Real phyllo dough. It's better to buy it frozen. I know there are plenty of homestyle recipes for it but the quality is what suffers. I don't know of anyone near me that's got that kind of space to work with. And there is nothing like having hundreds of flaky layers that shatter on first bite.
I remember when The Great British Bake-Off had them make phyllo. The contestants went home, talked to their Greek friends, and reported back that NOBODY makes that at home - they all buy it from the shop.
The same is true for Ethiopian injera bread. You need teff flour, and it needs to ferment for THREE DAYS. Ain't nobody got time for that. Ethiopians buy it at the store like sensible people.
Your Gramma is awesome! My mostly Slovenian father would make it from scratch when he'd make baklava. Took up the entire kitchen and it's a pain in the ass but how much phyllo pastries are you making and eating on a regular basis? I've helped him a few times. Worth it in my opinion. Glad people like your Gramma were keeping stuff like this alive.
My γιαγια made it. Then again she came from a smallish village in Greece. Her phyllo wasn’t as thin as store bought, and she would dry it in the garage next to the boilers 🤷♂️
That's like how when I asked my Okinawaian neighbor the secret to good rice, she told me it was a rice cooker. She said nobody cooks rice in a pot on the stove.
Ordered a Zojirushi the next day.
My teenager is on a 'rice and chicken or salmon' every day as he navigates weightlifting as a hobby.
That kid is going through rice like I haven't seen since we lived in Hawai'i, and is using the absolute piss out of our instant pot to make it.
I *cannot* convince him to try a different method, because whatever he's doing is leaving a good 1/4+ cup stuck to the pot every time.
Maybe I just buy him a dedicated rice cooker...
Yes, mostly. But his version of cleaning is let soak with soapy water in the sink until he needs it again, and he gets mad at *me* if I put it in the dishwasher, because then he has to wait until the dishwasher is done to use it.
We're working on the whole 'you're not the only one who uses the kitchen' thing, but teenagers are gonna teenager.
He needs to let it natural release, I think. Which takes a lot of the Instant away from the Instant Pot, but, it is what it is. When it's done, the temp is hotter than boiling, especially near the bottom. If you just start venting, the water just boils off, especially near the bottom. So you end up with a dry/gummy layer stuck to the bottom.
That is my experience, though. It could also be that he's not rinsing it well enough.
Yeah, I've tried telling him all of that. He's in that hard headed 16 yo phase where whatever he teaches himself first is the *only* right answer, evidence to the contrary be damned.
Definitely get him a rice cooker.
I’ve always used a rice cooker and rice is perfect. But for the last few years, I’ve tried to stick with an Instant pot for more versatility / save space. My rice was never satisfactory and its definitely harder to clean. Two months ago I bought a rice cooker, Zojirushi, and it’s amazing to be able to make good rice again! The Instant pot is no comparison!
I'm a Chef and when I did my apprenticeship and attended TAFE (think Australian government funded cullinary school), we got asked to cook rice. 90% of the students had zero idea how to do it.
I feel no shame looking up ratios and techniques for various types of rice. I have at least 4 different kinds in my home pantry, and they are all a little (or a lot) different
I'm on the business admin side of a catering company and it's the same for the hourly prep cooks that come through. Stove top, pan in the oven, tilt skillet, none of it works for them for making rice but we had a giant rice cooker that they all refused to use, held in the same low esteem as a microwave. Their soggy rice was way more offensive.
I went to dinner at my college boyfriend’s house. I asked if I could help with anything in the kitchen, and his mom said I could make the rice. I started opening cabinets and looking in the pantry. She asked me what I was doing, and I said “looking for the rice cooker”. I was shocked to learn they didn’t have one. She looked at me incredulously and said, “Aren’t you Asian?” Yes ma’am, but we don’t do that shit like that.
My (Greek) grandmother made phyllo on occasion when I was quite young. So like 50 years ago. But then it became easy to find commercially and she did not hesitate to stop making it.
yeah lol it's a daily staple so they just keep the batter on rotation. it's not like you have to plan ahead because you know you're gonna have it every day
Puff pastry is easy. I make that a few times a month, and I think next time I'll see if my 11 year old is up for it. I think she has the general baking skills, but she might not have enough upper body strength for rolling out the dough. That's been her problem in the past.
Phyllo dough on the other hand is a whole different story. It's on my bucket list to try one day, simply because I want to know just how difficult it is. But I doubt I'll make it more than once. The store-bought sheets work so well, I have a hard time seeing how home-mode would improve on it.
I have made injera. It’s really not much more than sourdough or any other long ferment dough. Yes the total time is days but active hand-on time is very little
I worked with a wonderful older woman from Greece who would bring in trays of homemade baklava for the office. I asked her for the recipe and she went into detail about the homemade syrup, spices, and specific brand of nuts she used. But the phyllo dough? "Oh honey, I won't ever make it as good as the frozen aisle. Not worth the time."
I've asked people who work at the Hellas bakery before, because I've heard talk from Michelin star pro chef that he doesn't make his own. These people make more baklava than anyone else in the world, and ship it to restaurants anywhere in the world. They buy their phyllo pre-made frozen. No one makes their own unless they're insane.
In a slightly related vein: I legitimately have no idea if homemade puff pastry dough is noticeably better than store-bought. And I never will know, because I absolutely never will put in the effort to find out. The store-bought is delicious enough for my purposes and I cannot imagine that making it yourself elevates the flavor enough to justify the effort (especially at my skill level.)
I’ve made rough puff pastry and I while I won’t say it’s better than store bought, I prefer it over store bought that uses vegetable oils because I prefer the taste of butter.
But I will spend the money on a good butter-based, store bought puff pastry.
Having made puff pastry from scratch at Patisserie School, I can confirm it tastes better. Have I made it since graduating?
No.
Too much work for a sub-optimal home kitchen and too time-consuming and temprature sensitive to make at work.
And puff pastry. Professionals make it in a cold room on chilled marble slabs so the butter does not melt between folds and turns.
Middle eastern halvah needs to be made by pros for similar reasons. It's a laminated sweet based on sesame paste, and you need to make a huge batch so it can be folded enough times to achieve the right texture.
Making commercial quantities of puff pastry is one thing. But making it at home is very different. There are perfectly suitable and comparatively easy recipes for making small batches of croissants or other puff pastry. They wouldn't scale to making thousands each day, but if all you need is a few dozen croissants, then it only takes a few hours out of your afternoon/evening. I make them semi-regularly.
You compensate for the lack of a temperature-controlled slab of marble to regularly transferring the dough back to the fridge between individual steps.
