enjoyable experiences by completely avoiding professionals using professional equipment with access to better ingredients.

[carlosjobim]

Paradoxically, it's the fast food staples that are most difficult to do at home – because you need a fryer. Haute cuisine is no problem making at home, because fine dining is not based on using fryers. It can't be made with restaurant speed nor quantity, but you can get the same quality at home.

[throwaway2037]

    > because you need a fryer

What? There are many, many YouTube videos explaining how to make "fast food" style french fries (double fried, and all that) at home, without a fryer.

[UIUC_06]

My air fryer makes decent fries, using only olive oil as a fat. It did take some practice to get it right.

Are they as good as deep-fat fried? No, but they're crisp on the outside and tender on the inside.

OK, you all want to hear this, you know you do:

===============

Start preheating the air fryer to 400F.

Slice the potatoes. Drop them in a bowl of water, swish them around and drain off the water, and fill the bowl again. By now, the water should be clear. If not, do it again.

Take the fries out and dry on paper towels, as dry as you can get them.

   *These steps are important; you need to wash off the surface starch, and get them dry so you're not steaming them*

Dry the bowl, and put in some olive oil, with seasonings (salt, pepper, garlic salt, etc.)

Put the fries back in the bowl and get them all oily. Put them in the fryer. The basket should be hot enough that they make a sizzling sound.

Every 5 minutes, toss the fries. You can either get compulsive and turn each one individually, or just pour them in a bowl and shake it, or shake the fryer basket (if that doesn't cause it to separate, as it does mine). Put them back in the fryer.

Check periodically that they're as brown as you want them.

==============

Good variations? I want to hear them

[rightbyte]

For how long do you need to dry them? Are we talking hours here or like 15 minutes?

[UIUC_06]

Good question. I just wipe them with paper towels and use immediately.

But longer might indeed be better. I can tell you they come out crispy and not soggy my way.

[ghaff]

And it's probably not reasonable that the average person who gets McDonalds fries (which are indeed good and better than most, if not all, of the "fast casual" joints) will do those things. Not that frozen supermarket fries in a deep fryer are an especially heavy lift and they're mostly good enough (with reasonably fresh oil) for hamburger and fries.

[Klonoar]

McDonalds fries can be somewhat achieved by adding beef flavor (authentic or vegetarian sub) to the fries. It’s like the easiest hack to better homemade fries, IMO.

[throwaway2037]

LATE EDIT: To be clear, I mean frying using oil -- not air frying.

[throwaway2037]

    > You won't achieve wok hei on your stove

This is simple untrue. There is many, many YouTube videos explaining how to achieve wok hei (鑊氣) at home with a non-commercial gas-fired stove and a cheap wok.

For any readers unfamiliar with the stir frying technique called wok hei, read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wok#Cooking

[swores]

I know very little about Asian cooking of any kind, but I seem to remember being told that wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building - to the point that even when people do want to use wok hei at home they would choose to have a setup in the garden rather than the kitchen.

If my memory/understanding is not wrong, then that adds to the idea that people won't achieve wok hei on their stove even if the reason is not wanting its side effects rather than being technically impossible.

[throwaway2037]

    > wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building

Not true. Find some videos on YouTube about wok hei. Yes, you need to choose an oil with a high smoke point (not olive oil). With a bit of practice, you can do it in your sleep and enjoy delicious stir fry.

[Klonoar]

Re: oven temps, I seem to recall seeing a link here maybe a decade ago about a guy who figured out how to get his oven hot enough for certain pizza routines by basically breaking the handle on the cleaning cycle or something.

Does anybody else remember this? Or am I crazy?

[bsder]

> You won't achieve wok hei on your stove

Not true. Pull out that blowtorch.

> your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods

Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.

> restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store

This might be true, but from what I have seen most of the restaurants are barely even reaching SysCo/USFoods level of quality ingredients. Your local grocery store is probably just fine until you are a very good cook. At that point, you might have to start looking at more niche grocery stores.

And, if you get better than that, well, you're likely sufficiently obsessive that you will find a way.

> You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.

It's more sheer technique and attention to fussy detail than teams of people. A patissier is simply WAY better than you are at making desserts, for example. They know all the tricks; they will also have all the necessary equipment.

However, yeah, Michelin restaurants are definitely next level.

[ghaff]

For most people, it's also not just the technique (and, to a lesser degree, gear), it's also the sheer number of fresh ingredients often required. Desserts may actually lean more towards technique/time and less towards ingredients. I took a croissant class and produced at least serviceable croissants (with a chef correcting things here and there). But much as I like a hard to source fresh croissant I'm not going to routinely spend half a day making a batch.

[UIUC_06]

> Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.

I have a steel plate. An hour at 500F only gets it to around 400F.

Which is fine for pizza, actually, so you're right about that.

If you ask big US pizzerias (I don't know about the famous Naples ones) what temp they use, it's usually 650-750. At 900F you have zero margin for error.

[awithrow]

You can get a standalone pizza over for a couple hundred. I've got an Ooni and it gets up to 900 in about 15 minutes. Its obviously not for indoor use but its great nonetheless. It still takes a good bit of technique to get the dough and timing right but its great to be able to cook a pizza in little more than a minute.

