Food culture sucks. Gourmets, foodies, Michelin star chasers etc, all suck.
All my favorite places were low-key mom and pop indie operations where the focus was on the food. Not the decor, the presentation, or the pretentiousness.
I also will never understand the total obsession people have with super expensive dinners. I hate them and they are a huge waste of money and the food is usually mediocre. Like expensive wine, it has nothing to do with the product’s quality or taste, and everything to do with just bragging about how rich you are by blowing boat loads of cash on an hour or two of pure vanity.
Sushi lovers only pretend to like uni to make themselves seem fancier to others.
Do fish cum next!
Also if you weren’t aware, fresh uni straight out of the shell has none of the fishy taste that it picks up when it’s even a few hours old.
Gastro pubs are the definition of “doing too much” and people only visit for the novelty, so you see them pop up and then shut down within a year or two. Kinda like electronics for rich people
the overwhelming majority of restaurants shutdown within a year or two, mainly because unless that shit is truly your life’s dream…running a restaurant (small businesses in general really) fucking sucks.
My british partner has shown me, british food isnt all disgusting, but defenetly has its fair share of disgusting dishes (atlesst to my taste). Fish head soup for example
I’ve never once eaten fish head soup, or been offered fish head soup, or seen fish head soup on a menu, or heard of any of my friends eating fish head soup. I’m, therefore, not convinced it’s ‘British food’. Does it come with gaslight sauce?
Just because you’ve never seen it. Doesnt mean it doesnt exist <3
Also doesn’t mean it’s a common British dish just because it appears in a cook book.
Never said it was common. It clearly states: scotland
I grew up in Scotland.
Cool for you. I grew up and live in swabia and still learned a swabian dish recently from my grandma: Kohlrouladen, that i also never saw in any restaurant, neither friends know it or seen it in media. Your entire point and argument against me now being?
Given how much it seems to matter to you that fish head soup is a thing because you found it in a book, I retract my entire ‘point and argument’. It’s clearly as British as red double decker buses, fish and chips, self-deprecation, a vague sense of unease at our politicians behaving as if our country is in some way still important, kilts, Cornish pasties, lava bread and cockles, and an Ulster fry. You obviously know more about British food than I do, and are expert in all things and definitely not. to. be. trifled with. whereas I have probably never eaten food in my entire life. You’ve won a disagreement on the internet and will be able to feel powerful and vital for the rest of your day.
Food culture only exists because people aren’t hungry.
No chef or restaurant can beat the satisfaction of eating whatever you have when you’re truly hungry.
Personally I don’t care for “Mexican pizza”. I mean I like the flavors, but together I just don’t.
One day I started a job at a warehouse as a picker, walked like 15 miles that day pushing a cart around climbing up and down shelves, I was exhausted. Stopped by my GFs house, she asked if I was hungry, I was but all she had was a frozen Mexican pizza. It was at the time, the greatest food I have ever tasted.
True. If people were extremely hungry though, especially constantly, you get food religion
You can just say you don’t eat cilantro. You don’t have to lie about it being an allergy.
A lot of people I know who say this do it because of the soap gene thing, if they don’t make it clear then it will have cilantro in it anyway and then their food tastes like soap.
Every “hot take” in this thread is a regurgitation of what r/cooking has been saying for the past decade
If we are talking about cuisine, then mine is that intensely spicy food (e.g. Indian, Korean, Laos, etc.) is heavily overrated.
I prefer a taste bouquet of a carefully crafted meal. Hotness should be a nice touch, not a dominant agony. Food should not require a built tolerance to it’s ingredients in order to be enjoyed.
Those foods are good, not just because they are spicy, but because of their flavor profiles.
I like a small proportion of what I eat to be very very spicy. Not everything, and not every day. But sometimes it’s exactly what I want and some foods are so good that way. Lots of other flavors are sort of learned too - wine, bitter greens, there are foods I tried every year until I could like them (mango and raw tomatoes, and wines, also Swiss cheese) and I am glad I did develop a palate for them. Spicy I’ve always liked, only one of my kids was like that but all of them like it now.
I guess my hot take is that just because I like milk and/or sugar in coffee, doesn’t mean I don’t like coffee. Most people who like chocolate don’t like unsweetened baking chocolate and nobody is gatekeeping that like they do with coffee.
Average American inland “seafood” is garbage. You have access to the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Florida Keys, Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes, and hundreds of thousands of lakes and rivers, yet the top fish dish 100+ miles from a shore is usually catfish fresh out of a polluted sewage overflow ditch or farmed shrimp/crawfish fed on subsidized cornmeal.
I saw a great sign at a seafood market once that read “If it smells like fish, it’s not fresh fish”. I can personally guarantee you that you cannot find good quality, fresh seafood in the USA unless you live within travel distance of a shore where you can find a local market or restaurant that sells their catch of the day.