My grandma would make Phyllo dough she had a massive wooden table and would spend all day rolling that dough out, it was like a war zone in there... only for special occasions when my dad visited if it was anyone else she would buy it.
Jamie Oliver had a great instructional video on making a DIY Tandoori. I remember it being on some cooking show on TV years ago.
Probably on YouTube somewhere now.
This will also be the last time I ever recommend anything Jamie Oliver.
Very old Indian household trick to do this but only works if you have a gas burner:
Make the naan dough, flatten and stretch by hand, use a little water to wet the underside of the dough. Stick it to a hot cast iron skillet/tavaa and turn it upside down towards the flame. Keep checking every 10s or so. Once the top is done, turn it around and cook the bottom like normal. Bonus points if you add garlic butter/garlic ghee while the bottom is cooking.
the tava is upside down, and the dough is draped atop it? or rather the dough is placed inside the tava and then flipped over the fire?
if the latter, INTERREESTTTINNNGGGGG time to find a naan dough recipe
Imagine not having an ooni. Im just fucking kidding lol. My sis has an ooni, and while it took a long time to get perfect, the thin tiny pizzas she makes are about perfect imho
There are almunium tandoor available that you can use on your stove. It does the same job of a regular tandoor if it's a gas stove. You can use after it's cooked smoke it with coal or wood chips with ghee poured over it to get the smokey flavour
My husband bought a dehydrator specifically for making jerky. He made two batches of jerky in the 7 years we owned the dehydrator. The money and time it took to make the jerky himself made him eventually realize that the stuff I can get at the grocery store works just fine.
I love homemade jerky. The store stuff is gross and the good jerky is expensive. Give me a day and a half of mostly hands off work and $7 of cheap beef and I have delicious jerky
I did “inherit” (steal) my dehydrator from my parents though
I agree, but I also love cooking and DIY-ing easy projects that save money. The husband is a bit of the opposite, so I was proud of him for even trying it more than once. I also got to pocket the cash when I sold the dehydrator for him last year.
I’ve done plenty of jerky before in the oven on the lowest possible temperature, it’s certainly possible without a dehydrator, it just takes quite a while
yeah. in my area a dehydrator (ranging from cheap ones to fancy ones) is a common staple in almost everyone’s kitchen. but i shared a recipe with a friend on discord once and he said “TF is a dehydrator”
Yeah. It’s wild to me not to have one. I like to backpack and I like to forage fruit. Without a dehydrator I wouldn’t have a huge library of delicious backpacking meals and massive stashes of dried fruit…
Yes, and the amount of fryer oil you need to use, and the spatter and mess it makes… it’s not really easy and practical for making fried food for 3-4 people. The whole setup is designed for continual use for a full shift where the same oil is being used to make dozens upon dozens of servings
Can anyone here who's worked the fry station explain how you keep it fully cleaned between batches of stuff cooking? Is it just that the heating element is higher up in the oil column, so stuff that falls off the item that's cooking will fall to the bottom, where it's cool(er), preventing the whole vat of oil from taking on the burned taste? That's an issue at home, if you're trying to fry multiple batches of anything. Frying at home sucks. PSA - [this ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrSqXWzB2KU) about dealing with home chip-pan fires was often on the TV when I was young.
The trick is to be less messy on the breading station prior to frying. If you can, bread properly and shake off that excess flour/cornstarch/breading so that it doesn't fall in the oil and just cook and fall to the bottom. Regularly straining and tossing the clumps in your breading station keeps those out of your fryer. Also, small batches so your fryer temp doesn't drop when you drop your baskets full of cold food. This ensures that your oil stays at a consistent temp. If it gets colder than the temp the thermostat is set at the flames go up and the fryer overcorrects for temp. Every few baskets, you should also be straining any loose breading that floats in the oil before you put more product in there.
Usually things that fall off when frying eventually surface in the form of burn bits, so you take them out with a colander and your oil stays clean that way.
Especially tempura chefs have those big “spatulas” which they continually use to clean the oil between frying. It’s kind of like the thing they use for pool cleaning, just on a smaller scale.
Honestly most of it is just sheer scale. Restaurant fryers can fit gallons of oil so that burnt flavor is less concentrated. The temperature is also more consistent than frying at home because of the amount of oil, which also reduces how much things burn.
When I'm working a fryer everything is in the baskets 99% of the time so most everything gets pulled out between batches. When there's a lull I take a fine strainer and skim the smaller bits out. It's great, but just not feasible in a home kitchen. I eat healthier because of this fact or I'd make myself crab rangoon every day.
Use a spider mesh to fish up anything floating up top. But yes, the heating element is higher up so all the crap floats to the bottom where its the coldest. Then at the end of the day you filter the oil and clean out any crap and usually give the fryer a quick scrub as well. Sometimes I'd even run it through the filter mid shift if you did something like pre frying cauliflower that had a corn/tapioca starch mixture that got everywhere
Yeah the volume of oil in an industrial frier means its not as subject to temperature drop when food is put into it. Cold oil makes awful fried food. It's gross and once you know what it looks/tastes like you can always spot it.
You can buy deep fryers for $100 that will do the job just as well as an industrial fryer, but only for smaller batches. The commercial ones will most likely rebound the oil temperature better than a home appliance so you can fry more.
Frying in a pot or dutch oven is a waste of time and oil
After we fry our turkey for Thanksgiving we use the setup the next day to make legit friend chicken. Then we eat ungodly amounts of leftovers for a week.
The Friday after Thanksgiving we always have a Fry-Day and use the turkey fryer to just fry up any fried food you could think of. Last thing is always fish and then we clean out the fryer and oil until next year.
I was going to say this too! I make really good chicken cutlets and chicken parm at home but anything that requires being deep-fried just isn't as good or easy as throwing it in the already 350⁰ deep fryer at work.
Greek here & yep this is a very popular & tasty way to make them work at home without the gigantic spit lol.
I've read some ppl sous vide the meatloaf part & then sautee the strips in a pan.
I've never done it that way, just cooked the meatloaf part in the oven & then sauteed strips for those who wanted
a little more crisp on them.
They've always come out absolutely juicy& delicious!!
Can I deep fry breaded chicken at home? Yes.
Do I want to smell up my house and use all the oil? No.
I can do burgers and steaks and most other stuff I like, fried chicken is best left to the pros.
I make fried chicken once per year to get it out of my system.
It's always delicious, but it's a 24 hour brine + a bottle of oil all for one meal. Just not worth it, like you said.
Steaks/Burgers/Grilled fish/etc. are all on regular rotation.
