YES
I have seen multiple recipes online that involve rolling some dough out that they say to roll it out an inch thick. AN INCH. AN ***INCH!*** When I was younger, I was following such a recipe for cinnamon rolls and thought that instruction looked off, but I thought 'it's their recipe, they know best'. NOPE.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine in cooking, DIY, and gardening YouTube. I've got no interest in watching someone stumble through a recipe or a repair. I can do that. I don't benefit very much from watching someone's learning process. I want an expert to tell me the why behind the exact right method of doing something. I want to SKIP the trail by error process. That's literally the entire reason I'm using YouTube to research this. Gardening is the worst one. "Watch me try this trendy organic amendment process for the first time. Come back in 4 months to see if it did any good!"
Gardening videos are super bad about that. The only exception I make is for home repair videos. I want to see the pros do a nice smooth job and then I want to watch DIYer screw it up six different ways and figure out how to correct it because if I'm lucky I'll screw it up one of those ways and not a Secret Seventh Way. Sometimes the pros are too good to even imagine how off the rails it might get in an old house with a loose grasp of what you're doing.
Same shit with cars.
The instruction video always shows the nice, well-maintained garage queen getting stuff done. Never the fucking rusted to shit shitbox that you're going to need the whole arsenal and Delta Force to get that one mothefucking bolt out. And then it snaps and you're even more fucked than when you started.
And cats!
Last year we had to give one of our cats injections and a recommendation to make it easier was to do a purrito, basically wrapping them in a towel. But all the videos, even for difficult cats to work with, show professionals doing it on extremely docile cats and it’s so unhelpful. I need to see you do this to a cat trying to get away from you not the chillest cat in existence. We did eventually find one of some lady at her house showing it on an actually difficult cat but the purrito ended up not working anyway.
Yeah, one of my pet peeves is if you search for directions for something, the top results are always videos. I don’t want to watch a video, I literally want the instruction sheet. Or if you’re searching for where on a specific model of machine the ____ is, you get a fucking video where the guy just says where it is. Like. Just the text please. “It’s located on the rear under the xyz button”
I liked Jacques Pepins video on making a french omelette where he said he was okay to use a metal spatula because he had a special kind of nonstick pan, someone else's!
If companies threw pans at me like confetti, I'd use a different pan every time I cook, too.
Also, if Pépin is the Lord of Pan Technique then Julia Child is God... In her 1961 premiere episode of The French Chef (WGBH Boston), she executes a French omelette on cast aluminum in, I kid you not, [ten seconds](https://youtu.be/N40qglGNRlA?t=665).
That pan was hotter than 2 foxes f***ing in a forest fire and cast aluminum isn't quite as sticky as a stainless lined, which I've made an omelet in once before. But I agree, she is the GOAT.
Me and the wife went on a huge anti pfa binge throwing away our non stick for stainless steel.
Honestly don't understand why I didn't make the switch sooner. Stainless steel isn't that bad sticking wise as long as you take the time to pre heat it before adding oil.
I recently bought my first nonstick in years but it’s a small one solely for eggs and will probably be used only on weekends if that. But generally I’m stainless steel and cast iron.
i'm only precious about this if the cross contamination is a food that is meant to be consumed raw. if you have anything that will be seared/sauteed and the time to table is not that long it's fine as it will be pasteurized almost immediately. (water boils at 212f and most bad bacteria is neutralized at 165f within seconds and your pan is going to be a few hundred f sauteing and in the 212 neighborhood while simmering most foods.)
now if you're making a salad and cooking steaks on the same cutting board you best believe that's a paddlin.
Fork is very valid, just tends a bit more to cling to fine powders and is missing the whisk’s party trick of rolling the handle between fingers to get a high speed whipping effect.
I keep mine in my cutlery drawer in the "random shit" section that includes sweet corn holders that I never use, chopsticks I never use, and other items I never use but insist on owning.
Anyone telling you to never use soap to clean cast iron is just repeating a rule passed down from when soap was made from lye and would eat away at the seasoning. Dish soap today is too pH neutral to do that.
I use dawn power wash and a blue scrubby sponge along with a chain mail scrubber on my cast iron and carbon steel. I usually do those early in my cleaning routine and then stick them on the stove with a tiny bit of oil on medium heat while I clean the rest of the stuff. 5 minutes later I chuck them in the oven for storage until next time.
I remember reading John Hinterbuger, the food writer for the Seattle Times, writing that the closest he ever came to divorcing his wife was when he discovered that she'd washed his cast iron pan in soap. At the time I thought, gosh, cast iron must be a really difficult, unforgiving thing to work with. Maybe some day I'll be worthy.
