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:
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.
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
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