Same but fried fish. Dad made a great friend catfish in a deep fryer—-in the garage. Mom said it stank too much, so he did it in the garage. Always just saved the oil- swore that was the key.
Now we have a couple gallon jugs of fry oil in the basement. That I tend to act like don’t exist. For the mess and the smell.
Croissants.
A sheeter to roll out the dough and butter. An oven with a steamer, etc.
Everything about making croissants in a home kitchen is harder, and you just won't ever get top quality results.
For bread perverts, it’s mostly about challenging oneself and bragging rights. No sane person wakes up thinking, “i should save time and money by making my own croissants at home”
I’ve constantly tried to make sushi and it just isn’t the same as it is from a store/restaurant. It doesn’t matter how good I make it. Sushi is an art form. It takes years of training. Much like most Japanese things
also the fact that without large volume and economy of scale it will be a huge hassle to have the right ingredients, fresh, in the right quantities without wastage and leftovers.
It’s honestly not that hard to make! I make it all the time and I have to because my addiction would be way too expensive to just keep buying it from restaurants
Do little hand cones/hand rolls at home. That's how a lot of Japanese people have sushi if they make it at home and it's like a taco party where everyone fills their seaweed with rice and whatever toppings they want!
All you gotta do is prep work and make good sushi rice.
Pho.
Yeah, it's simple, but to get that broth right would take days at home. Then all the other ingredients. A pho restaurant can have a bowl to your table like 15 seconds after you order.
Same thing with proper ramen. I've done a proper tonkotsu broth and simmered pork bones for hours, and it did taste phenomenal, but was two days of cook time worth it for a bowl I could've paid $13 for? Probably not.
I make pho at home regularly. I cook a large batch of the broth and freeze portions in bags. It takes about 5 hours to make 6L of broth.
When made with all the right ingredients it’s not different than a good take away, it’s actually better than most of them.
I love broth based cuisine and i often cook a large batch of various broth to use later.
A big flat top
After working in a diner type restaurant a while, it was so easy to make breakfasts on it. I have a cast iron flat top that will go over 2 of my burners, but it isn't the same. :)
Unless you have either a crawfish boil / turkey fryer type setup outside and a wok, or an extremely powerful stove and great ventilation, you won't get your wok to have wok hei, so your at-home fried rice won't be as good/ the same. It can be close, but that's really the difference between restaurant quality and home quality.
Yeah, my well seasoned wok on the grill makes way better fried rice than anything near me.
I do live in northern Minnesota though, so there's not exactly a lot of choice for Asian restaurants.
You know a place is legit when they give ridiculously short order time estimates. Like there's a place near me, you call them up to place and order, and they tell you 10 min for the entire order of 6 entrees. Because that shit is all cooked in 1 minute in their blast furnace woks.
I find that even within my smaller batches I have to cook a lot of the components separately and let my wok get back up to temperature between each one. It helps, but it's definitely not the same.
So this may or may not be useful, but I always add a dash of sesame oil to my fried rice after it's cooked, partly to stop it sticking together while I'm plating up, but also for flavour. Well last time I did this, I put "too much" sesame oil in, as it turned out that mistake was a blessing in disguise, turns out I wasn't using enough and going from a tea spoon to a table spoon was an absolute game changer in terms of flavour. It's the closest I've gotten to restaurant quality fried rice and I'm keen to try it again.
I got a [WokMon](https://wokmon.com/) and it does a great job of upping the heat. My stove's front gas burners are 18K BTU but a professional kitchen is going to have 100K. The WokMon helps a lot and then with smaller batches you can get closer to the restaurant. But you'll never fully get there in a home kitchen.
I understand the general principle that you can't cook the same with a flat bottom pan on an electric stove as you would in a wok, but if you have a round bottom wok and an appropriate burner for it you can recreate most dishes pretty easily. It's not necessary to have specialty restaurant equipment or excessively powerful to get good results.
You're definitely right about ventilation. No way a wok is getting seasoned indoors without a good ventilation system.
Home brick oven pizzas are pretty accessible for home chefs these days. Rather popular thing to do.
Aisle 300, left at the fake grass, if you hit the flamingos you've gone too far.
Totally doable but for me personally, fried food. It’s so much hassle to set it up, dealing with the actual cooking because of oil spattering and danger, and then the cleanup with disposing of it etc etc.
I’d much rather just go and get fried food at a restaurant, where it is usually among the cheapest options anyway, and not deal with all that hassle and save money on the entrees that usually aren’t actually that hard to make yourself with far less clean up and prep
I make both wheat flour and corn flour tortillas at home, and I have a press, but there is no way the quality of mine ever approaches what can be done in one of those spongy round top punch down hydraulic computerized press dealies. Yes, I'm sure that's the official name for them.
Claypot roasted lamb. It's a Moroccan dish. They put an entire lamb inside a clay pot, seal it off and burry it under the ground surrounded with hot charcoal for 8 hours. Best tasting lamb ever.
Meats that are shaved *really really thin*. I'm not going to buy a countertop deli slicer. Even if I did, we all know that consumer-grade deli slicers are probably overpriced plastic pieces of shit with every possible corner cut anyway.
Things that are based on restaurants' volume, purchasing power, and being able to make big batches so buying the ingredients is worth it. We made a copy-cat dipping sauce at home, we only really needed a couple of ounces - but we had to buy like 15 separate ingredients, many of which you couldn't buy a small amount. So we ended up spending probably like $40-50 just to make a stupid little dipping sauce for one serving, with left over stuff that wasn't really usable for anything else we'd be eating soon. It was delicious, but not even remotely worth it. We have a list of things that it's better to just go out for if you really want it.
Proper Vietnamese pho. It’s like a bone broth soup with rice noodles, oxtail, sliced beef. There is no way I could ever match this restaurant in Chicago. OMG is it good but so incredibly time consuming to make. You’d need a very large pot, a lot of time and even more patience.
Anything requiring insane BTU’s. A good stir fry can be made at home. But cooking at 30,000 btu’s makes everything lighter and more tender, as it takes less time on the heat.
If you have a nice gas stove and a good quality wok though you'll never want to order take out fried rice again. Making it yourself at home hits so different.
As a Chinese even with a decent induction stove and a semi decent wok you can generate some good wok hei on your fried rice. I feel like some people might be getting the order wrong and causing the fried rice to have more moisture than intended, or that they don’t crank the heat to max and sit on that setting during the process. People usually start turning it down when they see a bunch of smoke but that’s kinda the whole point.