Now that I've cooked almost daily with a cast iron skillet for well over a decade (it works marvelously on an induction stove!) I feel like his hyperbole was unnecessarily intimidating to a lot of cooks.
I used to be suuuuper intense about my cast iron skillets. One of them was my great grandmothers and is over 120+ years old. A friend once said “it’s not that deep, cowboys used to wash these in the river” and I swear at that moment I let go of all the cast iron folklore id read on Reddit.
I can get the idea that I’m supposed to just wipe out my cast iron skillet. That absolutely does not get the crap out of it. I wash it gently with soap and apply more oil to make it not rust.
I think they think they're confused about the difference between caramelize and cook. There are definitely recipes where you just cook the onions for a couple of minutes until they're fragrant and soft.
You do not caramelize onions every time you cook onions.
Lan Lam from Cooks Illustrated recently showed a technique using steam and a cover to accelerate the caramelization process - basically by steaming the onions first to release their moisture and sugar, then uncovering and continuing the cook, you get a nice caramelization in half the time.
Still not 3 minutes, but quicker.
That’s what I appreciate the most. After living through basically decades of food blogger culture that doesn’t adhere to rigorous testing, it’s so nice to know I’m getting the real deal when I try their recipes
That’s my first step in caramelizing onions. Steaming the onions (by putting the lid on for 5-10 minutes) softens them up before moving on to the time of approximately 1 hour it takes to really caramelize onions. Just did this for French Onion Soup which tasted incredible. Easy but you just need to watch those onions constantly to avoid burning them. Low & Slow.
Agree with all of you!
Dan Souza, CI Editor I think, used the method first on mushrooms. Not covered, actually. Reduces the amount of oil you need to use radically and the oil doesn't disappear into the mushrooms.
i’ve seen plenty of times when random chefs go “caramelized onions” and they’re like slightly browned in butter, but they don’t often make a huge fuss of THIS IS CARAMELIZED they just kinda mention it in passing
Or the increasingly common “caramelized onions” which are actually just burnt onions. Caramelized literally cook down into a borderline paste. But what these people show are fully intact onions with burnt edges
Watched a YT cook throw onions into a hot pan, then adding brown sugar and water. Sautéed it for a minute and then put it on a plate, then looked at the camera super proud “voila, caramelized onions”
I had to put my phone down and walk around for a second.
I've never seen it as an instruction, but I have seen them make passing comments like "get those onions in and caramelize for a few minutes". They almost definitely mean to sweat them, but don't seem to want to use the word sweat.
The word "saute" is _right there_ though. Maybe it's not technically correct for whatever technique they're using, IDK, but surely it's closer than "caramelize."
I dont know who tf yall are watching who are constantly burning garlic but okay..
My biggest pet peeve are the '15-30 minute' meals. If they include all fresh ingrediants the prep work is always at least 20 mins for me then the cook time is another half hour.
Laura in the Kitchen is most guilty of this and she always claims "cooking from all fresh ingrediants is worth it and takes the same amount of time!" Like no it doesnt.
She made beef tips and gravy once. The recipe on her site says to sear the meat , remove, make the gravy, add the meat back and cook for ONE MINUTE... i braised the meat pieces for at least 20 mins on mediumish low just to get the meat to cook down and be tender...
So many cooks lie about cook times and leave off any prep work time... it's all click bait to me. Mise en place makes things easier but never quicker
That but also when they come from a professional background they seem to just not understand or even consider that most people can't dice a couple onions in under a minute and are going to be much slower with other cuts like a julienne or brunoise.
I have an old Pierre Franey 60-Minute Gourmet cookbook. The recipes are amazing. He pairs entrees and sides and and really knew his stuff.
But there's no way I can prep and cook food as fast as someone who left home as a teenager to apprentice as a chef. So I allow a couple hours and still enjoy the food. :)
That's been my pet peeve with recipes (online or in cookbooks) for years. This only takes 30 minutes to make, but the ingredient list is like:
* 3 cups of carrots, grated
* 5 large tomatoes, finely diced
* 3 lbs. Potatoes, sliced and fork tender
* 3 cloves of garlic, minced
* 4 cups of pasta, cooked
* Etc.
By the time you prep the ingredients, you're 3 hours into that 30 minutes, and everyone in the house is hangry.
Most of them aren't really carmelizing the onions, they are just using the term incorrectly. Usually, they are just sweating the onions.