Catfish is not good quality fish. It’s a trash bottom feeder that does an excellent job of cleaning waterways. Stop eating it and claiming the flavor is unmatched, I can taste the Monsanto runoff.
Respectfully, wtf is “food culture”? Is the fascination with taking food pics for Insta and going to popular restaurants you see on TikTok that have great decor and selfie backgrounds? I think it’s ridiculously performative and for silly people.
If you meant “what are your hot takes about food?”, then idk, I think I have pretty lukewarm ones, lol (“Chinese > Italian > Indian” for popular cuisines around the world, for instance).
Food culture is the way people act and think about food, the way it should be prepared and served, as well as enjoyed.
Look, sniff, and only then taste if you didn’t detect anything. Do it with totally fresh stuff too so you learn what That’s supposed to be like.
That’s why your mom had “the nose”. Learn to use your senses.
- afternoon cappuccino is great (Italians disagree)
- sweet-and-salty is tasty af (pineapple pizza, cream cheese with chocolate/nougat, steak with ketchup)
- sweet alcoholic drinks are great, actually (but they should still have taste - use high quality ingredients and keep the ratios sensible!)
- 2 months-old dry vermouth (fridge-stored) tastes better than freshly unsealed dry vermouth
Well, now I want to do a dry vermouth comparison. Since we’re talking quality, I assume the two-month-open bottle has been stored in the fridge?
Yes, my vermouth is being stored in the fridge the entire time between unsealing and drinking.
Dry vermouth is a bit of a meme in cocktail enthusiast circles. The mainstream opinion is that it needs to be as fresh as possible to make a good cocktail, and it definitely loses a lot of flavor in the first weeks after unsealing. But to me, that full punch of wormwood herb is a bit much, I much prefer the more muted flavor of fridge-aged (oxidized) vermouth. I think part of that “as fresh as possible” stance is that people used to store unsealed vermouth outside of the fridge, often for years at a time because people were drinking their Martinis with only a few drops of vermouth. And even with freshly unsealed vermouth, most cocktail enthusiasts still tend to prefer low amounts of vermouth in their Martini, which to me suggests that they don’t actually like fresh vermouth that much.
Alternatively I could just try a few more different vermouth brands until I find one that I like from the start, but Dolin dry is delightfully cheap and Noilly Prat is the only dry vermouth that you can actually buy in physical stores where I live.
I don’t care about the rules. I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing most of the time. I do read recipes, but I don’t follow them. They are more like ideas for me, as in “oh they are using that spice with these veggies, might try that some time.”
Most of the time I just throw stuff in the pan/pot and let them be over the heat for a bit. So far, nobody has complained about the food. Though that might be because I eat alone.
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lol I didn’t mean those sort of rules/instructions. I meant the stuff like “pineapple doesn’t belong on a pizza” type things.
But you are correct, the ready made meal instructions are often a bit iffy. One thing they get right is the consistency though. Once you figure out how long you need to boil things, you can get them done fairly well. Though I only use those Knorr bags on my camping trips and its always the last one that I cook, that I get right. Then by the time I go for the next hike, I’ve already forgotten lol. But luckily everything tastes better when you are in the wilderness.
Steaks are diminishing returns for the price.
Most people can tell a $30 steak is better than a $6 one, but I think most people aren’t going to get much of a difference between a $30 and a >$100 steak.Diminishing returns applies pretty universally, it’s just a matter of finding the point that’s good enough.
I agree… but I also think that applies to LOTS of other foods, particularly in the setting of a restaurant.
Not just foods, either. Tons of products are like that.
The gap between an El Cheapo lowest-bidder product and the midrange product will be far, far more significant than the gap between a midrange product and the high-end stuff.
Holds true for almost every product in almost every industry. Clothes, cars, sporting goods, electronics, you name it.
Unless you just absolutely cannot afford it, then the midrange product is usually the best choice. The high-end stuff will be slightly better, sure, but unless you’re an extreme enthusiast with very specific needs, the upgrade to high-end stuff just isn’t worth the price premium you’ll pay for it.
the purpose of high end products is to broadcast you have money and therefore you are better than other people who don’t.
the point of luxury cars and such is so show that you can piss away $500 on a oil change, and are therefore ‘better’ than the peons who drive cars where the oil change is $50.
Often, sure, that’s the reason many people buy high-end products. And luxury cars are a prime example because nobody really needs a luxury car.
But instead, say, let’s look at mountain bikes. A midrange mountain bike will be much better than a Walmart special ‘mountain bike’. And a high-end mountain bike will be slightly better than the midrange one. And it’s true, a lot of the people buying high-end mountain bikes don’t really need that extra 10% of performance and maybe aren’t even really capable of using it. A lot of them are buying it just to flex on the poors, or because they have more money than they know what to do with and feel like they just have to have ‘the best’. But there are real enthusiast mountain bikers out there who actually do ‘need’ that extra 10% performance – expert riders taking on some of the worst terrain possible, people stretching the limits of what’s possible, and competitive athletes for whom a 10% performance difference means the difference between first place and last place.