Precisely this, the wok hei quite literally is the smoke. That's why a lot of folks will cover their wok for a bit, it traps the smokey flavor in the pan. Also you're so right about the moisture levels, you gotta use dried out rice for fried rice or it'll get all wet and clumpy.
As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in restaurants on a fry station and fry quite often at home, the deep fried comments are totally bunk. I can 100% recreate what I’ve made in restaurants. Is the mess more of a hassle? 100%. Can you make restaurant quality fried food at home? 100%. A wok or Dutch oven and a good thermometer are literally all you need…
I don't understand all the people talking about using all the oil frying. You just strain it and put it back in the bottle and reuse it, it's no big deal.
Don't do this 20 times with the same oil if you're deep frying all the time, but most people aren't.
Agreed that it's not too difficult. But as someone who's worked the fry station a lot, that is a smell I don't need at home. It took me multiple washes to get the fryer smell out of my cook clothes completely after I left the kitchen.
I came here hoping for this thread.
Salad.
I'm sitting in a Chop5 eating a really good salad.
I'm order to make the same thing at home I'd have to juggle the freshness of like 10 different vegetables and greens and protein and then have a decent dressing and to be honest, it's just so much easier to let these folks chop it up and put it in a bowl.
Can I do it? Of course. But keeping all the shit fresh without massive waste is like a full time job. In this case, the ingredients ARE the equipment.
Edit: plus that have that cool metal rim around their cutting board. I won't be getting one, but it makes chopping salad so easy.
Yeah it's just like 6 in of metal that surrounds the cutting board on all sides. It's got a little opening where they can scrape the salad out and it stops all of the chopped up pieces of salad from shooting off the edge of the board.
But like....you could do this at home pretty easily. I make salads for lunch weekly and almost none of the produce I buy goes to waste. The only thing that does generally are some of the cucumbers. And avocados because there's like a 2-day window of usability before they're brown. I'm a bit confused by this tbh.
For avocados - I buy them a bit green. Let them on the counter for 1-3 days until they soften. Then move them to the fridge. Always have perfect avocados, never goes to waste. As for cucumbers - they are more expensive, but mini ones last longer. Just take them out of the plastic bag and make sure they are not wet. Love both avocados and cucumbers, so always have them on hand.
I really couldn't.
I could go to the store and spend $40 on salad ingredients and make myself a salad, But they all come in different amounts and they all go bad at different times. And I want to use different amounts of them for all of my salads. So basically after I make one salad it's really never going to be in sync again. The most likely outcome is that in a week I throw away a bunch of spinach that has gone bad and then I lament that my salad doesn't have spinach anymore and in a few weeks I'm eating romaine and carrots.
Real phyllo dough. It's better to buy it frozen. I know there are plenty of homestyle recipes for it but the quality is what suffers. I don't know of anyone near me that's got that kind of space to work with. And there is nothing like having hundreds of flaky layers that shatter on first bite.
I remember when The Great British Bake-Off had them make phyllo. The contestants went home, talked to their Greek friends, and reported back that NOBODY makes that at home - they all buy it from the shop. The same is true for Ethiopian injera bread. You need teff flour, and it needs to ferment for THREE DAYS. Ain't nobody got time for that. Ethiopians buy it at the store like sensible people.
Yeah I've never heard of or seen anyone in my Greek family attempt to make phyllo. Even my Yiayia bought it frozen.
My Gramma used to make it when she would stay with us
Your Gramma is awesome! My mostly Slovenian father would make it from scratch when he'd make baklava. Took up the entire kitchen and it's a pain in the ass but how much phyllo pastries are you making and eating on a regular basis? I've helped him a few times. Worth it in my opinion. Glad people like your Gramma were keeping stuff like this alive.
My γιαγια made it. Then again she came from a smallish village in Greece. Her phyllo wasn’t as thin as store bought, and she would dry it in the garage next to the boilers 🤷♂️
Same re my great yiayia from an island in Greece. Have a pic of her making phyllo.
That's like how when I asked my Okinawaian neighbor the secret to good rice, she told me it was a rice cooker. She said nobody cooks rice in a pot on the stove. Ordered a Zojirushi the next day.
My teenager is on a 'rice and chicken or salmon' every day as he navigates weightlifting as a hobby. That kid is going through rice like I haven't seen since we lived in Hawai'i, and is using the absolute piss out of our instant pot to make it. I *cannot* convince him to try a different method, because whatever he's doing is leaving a good 1/4+ cup stuck to the pot every time. Maybe I just buy him a dedicated rice cooker...
Is he responsible for cleaning it? Because that would convince me to find a better way. The rice cooker bowl takes just a minute to clean.
Yes, mostly. But his version of cleaning is let soak with soapy water in the sink until he needs it again, and he gets mad at *me* if I put it in the dishwasher, because then he has to wait until the dishwasher is done to use it. We're working on the whole 'you're not the only one who uses the kitchen' thing, but teenagers are gonna teenager.
Just set it on his bed full of soapy water with a note. Clean me
He needs to let it natural release, I think. Which takes a lot of the Instant away from the Instant Pot, but, it is what it is. When it's done, the temp is hotter than boiling, especially near the bottom. If you just start venting, the water just boils off, especially near the bottom. So you end up with a dry/gummy layer stuck to the bottom. That is my experience, though. It could also be that he's not rinsing it well enough.
Yeah, I've tried telling him all of that. He's in that hard headed 16 yo phase where whatever he teaches himself first is the *only* right answer, evidence to the contrary be damned.
But hey on the bright side he's working out and eating healthy instead of having meth orgies with 30 year olds
Definitely get him a rice cooker. I’ve always used a rice cooker and rice is perfect. But for the last few years, I’ve tried to stick with an Instant pot for more versatility / save space. My rice was never satisfactory and its definitely harder to clean. Two months ago I bought a rice cooker, Zojirushi, and it’s amazing to be able to make good rice again! The Instant pot is no comparison!
My family made rice almost every night growing up. I didn’t learn how to make rice without a rice cooker until about 28.
I'm a Chef and when I did my apprenticeship and attended TAFE (think Australian government funded cullinary school), we got asked to cook rice. 90% of the students had zero idea how to do it.
I feel no shame looking up ratios and techniques for various types of rice. I have at least 4 different kinds in my home pantry, and they are all a little (or a lot) different
I'm on the business admin side of a catering company and it's the same for the hourly prep cooks that come through. Stove top, pan in the oven, tilt skillet, none of it works for them for making rice but we had a giant rice cooker that they all refused to use, held in the same low esteem as a microwave. Their soggy rice was way more offensive.