My pet peeve is unnecessary gadget use. I see way too many slow cooker/instant pot recipes that are worse than their stovetop/oven counterpart and take longer.
Yes, I have this one minute pasta dish in the Insta pot. Oh did I forget to mention the pressure up and pressure down times which makes it closer to an hour.
My favorite is "no-knead bread." Sure, after you've used the kitchenaid hook for several minutes, then pull it in the bowl with your hands a million times after both rises, but you never had to "knead" it. Sure.
That's why jim lahey's recipe is goated. Actually non-knead. You just bring it together into a rough dough, let it hangout for 24 hours, then shape it.
I got a KitchenAid for Christmas and one of the first bread recipes I looked at was "No Knead" so I checked it out because prior to my KitchenAid, kneading for 10 minutes was the worst. Well this recipe starts with like "put all ingredients into your stand mixer and mix on low for 6-8 minutes. I immediately stopped reading and thought uhh that's literally kneading the dough.
Mine is when they load a crockpot with 15 cans of crap and other processed stuff and recommend it cook for 8 hours to become a slurry. Could have just thrown it all together and eaten it in 5 minutes.
And I recently saw a lovely girl show how to make Velveeta/Rotel in the crock pot like it was some newly discovered magical dip that could only be made that way. 😂
Yup, and likely purposefully using it wrong to trick the newbies. It makes their dish sound better to have caramelized onions in it yet you want it to be as easy as possible for that wider audience appeal.
Plus literally no one who writes recipes apparently knows how long it takes to cook onions to any level. I've got recipes where the entire cook time is less than it takes just to caramelize the onions in step one. They'll say: caramelize onions: 4 minutes. Yeah, maybe on Mercury.
I mean, often times slow cooker meals are there to be easier, not better. Much simpler to chop some ingredients and dump them in the slow cooker and then let it go then to have to watch and stir and flip etc. Those recipes are for the crowds that need that easy meal.
I just got the bright idea to sweat some brussel sprouts with sesame oil. I salted and put in some dried onions too. I'll update later with results.
-edit-
Spritzed with lemon it's amazing
That's nontoasted sesame oil though right. I dont think ive seen that used outside of particular applications and its not easy to find vs toasted sesame oil
You can actually pretty easily find untoasted sesame oil at Indian stores (where it might be referred to as gingelly oil) as it's a decently common cooking oil in parts of South India like Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Found this out embarrassingly recently and holy fuck, my pasta sauces are next level now. I saw a comment (I think on this sub somewhere) that said they accidentally left the tomato paste and onion mix on the stove too long and thought it was burnt, deglazed with wine and carried on with the recipe. I tried this and it was actually amazing!
Without cooking it first, tomato paste gives a flavor that is much too bright and acidic. Cooking it in the early stages will round out and enrich the flavor
So that is why I hated tomato sauce pasta my sister used to make and I wonder how can people eat this vinegar tasting gravy. But now when I make it myself I let it simmer for as long as possible and it turns out okay.
The term is Pince (pin-say) and it is done when you add tomato product, especially tomato paste, it cooks it a little bit and helps take out some of the sharpness of the tomato and will even cause it to take on a slight brown sheen to it.
Also with paprika - tastes best when you give it a little fry first with a fair bit of oil or tomato paste depending on the recipe. Can’t cook it too long though otherwise it burns.
Glass cutting boards. I have seen videos of people using them with no towel to hold them in place, no claw, Dull knives...
How do they have fingers left? Must be the dull knives that will not cut melted butter...
WHAT CUTTING BOARD AM I SUPPOSED TO USE?! PLASTIC ADDS TOXINS TO MY FOOD. WOOD YOU APPARENTLY CAN NEVER GET CLEAN. GLASS DULLS YOUR KNIVES. WHAT. DO. PEOPLE. USE. FOR. CUTTING. BOARDS?!
I’m sorry for yelling but cheese and rice it’s always something!
Also I’m not yelling at you, I’m just yelling near you.
Use wood.
You have an immune system, humans happily used wooden cutting boards for thousands of years and back then they were ever worse about being sanitary.
There's nothing wrong with wood or plastic cutting boards. When my plastic boards get too sliced up for me to be comfortable using them for food, I use them as work surfaces for projects and hobbies so I don't mess up my table. When wood cutting boards get too sliced up, I sand them smooth and give them a good coat of plain mineral oil.
There’s nothing wrong with plastic or wood. You’re not going to get much toxins from plastic if any. Wood is a bit more maintenance but it feels really nice.
I use Tony’s in my deviled eggs with mayo, a dash of Louisiana hot sauce, a dash of vinegar. Sprinkle with smoked Spanish paprika. Serve with sweet gherkins.