Or, say, look at a tool like a power drill. A midrange drill will be significantly better than some Harbor Freight discount garbage. (Though, actually, HF’s midrange stuff is fairly decent.) And a high-end drill will be only slightly better than the midrange one. Here, there’s even less of a chance of people buying an expensive drill just as a flex. Because who cares what kind of drill you have? The only people buying it who don’t need it are those idiots with more money than sense who have to have the best of everything. But these high-end drills still get sold in fair numbers, because there are professionals out there using them every day. People who use the tool frequently for work can really benefit from one that’s just a little bit more reliable, a little bit faster and more powerful, etc. It allows them to get their work done a bit faster and more reliably, and for someone using it that much, the extra cost of a high-end tool can pay for itself over time by making them able to get more work done in less time and make more money.
At least some high-end products actually do have a purpose beyond just conspicuous consumption.
The majority of consumers for those products a middle aged dads. They simple have a lot of money to burn and it makes them feel good about themselves to blow $15,000 on a mountain bike they ride green trails on or $2000 on a drill they use to hang pictures. It’s pure vanity. But those folks are also living in 5000sq ft homes and driving 80K cars.
Working professionals aren’t consumers. They are producers. There are very few of them, compared to the 100,000s of vanity consumers who are buying luxury goods of which they will only ever use like 10% of the product.
Babish figured out how to make a beef Wellington with a $10 cut that rivaled a $120 cut. A little science and time at sous vide.
And that $30-100 steak is going to underperform against a mediocre home cook as long as the latter can take their time and prep the meat properly.
Unless someone I don’t like is buying me dinner, I’m skipping the steak every time. I do it better at home.
Sadly, this doesn’t apply to a lot of seafood, however. Absolutely buy the most expensive scallops, for example, because they are handled, processed, and stored better, resulting in a very noticeable difference in quality; on the other hand, the difference between the cheapest and mid-range is less noticeable. Same with most sashimi. Oh, and even moreso with sake (obviously not seafood).
Its more important to enjoy what you are eating than it is to follow someone else’s food “rules”. Put ketchup on hotdogs, pineapple on pizza, smear wasabi on sushi, coffee with pasta.
Try it the recommended way for at least one or two bites and then judge how to improve it for yourself.
I like ketchup and mustard on my dogs. I think pineapple on pizza is revolting, but I don’t pineapple-shame those who like it.
Ketchup and Mustard is hot dog glory. What ever the fuck I was served in Chicago had me searching for the meat
I feel obligated to plug the Seattle dog simply for being a different third option.
A Seattle dog is simply a hot dog on a roll that has been toasted inside and had a shmear of cream cheese. Standard is to come with fried onions, but it’s optional. Then you can add whatever you wants far as the usual hot dog toppings go. The hot dog or sausage is usually split open and grilled.
I like it with fried onions, sauerkraut, mustard, and a bit of ketchup. The ketchup balances out the saltiness of the rest. You could do relish. I also like it just plain with no extras.
I got a hotdog at a food truck that appeared near my house a few years ago. I asked for just ketchup on the dog. She laughed and said “You’re a little boy! That’s OK, little boys get hotdogs too.” I’m like, lady I am giving you money right now, is there a version of this encounter where you’re not judging me?
It’s 100% the norm to put ketchup on hot dogs. She can go fuck right off.
I thought she was judging him for not having mustard.
And rightfully so.
since when was ketchup on hotdogs considered unusual!? i thought that was normal my whole life!
not that it matters anyway :P
It is standard.
I think it is some regional pride thing in the states. Chicago people were ready to throw down on it.
coffee with pasta, Do you just plonk it in with the sugar or do you dunk like a biscuit?
in parts of Italy it is highly discouraged to have a main dish with a coffee drink.
Nor do Europeans drink soda with a meal.
Ah I see you are enjoying yourself. Would you care to know that you are, in fact, enjoying yourself incorrectly?
There is no joy to be had the way you are doing it. If there is, it is a fault in your character.
The only time I think somebody can really enjoy something incorrectly is in karaoke (not bar karaoke, real karaoke when you get a room) because you can bring down the whole experience so easily. It’s a social activity, not a contest. And it’s a fun activity, not a wake.
smear wasabi on sushi
There is nothing wrong with this. Sushi cehfs put it on the underside. If you want more, put it on top. It’s generally considered bad manners to mix soy sauce with wasabi and dunk but, to be honest, I see that fairly frequently here in Japan as well. Mixing soy sauce and wasabi to pour over chirashi is fine.
I love food bullies who get off on telling people how to eat and what they should like. The Chef was written for those people.