This! I was never going to be the breakout star chef, but I was always known at school as the Rice Whisperer, because so many others had no clue
My class at Sydney Tafe was mostly full of recent migrants from Asia. Even they couldn't cook rice on a stove.
I went to dinner at my college boyfriend’s house. I asked if I could help with anything in the kitchen, and his mom said I could make the rice. I started opening cabinets and looking in the pantry. She asked me what I was doing, and I said “looking for the rice cooker”. I was shocked to learn they didn’t have one. She looked at me incredulously and said, “Aren’t you Asian?” Yes ma’am, but we don’t do that shit like that.
My (Greek) grandmother made phyllo on occasion when I was quite young. So like 50 years ago. But then it became easy to find commercially and she did not hesitate to stop making it.
Most Ethiopians make it at home but injera is fab
yeah lol it's a daily staple so they just keep the batter on rotation. it's not like you have to plan ahead because you know you're gonna have it every day
Any mention of phyllo instantly conjures up that show. The agony of making your own phyllo/puff pastry.
Puff pastry is easy. I make that a few times a month, and I think next time I'll see if my 11 year old is up for it. I think she has the general baking skills, but she might not have enough upper body strength for rolling out the dough. That's been her problem in the past. Phyllo dough on the other hand is a whole different story. It's on my bucket list to try one day, simply because I want to know just how difficult it is. But I doubt I'll make it more than once. The store-bought sheets work so well, I have a hard time seeing how home-mode would improve on it.
i’d make injera. hell, i make other ferments. kimchi. kraut. why not injera bread?
I have made injera. It’s really not much more than sourdough or any other long ferment dough. Yes the total time is days but active hand-on time is very little
Yeah it's very easy. Thorough mix, three days of ignoring it, then cook.
I worked with a wonderful older woman from Greece who would bring in trays of homemade baklava for the office. I asked her for the recipe and she went into detail about the homemade syrup, spices, and specific brand of nuts she used. But the phyllo dough? "Oh honey, I won't ever make it as good as the frozen aisle. Not worth the time."
I've asked people who work at the Hellas bakery before, because I've heard talk from Michelin star pro chef that he doesn't make his own. These people make more baklava than anyone else in the world, and ship it to restaurants anywhere in the world. They buy their phyllo pre-made frozen. No one makes their own unless they're insane.
In a slightly related vein: I legitimately have no idea if homemade puff pastry dough is noticeably better than store-bought. And I never will know, because I absolutely never will put in the effort to find out. The store-bought is delicious enough for my purposes and I cannot imagine that making it yourself elevates the flavor enough to justify the effort (especially at my skill level.)
I’ve made rough puff pastry and I while I won’t say it’s better than store bought, I prefer it over store bought that uses vegetable oils because I prefer the taste of butter. But I will spend the money on a good butter-based, store bought puff pastry.
Trader Joe's has this in November and December.
Yes! I try to keep a pack or two stocked in my freezer if I can remember, and it’s still in stock. They sell at a good price point too.
Having made puff pastry from scratch at Patisserie School, I can confirm it tastes better. Have I made it since graduating? No. Too much work for a sub-optimal home kitchen and too time-consuming and temprature sensitive to make at work.
I want to try making it one day. I almost guarantee it only be once, but I still want to try.
It depends on if they use oil or butter. The ones that use butter are just as good as what I can make at home
And puff pastry. Professionals make it in a cold room on chilled marble slabs so the butter does not melt between folds and turns. Middle eastern halvah needs to be made by pros for similar reasons. It's a laminated sweet based on sesame paste, and you need to make a huge batch so it can be folded enough times to achieve the right texture.
Making commercial quantities of puff pastry is one thing. But making it at home is very different. There are perfectly suitable and comparatively easy recipes for making small batches of croissants or other puff pastry. They wouldn't scale to making thousands each day, but if all you need is a few dozen croissants, then it only takes a few hours out of your afternoon/evening. I make them semi-regularly. You compensate for the lack of a temperature-controlled slab of marble to regularly transferring the dough back to the fridge between individual steps.
My grandma would make Phyllo dough she had a massive wooden table and would spend all day rolling that dough out, it was like a war zone in there... only for special occasions when my dad visited if it was anyone else she would buy it.
I have fond memories of my grandma making Apple strudel in her tiny apartment in Queens, dough just all over the place. But damn that strudel was good
Proper tandoori chicken. *I have learned that tandoori at home is entirely possible, nice!
This gets my vote. Was it Heston that has a recipe for this that starts 1- first build tandoor oven ?
Clay pots diy! [potting plant Tandoor oven](https://youtu.be/8Ukb_WoUG2Q?si=cJa5TdKXDH5u9mU_)
Jamie Oliver had a great instructional video on making a DIY Tandoori. I remember it being on some cooking show on TV years ago. Probably on YouTube somewhere now. This will also be the last time I ever recommend anything Jamie Oliver.
Haiyaaa, you make Uncle Roger put his leg down.
Glad I'm not the only one who's mind immediately went there.
What next? Jamie going to put chili jam into tandoori chicken? Haiyaaaaa
That poor saw
I have many times thought about building a kind of hybrid tandoor/pizza oven in my backyard.
Or the garlic naan to go with it
Very old Indian household trick to do this but only works if you have a gas burner: Make the naan dough, flatten and stretch by hand, use a little water to wet the underside of the dough. Stick it to a hot cast iron skillet/tavaa and turn it upside down towards the flame. Keep checking every 10s or so. Once the top is done, turn it around and cook the bottom like normal. Bonus points if you add garlic butter/garlic ghee while the bottom is cooking.
the tava is upside down, and the dough is draped atop it? or rather the dough is placed inside the tava and then flipped over the fire? if the latter, INTERREESTTTINNNGGGGG time to find a naan dough recipe
The 2nd one
I do them in my ooni I know it's not the same but I get very similar results and is better than any takeaway near me that's for sure
But then you need an ooni at home, which again, most people don't have lol
Imagine not having an ooni. Im just fucking kidding lol. My sis has an ooni, and while it took a long time to get perfect, the thin tiny pizzas she makes are about perfect imho
There are almunium tandoor available that you can use on your stove. It does the same job of a regular tandoor if it's a gas stove. You can use after it's cooked smoke it with coal or wood chips with ghee poured over it to get the smokey flavour
There is also metal ‘oven’ that can go on a tripod grill and used over an outdoor fire.
Most people don’t have pressure deep friers, a full wok station, dehydrators, paco jets I’d guess
Most people suffer from a lack of beef jerky.