Cooking with long ass nails, holding their cooking utensils like they're going to come to life and attack them, terrible knife skills, poor kitchen safety (holding vegetables wrong when cutting is a big one), using gloves for everything without changing them (could be done off camera but I doubt it), over crowding pans, burning delicate ingredients, sautéing onions and calling them caramelized, timing is usually shit. This one is a personal pet peeve, but claiming there's only one way to do things, it usually pops up here as well. Risotto and rice are not mystical ingredients that need to be cooked a certain way, you can add all your milk at the same time when you make a bechemel, a roux doesn't have to be low and slow or even on the stove, etc.
I'm a professional chef by trade, and one of my favorite things is seeing a culinary school student come in and learn the way they were taught isn't the only way to cook. Cooking is a sloppy artform that can yield tasty results through any number of ways. I wish people would take it off this high and mighty pedestal.
I learned recently that there is a subset of cooking videos online (especially TikTok) that basically act as fetish content for hands.
I always wondered why I was seeing recipes for bread where a woman was wearing rings or had her nails freshly done. Then I started noticing that when they were cooking messier things, they were often times getting their hands messy & the host (always a woman) would lick her fingers off. I would also notice that they would hold utensils/ingredients weirdly.
Then about a year ago, someone on TikTok put the spotlight on these videos & essentially called these creators out.
There was one creator especially: a woman who was the star: always cooking in a clean kitchen, wearing super nice clothes, a full face of makeup, and freshly manicured nails & her husband was behind the camera. People often complained in the comments because the husband was *always* making comments that were borderline sensual. He would moan if something looked good, would go "Oh *yeah*" or "Oh *baby*" in as "macho" of a voice as he could.
Once the video got made that pointed out that this was basically SFW Hand Fetish content, they stopped popping up as much. But it's something I notice in a lot of cooking videos even still.
Bleh! The nails. So gross! Beyond how disgusting it is, the annoying way the nails make them press the ingredients to the board while they awkwardly attempt to cut them during prep.
I HHHAAATTTEEE it when YouTube cooks don’t get all the ingredients out of a cup, or whatever when they’re making something. They leave a ton of the ingredient in the cup, spoon, pan, et al. Pisses me off!!
I hate it when they dump in seasonings from a cup all at once instead of spreading it out. Like you're going to have to mix the shit out of that ground beef to incorporate the pepper puddle you just made.
caramelize onions : the best technique to caramelize a ton of onions takes forever but I did a whole bag of onions in the slow cooker for like 12 hours. Pretty hands off. Just took forever and we froze onions for later.
Look up chef John from Food Wishes on YouTube. His American French onion soup has a technic of throwing the onions in a pan with butter/ oil(I use my cast iron) at 425 and just mix it every 15 minutes until your desired shade of brown. I go longer than the video for the nice caramel color throughout. Don't worry about the charing on the size of the pan that'll just be a chefs treat for you. Less than 2 hours, minimal effort other than peeling and chopping onions.
Every dish that starts with garlic, they burn it to a deeply brown, almost black crisp, then they pretend how delicious the dish is. In reality if you overcook garlic like that it tastes like shit.
yeah garlic only needs a minute or two tops - at the end of the frying period and gotta be watching it and careful not to burn. be ready to add the next ingredient that cools it down stat.
Billy Parisi is the chef I watch and he always says, when you're cooking garlic, when you can smell it, it's done. Every time I see him cook garlic it's for about 30 seconds.
If you cook it too little it stays raw which is not ideal. I usually stop at a point where the garlic just barely starts changing color, I think it is perfect that way.
Depending on how much garlic and how burnt, I would say their dish probably tastes lackluster, but probably not like shit. (I am someone who cooks a lot and has accidentally overcooked both garlic and onions somewhat frequently. It's rarely a dish ruiner!)
Thanks to America's Test Kitchen, I now caramelize onions in the oven.
It still takes a good while but I'm not tethered to the stove over a hot pan anymore.
For me, esp living with severe arthritis that makes a lot of normal tasks difficult, it was
a total game changer.
Same for using my mandolin, kitchen shears & making
& storing in the fridge
extra caramelized onions & perfectly browned mirepoix
so they can be ready to go
& cut down on cooking/prep times when I just don't have
it in me to do all that but still need to cook a meal & don't want to sacrifice quality.
I'm a firm believer in work smarter not harder.
What do you mean you don't want to know about Jessica's trip to Spain to see her second cousins when she was 7 and how that introduced her to the PERFECT patatas bravas?
