[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.

[throwaway2037]

Real question: I see a lot of YouTube videos bragging about "leoparding" (spots on the bottom). Does it really matter? My point: Can you cook a pizza that tastes just as good _without_ "leoparding"?

    > My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour.

Sheesh. This is my second complaint about endless YouTube videos about the "perfect pizza at home": What is the carbon footprint per pizza? (Exception: I can forgive anyone who has a magical setup that is 100% electric and has solar panels / wind turbines to supply it! Also: Hat tip to any of the crazies that are producing their own green hydrogen at home via electrolysis for their hydrogen-gas-fired pizza oven!)

[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.

[throwaway2037]

Great follow-up. Thanks! I never saw anyone comment like this: "you have much less tolerance for error". That is the key to understanding Ooni vs kitchen oven. Brilliant.

Have you tried Adam Ragusea's NYC pizza recipe? He gives a lot of sensible advice about how to get a great pie from a shitty kitchen oven!

[Larrikin]

Which model did you own? I haven't bought one but had been considering buying an almost unitasker because the reviews from trusted sources seemed very good. Serious Eats in particular seems to love the brand.

[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.