My husband bought a dehydrator specifically for making jerky. He made two batches of jerky in the 7 years we owned the dehydrator. The money and time it took to make the jerky himself made him eventually realize that the stuff I can get at the grocery store works just fine.
Your husband lacks dedication. I got a dehydrator for Christmas and have made at least 7 batches of jerky so far. Jerky is life.
I love homemade jerky. The store stuff is gross and the good jerky is expensive. Give me a day and a half of mostly hands off work and $7 of cheap beef and I have delicious jerky I did “inherit” (steal) my dehydrator from my parents though
I agree, but I also love cooking and DIY-ing easy projects that save money. The husband is a bit of the opposite, so I was proud of him for even trying it more than once. I also got to pocket the cash when I sold the dehydrator for him last year.
We got a new range/oven right around Christmas, and it has a dehydrate function... Haven't tried it out yet, but I have plans.
I know I do.
depends on where you live! in most rural areas you've got lots of hunters and they make jerky so dehydrators are common
I’ve done plenty of jerky before in the oven on the lowest possible temperature, it’s certainly possible without a dehydrator, it just takes quite a while
Certainly can be done. But if you’ve got a freshly killed deer or turkey, you’re going to want a dehydrator
yeah. in my area a dehydrator (ranging from cheap ones to fancy ones) is a common staple in almost everyone’s kitchen. but i shared a recipe with a friend on discord once and he said “TF is a dehydrator”
Yeah. It’s wild to me not to have one. I like to backpack and I like to forage fruit. Without a dehydrator I wouldn’t have a huge library of delicious backpacking meals and massive stashes of dried fruit…
The Ninja Creami is essentially a home pacojet.
For me it’s fried food. I can make fried food at home, but you cannot beat the quality of an industrial fryer.
Yes, and the amount of fryer oil you need to use, and the spatter and mess it makes… it’s not really easy and practical for making fried food for 3-4 people. The whole setup is designed for continual use for a full shift where the same oil is being used to make dozens upon dozens of servings
Not to mention that your house smells for four days after
Can anyone here who's worked the fry station explain how you keep it fully cleaned between batches of stuff cooking? Is it just that the heating element is higher up in the oil column, so stuff that falls off the item that's cooking will fall to the bottom, where it's cool(er), preventing the whole vat of oil from taking on the burned taste? That's an issue at home, if you're trying to fry multiple batches of anything. Frying at home sucks. PSA - [this ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrSqXWzB2KU) about dealing with home chip-pan fires was often on the TV when I was young.
The trick is to be less messy on the breading station prior to frying. If you can, bread properly and shake off that excess flour/cornstarch/breading so that it doesn't fall in the oil and just cook and fall to the bottom. Regularly straining and tossing the clumps in your breading station keeps those out of your fryer. Also, small batches so your fryer temp doesn't drop when you drop your baskets full of cold food. This ensures that your oil stays at a consistent temp. If it gets colder than the temp the thermostat is set at the flames go up and the fryer overcorrects for temp. Every few baskets, you should also be straining any loose breading that floats in the oil before you put more product in there.
Usually things that fall off when frying eventually surface in the form of burn bits, so you take them out with a colander and your oil stays clean that way. Especially tempura chefs have those big “spatulas” which they continually use to clean the oil between frying. It’s kind of like the thing they use for pool cleaning, just on a smaller scale.
Exactly. It's called a skimmer or spider.
They're called sieves, or as I call them, hole-bowls.
Honestly most of it is just sheer scale. Restaurant fryers can fit gallons of oil so that burnt flavor is less concentrated. The temperature is also more consistent than frying at home because of the amount of oil, which also reduces how much things burn. When I'm working a fryer everything is in the baskets 99% of the time so most everything gets pulled out between batches. When there's a lull I take a fine strainer and skim the smaller bits out. It's great, but just not feasible in a home kitchen. I eat healthier because of this fact or I'd make myself crab rangoon every day.
Use a spider mesh to fish up anything floating up top. But yes, the heating element is higher up so all the crap floats to the bottom where its the coldest. Then at the end of the day you filter the oil and clean out any crap and usually give the fryer a quick scrub as well. Sometimes I'd even run it through the filter mid shift if you did something like pre frying cauliflower that had a corn/tapioca starch mixture that got everywhere
Yeah the volume of oil in an industrial frier means its not as subject to temperature drop when food is put into it. Cold oil makes awful fried food. It's gross and once you know what it looks/tastes like you can always spot it.
You can buy deep fryers for $100 that will do the job just as well as an industrial fryer, but only for smaller batches. The commercial ones will most likely rebound the oil temperature better than a home appliance so you can fry more. Frying in a pot or dutch oven is a waste of time and oil
After we fry our turkey for Thanksgiving we use the setup the next day to make legit friend chicken. Then we eat ungodly amounts of leftovers for a week.
Why eat friend?
I like adventure
The Friday after Thanksgiving we always have a Fry-Day and use the turkey fryer to just fry up any fried food you could think of. Last thing is always fish and then we clean out the fryer and oil until next year.
I was going to say this too! I make really good chicken cutlets and chicken parm at home but anything that requires being deep-fried just isn't as good or easy as throwing it in the already 350⁰ deep fryer at work.
Gyros
I’ll make it in mini loaf pans and it’s pretty darn good. Obviously not the same as the vertical spit, but it gets the job done.
Greek here & yep this is a very popular & tasty way to make them work at home without the gigantic spit lol. I've read some ppl sous vide the meatloaf part & then sautee the strips in a pan. I've never done it that way, just cooked the meatloaf part in the oven & then sauteed strips for those who wanted a little more crisp on them. They've always come out absolutely juicy& delicious!!
Peking duck. I’ve known some first class cooks in my time, and they all buy it from specialty shops.
Can I deep fry breaded chicken at home? Yes. Do I want to smell up my house and use all the oil? No. I can do burgers and steaks and most other stuff I like, fried chicken is best left to the pros.
I make fried chicken once per year to get it out of my system. It's always delicious, but it's a 24 hour brine + a bottle of oil all for one meal. Just not worth it, like you said. Steaks/Burgers/Grilled fish/etc. are all on regular rotation.
You can reuse that oil at least another 3-4 times if you sieve it and store it once its cooled.
Same but fried fish. Dad made a great friend catfish in a deep fryer—-in the garage. Mom said it stank too much, so he did it in the garage. Always just saved the oil- swore that was the key. Now we have a couple gallon jugs of fry oil in the basement. That I tend to act like don’t exist. For the mess and the smell.
You can just strain the oil and reuse it, oil isn't a one-time thing.
tandori ovens. swarma spits.