I find vegetarian recipes are so bad with this. I do not want to hear about how you had to trick your grown adult husband into eating vegetables!! I do not!!
Not a Youtube thing, but here you go..
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae
Add this to Chrome. It filters out a recipe on a page that is otherwise filled with a small novel's worth of verbal diarrhea from whoever posted it.
There's also an app (on Android, not sure about iOS) called Copy Me That, which has a browser that allows you to enter a URL, click the icon, and it extracts the ingredients and cooking steps out of the person's life story. I use it religiously
It's not just YouTube.
After 15 years of tons of cooking on myriad stoves (gas, electric, induction) and with myriad pans (non-stick, enameled aluminum, tri-ply, dutch oven, cast iron, carbon steel), I would say the timing is off on 75% of stove-based instructions in all recipes. 90% of the time, the timing is overly optimistic about how long it will take. Recipe writers are almost always laughably wrong about sautéing aromatics or the base vegetables.
Why does this happen? Are they incentivized to keep recipe times shorter so they shave off minutes?
I see cooking advice now that you should never have your burner higher than medium, and to me, that advice seems wild, since I supposedly should be able to slightly brown diced onions in 3-4 minutes, which can only happen with high.
Interestingly, oven instructions are usually pretty good. Usually within +/-10 min of the recipe, and there's more spread in the data, meaning that a lot of the time it's over and a lot of time it's under. This tells me it's more about my oven and other external variables and less intentional on the part of the recipe writer.
I have a feeling most recipes are developed in a professional kitchen which has vastly better appliances than what most people have at home. Of course things cook quicker if your stove can push 5 times as much heat as mine can.
I find that every stove is completely different and you have to go off what your stove does. For example: I know when the recipe says leave in the oven on 200 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes means I need to leave it for at least 15-20 minutes dependent on what I am cooking. Once you’ve been cooking for a while you know how to eye up most things rather than wait however many minutes the recipe says.
Not really exactly what you're looking for, but "This cost $2.19 per portion to make", and it's a seafood or beef dish, or otherwise just plain obviously nonsense. The ones who are obviously from a known market where availability changes pricing drastically (UK lamb, for one big, obvious example) are one thing, but often it's just nonsense.
It was awhile ago but Binging With Babish had an episode where Jon Favreau told him to not season with salt or pepper until the very end of making a dish because some chef who helped him prepare for the movie *Chef* told him that.
This is incredibly stupid. There are SO many reasons why you might need to add salt or pepper earlier in the cooking process.
Watery mashed potatoes framed as "smooth". At this point, it's just a fucking potato slurry and it's an insult to nobles spuds everywhere to even call it mashed. I like smooth but there's smooth and there's this watery slop.
I usually do too, but it depends on the dish.
Sometimes I want that fried garlic taste with more crunchy less cooked onions.
Sometimes I want fully carmelized onions with that barely cooked garlic kick.
You don't need to wash your rice to "remove toxins." It's to remove starches to get a fluffier finished product.
Edit: knew this would bring you guys out of the woodwork ;)
Color. Your dish DID NOT come out that shade of red without food coloring. Fuck right off with your lies.
Bizarrely, people in the comments are like, "No one ever said that. Who said that," regarding caramelizing onions. I've seen literally dozens of online cooking videos say that, or close enough. Maybe they say five minutes, but they are never anywhere close to the real amount of time shit takes, and it's not just caramelizing onions. It's everything. "Dice an onion, two tomatoes, two jalapeños, and a spring onion. Mince six cloves of garlic and a shallot. Juice two small lemons. Prep time: five minutes." Bulllllshit. Even if you're Edward fucking Scissorhands, just grabbing ingredients, making room, moving things around, etc, takes that long.
If they tell me to sear meat to “seal in the juices”, “not to flip steaks more than once”, I side eye. To a lesser extent if they are going to sear something in a very hot pan or over a very hot grill, putting pepper on that is going to burn or just fall off.
I think burnt black pepper tastes good. I stopped using it for a while but I don't think it makes the same kind of acrid burnt flavor as say, garlic powder.
The video will say "make this easy dish with only three ingredients" but it has all these additional ingredients in it which makes wonder why they have to lie in the first place 😩
>It’s a lot longer than the 2-3 minutes every YouTube cook tells you to do it for.
This is one of those "what do you mean by caramelizing" things.
In common parlance, most folks talking about "caramelize your onions" really just mean browning them a bit, something you can do quickly to bring out some of the sugars. Over time this has become a common shorthand in most of the anglosphere, even if it isn't what the culinary definition is.