[AlbertCory]

Have you actually pointed an IR thermometer at it? On mine (which I sold), it was 900 at the back and 600 at the front.

It was just too much trouble. A pizza steel in a kitchen oven, preheated, works very well; maybe not as good as a 700F oven but WAY easier. And 5 minutes instead of 1 minute is not a big sacrifice.

[throwaway2037]

Hey, this is a great post. I have read similar complaints about Ooni pizza ovens, where it is very difficult to achieve the 900F temp and impossible in the front. Great point about 5 mins vs 1 min.

Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)

[__turbobrew__]

You cannot get the same leoparding on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with a 5 minute pizza. If you are talking about normies than probably no, they cannot tell the difference but if you are detail oriented you can tell the difference.

My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Even with all that thermal mass I find the later pizzas take longer to cook due to the steel cooling off. You just cant put enough energy into a home oven to match the energy it looses during cooking.

Another tip is when the steel is maximally heated I find the rate of cooking on the bottom of the pizza is faster than on the top so I also turn the broiler onto max after I put in the pizza so the toppings get cooked at the same rate as the bottom of the crust. A delicate balance which requires continuous feedback.

[AlbertCory]

Thanks, you know, I think the brick oven pizza IS better. Yes, you probably could taste the difference. Whether the 5 min is dryer: maybe, could be.

My decision to sell my Ooni, after about 6 tries, was because my actual results were nowhere close to a pizzeria's, and way more trouble than my kitchen oven's.

Since you can't just open the door as you can with the kitchen oven, you have much less tolerance for error. In the kitchen, you just open after 5 minutes and decide, "OK, it's done" or "One more minute."

I guess I decided the brick oven pizzeria results are just not attainable at home. The kitchen results are damn good; way better than a frozen pizza.

[imp0cat]

Yeah the taste difference is there, but you can get quite close even with a regular 500°F (~250°C) household oven and a longer time (4 with fan/grill + 4 minutes without in my case, YMMV). The basic tricks are to use a pizza stone, prepare your pizza dough a few days before (let it rest in a fridge) and do not go crazy with the toppings (less is more, too much stuff on top of pizza usually means soggy pizza - the top grill element can sometimes fix this, but not always).

[ghaff]

It's not perfect but those Naan flatbreads available in many US markets plus a pizza stone at 500 degrees F work fine for the occasional homemade pizza if I don't want to get takeout from one of a couple of local pizzarias. One of which is more convenient and the other is brick-over/better.

[joezydeco]

Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach...

Go look for the folks that hack off the safety latch on their self-cleaning ovens. It's kind of nuts.

[UIUC_06]

I've heard of them. I'd hate to have to explain that to my insurance inspector after a house fire, though.

[joezydeco]

Thankfully these miniature outdoor pizza ovens are taking some of the thrill away from the firestarters.

[decafninja]

I lost a ton of weight during the initial Covid lockdowns of 2020 without even trying. The only difference?

I ate home cooked meals while WFH. They weren’t even made to be specifically healthy or with the objective of losing weight.

Then I jumped ship for a company that was 100% in office. I started eating the supposedly healthy meals catered by the company for lunch. Dinner also came later because commute time.

I gained back all the weight I lost WFH and then some. The significant amount of walking and/or biking from the commute did nothing to help.

[standardUser]

Where are you people eating that you feel gross? And what are you ordering? I promise you, eating out does not and should not need to be anything like you are describing.

[positr0n]

How old are you?

5-10 years ago I would have agreed with your comment, but once I hit my 30s I started to feel gross if I ate a bunch of donuts, super duper greasy food, etc.

As the years progress more and more food makes me feel a little yucky afterwards, not just the blatantly obvious incredibly unhealthy ones.

[m463]

...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :)

I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food.

In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish.

But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are paid to make things tasty - with salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. And then with more of those.

(also, I wonder how restaurant review eating compares to supersize me)

[glinkot]

Your side comment about saunas got me searching. It's quite amazing (though based on small populations) - I'll be giving this a try, thanks for pointing it out!

https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(18)...

[fuzztester]

>salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil.

there is a famous cooking book with a name close to that. ;)

[m463]

add chocolate and get the perfect click ^H^H^H^H cookbait.

[fuzztester]

no, I meant an actual famous cookbook. I read about it on hn, actually.

it's called something like fat, acid, salt and heat. you can Google it.

[fuzztester]

>I read about it on hn, actually.

you know, like here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=salt+fat+acid+heat

[throwaway2037]

I hear this "cheap oil" thing a lot in food pseudo-science Internet writing. What exactly is "cheap oil"? And, is there any peer reviewed evidence for your claims about how you feel after eating "cheap oil"? If this effect is so drastic, then, surely, it must affect others, and would be an interesting and worthy research topic.

[ghaff]

I guess it's generic vegetable oil as opposed to Canola oil or Peanut oil? I'd actually suspect that a mindset of buy whatever oil is cheapest from Sysco would pursue cheapness in other areas as well including kitchen supervision/skills.

[lobsterthief]

I wouldn’t suspect that at all—some recipes (like certain kinds of “street food” from different countries actually call for the use of cheaper oils :)

[ghaff]

I doubt it makes any appreciable difference anyway most of the time although Canola oil and Peanut oil do have a slightly higher smoke point than vegetable oil.