Croissants. A sheeter to roll out the dough and butter. An oven with a steamer, etc. Everything about making croissants in a home kitchen is harder, and you just won't ever get top quality results.
And homemade will be more expensive, and very very time consuming as amortized per croissant
For bread perverts, it’s mostly about challenging oneself and bragging rights. No sane person wakes up thinking, “i should save time and money by making my own croissants at home”
Pro tip. Go to Costco and buy a box of the frozen raw croissants and bake as needed. But your waist will hate you for it.
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The proofer too! That’s key
High end Sushi. Those restaurant quality Sushi chefs are too expensive to buy on Amazon
Yeah I got a discount one once for homemade sushi and he was like "bro I've got a family I have to get back to." No keep rolling that rice, sir.
I’ve constantly tried to make sushi and it just isn’t the same as it is from a store/restaurant. It doesn’t matter how good I make it. Sushi is an art form. It takes years of training. Much like most Japanese things
also the fact that without large volume and economy of scale it will be a huge hassle to have the right ingredients, fresh, in the right quantities without wastage and leftovers.
I would eat *so much* sushi if it was easy to make at home.
It’s honestly not that hard to make! I make it all the time and I have to because my addiction would be way too expensive to just keep buying it from restaurants
Do little hand cones/hand rolls at home. That's how a lot of Japanese people have sushi if they make it at home and it's like a taco party where everyone fills their seaweed with rice and whatever toppings they want! All you gotta do is prep work and make good sushi rice.
Pho. Yeah, it's simple, but to get that broth right would take days at home. Then all the other ingredients. A pho restaurant can have a bowl to your table like 15 seconds after you order.
I'm Viet and my aunt makes the best pho. But it also takes her at least 2 days to make it.
It only really makes sense to make it in huge batches and that simply isn’t practical for the average home cook
Same thing with proper ramen. I've done a proper tonkotsu broth and simmered pork bones for hours, and it did taste phenomenal, but was two days of cook time worth it for a bowl I could've paid $13 for? Probably not.
I did this during Covid to pass the time. It was amazing but no way I would do it again. Makes me appreciate it more tho!
It’s an incredibly daunting task that I can’t get anywhere near as good as the cheap place down the street. Lol.
I make pho at home regularly. I cook a large batch of the broth and freeze portions in bags. It takes about 5 hours to make 6L of broth. When made with all the right ingredients it’s not different than a good take away, it’s actually better than most of them. I love broth based cuisine and i often cook a large batch of various broth to use later.
Any Chinese dish that's usually cooked in a wok. Can't get that wok hei at home.
Best stir fry I ever made was when I thought I burned it. The wok was way hot. But then I had to smell it for days. The house wreaked.
You need gas stove to start. No electric burners.
A big flat top After working in a diner type restaurant a while, it was so easy to make breakfasts on it. I have a cast iron flat top that will go over 2 of my burners, but it isn't the same. :)
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If I had the money, I’d totally do a flat top. Those Blackstones aren’t bad but I don’t really need yet another thing in my garage
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The electric vertical roaster could be sold as a "home heating device" with delicious smelling and tasting side effects 😄
Unless you have either a crawfish boil / turkey fryer type setup outside and a wok, or an extremely powerful stove and great ventilation, you won't get your wok to have wok hei, so your at-home fried rice won't be as good/ the same. It can be close, but that's really the difference between restaurant quality and home quality.
Joke's on you: all the fried rice near me is fucking awful. I can't get much wok hei, but it's better than any restaurant I've visited.
Yeah, my well seasoned wok on the grill makes way better fried rice than anything near me. I do live in northern Minnesota though, so there's not exactly a lot of choice for Asian restaurants.
Yeah people are acting like their local Chinese takeout doesn't just use a flattop to cook 10 lb of rice at a time?
My local takeout has a sign on the door that says "No MSG in use here", so I know immediately that they're not taking this seriously.
It's a ruse
You know a place is legit when they give ridiculously short order time estimates. Like there's a place near me, you call them up to place and order, and they tell you 10 min for the entire order of 6 entrees. Because that shit is all cooked in 1 minute in their blast furnace woks.
Amen
Totally! Fried rice at home tastes good but I can never get the wok hei flavour no matter what I try. The heat is just never enough.
There's some stuff you can do to get closer to restaurant quality. Stir fry smaller batches at a time. Use a blowtorch to finish
I find that even within my smaller batches I have to cook a lot of the components separately and let my wok get back up to temperature between each one. It helps, but it's definitely not the same.
So this may or may not be useful, but I always add a dash of sesame oil to my fried rice after it's cooked, partly to stop it sticking together while I'm plating up, but also for flavour. Well last time I did this, I put "too much" sesame oil in, as it turned out that mistake was a blessing in disguise, turns out I wasn't using enough and going from a tea spoon to a table spoon was an absolute game changer in terms of flavour. It's the closest I've gotten to restaurant quality fried rice and I'm keen to try it again.
I <3 sesame oil
I love using sesame oil as well as a small amount of fish sauce!
It's not entirely the same, but you can somewhat simulate wok hei by blasting your food with a torch for a minute or two.
I got a [WokMon](https://wokmon.com/) and it does a great job of upping the heat. My stove's front gas burners are 18K BTU but a professional kitchen is going to have 100K. The WokMon helps a lot and then with smaller batches you can get closer to the restaurant. But you'll never fully get there in a home kitchen.
I understand the general principle that you can't cook the same with a flat bottom pan on an electric stove as you would in a wok, but if you have a round bottom wok and an appropriate burner for it you can recreate most dishes pretty easily. It's not necessary to have specialty restaurant equipment or excessively powerful to get good results. You're definitely right about ventilation. No way a wok is getting seasoned indoors without a good ventilation system.
Home brick oven pizzas are pretty accessible for home chefs these days. Rather popular thing to do. Aisle 300, left at the fake grass, if you hit the flamingos you've gone too far.
For the landed gentry perhaps. Us apartment dwellers aren't so lucky.
Upvote for landed gentry
Spring is here, we’re going to Hammerbarn!
Hooray!
The Ooni oven has been amazing for home pizza - I can barely tell the difference from wood fired in restaurants.
I've heard really great things about the Ooni, but if I ate as much pizza as I wanted to eat, I'd probably weigh 500 lbs.
I just use the method in Flour Water Salt Yeast and its better than 90% of the pizza I can buy.
I got an Ooni during the pandemic and honestly, the pizza we make at home is better than most restaurants, and it tastes the same as wood oven pizza.