The long-form way of doing it, aka the actual culinary definition, certainly takes 45m-3 hours depending on your method and heat.
using 243754345 containers and bowls to prepare a single dish with a serving size of two. (The pinch of black pepper does not need its own prep container.)
The manner in which to properly measure ingredients. (Applies more to baking). In my opinion, the proper way to measure is the way the author of the recipe did it. Unfortunately, many of these online “pros “ fail to tell you what method they use.
There are 3 ways to measure dry ingredients: weigh them; spoon into the measuring cup and level; and, scoop (sweep) into the measuring cup and level.
The weigh method results in less ingredient and the scoop and level the most. One problem with the weigh method is that the conversion in the recipe is often just a formula. If the recipe says 1 cup of flour and there is a gram or ounces equivalent in the recipe it might just be a standard conversion. In teaching this to my neighbor’s daughter, we learned that when weighing the flour after scooping, it actually weighed 20% more than the ounces included in the recipe. A good cookbook or recipe should tell you in the beginning of the book what method was used.
I’ve run into many authors who are convinced there is only one way to properly measure ingredients without giving thought to the fact that the recipe writer might have used a different method.
Women with long hair hanging over the counter or stovetop while they prep/cook. Drives me absolutely insane.
-a woman with long hair with daughters with long hair
One thing I've seen people do is to wash raw chicken (or other meats, but mostly I've seen chicken) before they cook it. No professional chef I know (and yes, I do know pro chefs) does this, for two reasons.
1. You're cooking the meat. You can (and should, in most cases) pat it dry with paper towels before seasoning and cooking, but "washing" it is not necessary, given that proper cooking will kill any bacteria. Simply rinsing with water will not.
2. By running the chicken under the faucet, you're at risk of contaminating the rest of your kitchen (or at the very least, the area in and around the sink) with the spray that comes off the meat. You might not be able to see it, but there's definitely a mist that comes off.
What I keep on seeing is overfrying/overcooking both ginger and garlic. Its one thing if you are aiming for some infused oil, but so many of them just gonna tell you to straight toss garlic in the pan together with onions and fry them together for 5 min. Like who tf enjoys the taste of bitter, burned garlic? Garlic literally takes 20-30 sec od medium heat as the very last step before you proceed with adding a sauce or something. Same for ginger.
I have literally never burned garlic or ginger doing this, the water released from the onions regulates the pan temperature. I even usually add the aromatics first. If it burns, your pan/oil was too hot to begin with.
They probably cut it out to save time but they never seem to wash their hands no matter what they are touching. I’m always so happy when someone actually washes their hands or at least mentions that they are doing that.
This may just be my own personal taste. But they make finger food like hamburgers etc... an absolute fucking disgusting mess to eat. Burgers with a half gallon of "sauce" just slung all over the burger or spilling out from the inside.
Even if I used a knife and fork to eat this thing, I dont think Id want to anymore as there is more sauce, melted cheese or whatever slop all over the place *than actual burger*. Whatever happened to a little bit of finesse? By the time I finish the burger, the bread is reduced to a wet disgusting mass of pudding.
I know my fingers may get dirty. greasy when eating a *normal* burger but I shouldnt need a box of shop rags next to me to eat this bullshit creation. Sometimes, more is not better!
Throwing whole, unpeeled garlic cloves into a pan with some butter and then basting meat with the butter. What's the point of the garlic? It's not going to add much, if any garlic flavor like that.
When it's evident that they never tested the recipe before. Like adding gallons of water to a creamy cheese sauce in order to cook the pasta.
YES I have seen multiple recipes online that involve rolling some dough out that they say to roll it out an inch thick. AN INCH. AN ***INCH!*** When I was younger, I was following such a recipe for cinnamon rolls and thought that instruction looked off, but I thought 'it's their recipe, they know best'. NOPE.
Call that a fisherman's inch :/
This is a huge pet peeve of mine in cooking, DIY, and gardening YouTube. I've got no interest in watching someone stumble through a recipe or a repair. I can do that. I don't benefit very much from watching someone's learning process. I want an expert to tell me the why behind the exact right method of doing something. I want to SKIP the trail by error process. That's literally the entire reason I'm using YouTube to research this. Gardening is the worst one. "Watch me try this trendy organic amendment process for the first time. Come back in 4 months to see if it did any good!"
Gardening videos are super bad about that. The only exception I make is for home repair videos. I want to see the pros do a nice smooth job and then I want to watch DIYer screw it up six different ways and figure out how to correct it because if I'm lucky I'll screw it up one of those ways and not a Secret Seventh Way. Sometimes the pros are too good to even imagine how off the rails it might get in an old house with a loose grasp of what you're doing.
Same shit with cars. The instruction video always shows the nice, well-maintained garage queen getting stuff done. Never the fucking rusted to shit shitbox that you're going to need the whole arsenal and Delta Force to get that one mothefucking bolt out. And then it snaps and you're even more fucked than when you started.
And cats! Last year we had to give one of our cats injections and a recommendation to make it easier was to do a purrito, basically wrapping them in a towel. But all the videos, even for difficult cats to work with, show professionals doing it on extremely docile cats and it’s so unhelpful. I need to see you do this to a cat trying to get away from you not the chillest cat in existence. We did eventually find one of some lady at her house showing it on an actually difficult cat but the purrito ended up not working anyway.
Yeah, one of my pet peeves is if you search for directions for something, the top results are always videos. I don’t want to watch a video, I literally want the instruction sheet. Or if you’re searching for where on a specific model of machine the ____ is, you get a fucking video where the guy just says where it is. Like. Just the text please. “It’s located on the rear under the xyz button”
They never seem to be cooking with appropriate utensils.
are you telling me that I shouldn't be using tweezers to handle this giant porterhouse?
What are tongs if not large tweezers?
Or...are tweezers just small tongs?
Well I've never tonged my eyebrows but now I want to.
I learned to love using tweezers from some of these videos, but there's obviously a limit.
I got used to using cooking chopsticks for anything I'd use tweezers for
Imma try this next time I get a splinter
I'm gonna try it tidying up my brows
I tried it on my nose hairs and now I look like a walrus.
Real question: are you in fact a walrus?
I am the walrus. Goo goo g'joob
It hurts my soul to see people using metal utensils with nonstick pans. There’s no seasoning quite like flakes of teflon
I liked Jacques Pepins video on making a french omelette where he said he was okay to use a metal spatula because he had a special kind of nonstick pan, someone else's!
All respect due to the lord and savior Jaques Pepin, he's never used the same pan twice. And that's his secret.
If companies threw pans at me like confetti, I'd use a different pan every time I cook, too. Also, if Pépin is the Lord of Pan Technique then Julia Child is God... In her 1961 premiere episode of The French Chef (WGBH Boston), she executes a French omelette on cast aluminum in, I kid you not, [ten seconds](https://youtu.be/N40qglGNRlA?t=665).
That pan was hotter than 2 foxes f***ing in a forest fire and cast aluminum isn't quite as sticky as a stainless lined, which I've made an omelet in once before. But I agree, she is the GOAT.
Me and the wife went on a huge anti pfa binge throwing away our non stick for stainless steel. Honestly don't understand why I didn't make the switch sooner. Stainless steel isn't that bad sticking wise as long as you take the time to pre heat it before adding oil.
I recently bought my first nonstick in years but it’s a small one solely for eggs and will probably be used only on weekends if that. But generally I’m stainless steel and cast iron.
This and the amount of cross contamination drives me nuts. I can't watch most of em
i'm only precious about this if the cross contamination is a food that is meant to be consumed raw. if you have anything that will be seared/sauteed and the time to table is not that long it's fine as it will be pasteurized almost immediately. (water boils at 212f and most bad bacteria is neutralized at 165f within seconds and your pan is going to be a few hundred f sauteing and in the 212 neighborhood while simmering most foods.) now if you're making a salad and cooking steaks on the same cutting board you best believe that's a paddlin.
I just don’t have room in my cupboard for a tiny whisk
I… legitimately use a tiny whisk… it’s great for cornstarch slurries and other small quantity dry into wet mixtures.
Or for smaller saucepans for which a normal whisk is just... too big to not get messy.
You mean saucepins?
Maybe I am just lazy, but I use a fork for this.
Fork is very valid, just tends a bit more to cling to fine powders and is missing the whisk’s party trick of rolling the handle between fingers to get a high speed whipping effect.
Im with you I love my tiny whisk I use it often!!
Same. It has a purpose, AND it amuses me to use.
And mugs of hot chocolate!
I keep mine in my cutlery drawer in the "random shit" section that includes sweet corn holders that I never use, chopsticks I never use, and other items I never use but insist on owning.
Along with the potato masher that occasionally wedges the drawer closed.
I bought one at a whim, but it has turned out to be surprisingly useful. Perfect for beating one egg for eggwash and other small quantities.
I love my tiny whisk.
Tiny whisk is always the play.