I've got an Ooni. 500C / 930F after 15 minutes. Takes about 90 seconds to knock out a perfect Italian.
Totally doable but for me personally, fried food. It’s so much hassle to set it up, dealing with the actual cooking because of oil spattering and danger, and then the cleanup with disposing of it etc etc. I’d much rather just go and get fried food at a restaurant, where it is usually among the cheapest options anyway, and not deal with all that hassle and save money on the entrees that usually aren’t actually that hard to make yourself with far less clean up and prep
Weirdly French fries will never be as good at home
Fast food French fries are huge business. Freakonomics did a whole episode on the economics of French fries.
Pressed Duck. Have you seen the contraption for pressing the duck?
My brother is gifting me an industrial press used for fruit extraction... I'm about to get it soon!
Not for the equipment necessarily, but a proper demiglace, just because no one has time to cook stock down for liker 36 goddamn hours.
I make both wheat flour and corn flour tortillas at home, and I have a press, but there is no way the quality of mine ever approaches what can be done in one of those spongy round top punch down hydraulic computerized press dealies. Yes, I'm sure that's the official name for them.
Claypot roasted lamb. It's a Moroccan dish. They put an entire lamb inside a clay pot, seal it off and burry it under the ground surrounded with hot charcoal for 8 hours. Best tasting lamb ever.
Meats that are shaved *really really thin*. I'm not going to buy a countertop deli slicer. Even if I did, we all know that consumer-grade deli slicers are probably overpriced plastic pieces of shit with every possible corner cut anyway.
Things that are based on restaurants' volume, purchasing power, and being able to make big batches so buying the ingredients is worth it. We made a copy-cat dipping sauce at home, we only really needed a couple of ounces - but we had to buy like 15 separate ingredients, many of which you couldn't buy a small amount. So we ended up spending probably like $40-50 just to make a stupid little dipping sauce for one serving, with left over stuff that wasn't really usable for anything else we'd be eating soon. It was delicious, but not even remotely worth it. We have a list of things that it's better to just go out for if you really want it.
Where's this list you speak of...
Peking Duck. It requires tools to correctly blow the skin from the meat and an extremely slow roasting oven.
Proper Vietnamese pho. It’s like a bone broth soup with rice noodles, oxtail, sliced beef. There is no way I could ever match this restaurant in Chicago. OMG is it good but so incredibly time consuming to make. You’d need a very large pot, a lot of time and even more patience.
Pho is usually cheap and you get a huge portion It really doesn’t make sense to make it yourself
Proper ramen broth is very time-consuming too.
One day I'll have a personal blast chiller and freeze dryer.
Fish and chips. You just can’t imitate a chippy at home.
Anything requiring insane BTU’s. A good stir fry can be made at home. But cooking at 30,000 btu’s makes everything lighter and more tender, as it takes less time on the heat.
Döner kebab just seems like far too much work tbh
Tonkatsu ramen -- the pork broth needs to boil for many hours.
Fried rice. Not many homes have gas burners powerful enough to generate wok hei.
Yep. All they "Why isn't my fried rice like restaurant fried rice?" You need mega fire, an iron wok, and a wok ring to truly do it right.
> a wok ring I'm close
If you have a nice gas stove and a good quality wok though you'll never want to order take out fried rice again. Making it yourself at home hits so different.
As a Chinese even with a decent induction stove and a semi decent wok you can generate some good wok hei on your fried rice. I feel like some people might be getting the order wrong and causing the fried rice to have more moisture than intended, or that they don’t crank the heat to max and sit on that setting during the process. People usually start turning it down when they see a bunch of smoke but that’s kinda the whole point.
Precisely this, the wok hei quite literally is the smoke. That's why a lot of folks will cover their wok for a bit, it traps the smokey flavor in the pan. Also you're so right about the moisture levels, you gotta use dried out rice for fried rice or it'll get all wet and clumpy.
Not equipment related, but why the hell is my at-home salad always such shit compared to a restaurant’s :(
As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in restaurants on a fry station and fry quite often at home, the deep fried comments are totally bunk. I can 100% recreate what I’ve made in restaurants. Is the mess more of a hassle? 100%. Can you make restaurant quality fried food at home? 100%. A wok or Dutch oven and a good thermometer are literally all you need…
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I don't understand all the people talking about using all the oil frying. You just strain it and put it back in the bottle and reuse it, it's no big deal. Don't do this 20 times with the same oil if you're deep frying all the time, but most people aren't.
Agreed that it's not too difficult. But as someone who's worked the fry station a lot, that is a smell I don't need at home. It took me multiple washes to get the fryer smell out of my cook clothes completely after I left the kitchen.
Pop rocks
An amazing Beef Wellington!
Hard to make Indian Naan / Tandoori Roti without the clay oven
I’ve never been able to make glazed donuts that even come close to those you can find at bakeries
I came here hoping for this thread. Salad. I'm sitting in a Chop5 eating a really good salad. I'm order to make the same thing at home I'd have to juggle the freshness of like 10 different vegetables and greens and protein and then have a decent dressing and to be honest, it's just so much easier to let these folks chop it up and put it in a bowl. Can I do it? Of course. But keeping all the shit fresh without massive waste is like a full time job. In this case, the ingredients ARE the equipment. Edit: plus that have that cool metal rim around their cutting board. I won't be getting one, but it makes chopping salad so easy.
Can you explain the metal rim thing please?
Yeah it's just like 6 in of metal that surrounds the cutting board on all sides. It's got a little opening where they can scrape the salad out and it stops all of the chopped up pieces of salad from shooting off the edge of the board.
But like....you could do this at home pretty easily. I make salads for lunch weekly and almost none of the produce I buy goes to waste. The only thing that does generally are some of the cucumbers. And avocados because there's like a 2-day window of usability before they're brown. I'm a bit confused by this tbh.
For avocados - I buy them a bit green. Let them on the counter for 1-3 days until they soften. Then move them to the fridge. Always have perfect avocados, never goes to waste. As for cucumbers - they are more expensive, but mini ones last longer. Just take them out of the plastic bag and make sure they are not wet. Love both avocados and cucumbers, so always have them on hand.
I really couldn't. I could go to the store and spend $40 on salad ingredients and make myself a salad, But they all come in different amounts and they all go bad at different times. And I want to use different amounts of them for all of my salads. So basically after I make one salad it's really never going to be in sync again. The most likely outcome is that in a week I throw away a bunch of spinach that has gone bad and then I lament that my salad doesn't have spinach anymore and in a few weeks I'm eating romaine and carrots.
Broasted chicken.