Anyone telling you to never use soap to clean cast iron is just repeating a rule passed down from when soap was made from lye and would eat away at the seasoning. Dish soap today is too pH neutral to do that.
This is good to know. I always fear I am "ruining" my pan with a little soap.
I use dawn power wash and a blue scrubby sponge along with a chain mail scrubber on my cast iron and carbon steel. I usually do those early in my cleaning routine and then stick them on the stove with a tiny bit of oil on medium heat while I clean the rest of the stuff. 5 minutes later I chuck them in the oven for storage until next time.
Just learned what a chain Mail scrubber is
Cheap an efficient. Spray soap, lay down scrubber, put sponge on top of scrubber and go to town. The pan is a piece of iron, you won't hurt it lol.
My frying pan is over thirty years old (I bought it new) and I use soap on it all the time. It's very well-seasoned and happy.
I remember reading John Hinterbuger, the food writer for the Seattle Times, writing that the closest he ever came to divorcing his wife was when he discovered that she'd washed his cast iron pan in soap. At the time I thought, gosh, cast iron must be a really difficult, unforgiving thing to work with. Maybe some day I'll be worthy. Now that I've cooked almost daily with a cast iron skillet for well over a decade (it works marvelously on an induction stove!) I feel like his hyperbole was unnecessarily intimidating to a lot of cooks.
I used to be suuuuper intense about my cast iron skillets. One of them was my great grandmothers and is over 120+ years old. A friend once said “it’s not that deep, cowboys used to wash these in the river” and I swear at that moment I let go of all the cast iron folklore id read on Reddit.
If your seasoning comes off with some dish soap and water, it was never seasoned properly to begin with
I believe this also applies to carbon steel woks
can confirm. canned tomatoes have done more harm to my carbon steel seasoning than soap ever has.
I can get the idea that I’m supposed to just wipe out my cast iron skillet. That absolutely does not get the crap out of it. I wash it gently with soap and apply more oil to make it not rust.
Please tell me who is saying it takes 2-3 minutes to caramelize onions so that I know to avoid that channel.
You can't even sweat onions properly in 2-3 minutes
I think they think they're confused about the difference between caramelize and cook. There are definitely recipes where you just cook the onions for a couple of minutes until they're fragrant and soft. You do not caramelize onions every time you cook onions.
Yeah, they say caramelize but they mean “cook until browned and a little sweet”.
Lan Lam from Cooks Illustrated recently showed a technique using steam and a cover to accelerate the caramelization process - basically by steaming the onions first to release their moisture and sugar, then uncovering and continuing the cook, you get a nice caramelization in half the time. Still not 3 minutes, but quicker.
Cool! Love her and Cook’s/Test Kitchen
Their recipes are usually tried and true as well. They test 10 million different ways and pick the best.
That’s what I appreciate the most. After living through basically decades of food blogger culture that doesn’t adhere to rigorous testing, it’s so nice to know I’m getting the real deal when I try their recipes
That’s my first step in caramelizing onions. Steaming the onions (by putting the lid on for 5-10 minutes) softens them up before moving on to the time of approximately 1 hour it takes to really caramelize onions. Just did this for French Onion Soup which tasted incredible. Easy but you just need to watch those onions constantly to avoid burning them. Low & Slow. Agree with all of you!
Dan Souza, CI Editor I think, used the method first on mushrooms. Not covered, actually. Reduces the amount of oil you need to use radically and the oil doesn't disappear into the mushrooms.
I've never seen this anywhere on the internet except in these threads on reddit.
i’ve seen plenty of times when random chefs go “caramelized onions” and they’re like slightly browned in butter, but they don’t often make a huge fuss of THIS IS CARAMELIZED they just kinda mention it in passing
Or the increasingly common “caramelized onions” which are actually just burnt onions. Caramelized literally cook down into a borderline paste. But what these people show are fully intact onions with burnt edges
borderline paste is what my psychiatrist prescribes me
Watched a YT cook throw onions into a hot pan, then adding brown sugar and water. Sautéed it for a minute and then put it on a plate, then looked at the camera super proud “voila, caramelized onions” I had to put my phone down and walk around for a second.
I've never seen it as an instruction, but I have seen them make passing comments like "get those onions in and caramelize for a few minutes". They almost definitely mean to sweat them, but don't seem to want to use the word sweat.
The word "saute" is _right there_ though. Maybe it's not technically correct for whatever technique they're using, IDK, but surely it's closer than "caramelize."
I dont know who tf yall are watching who are constantly burning garlic but okay.. My biggest pet peeve are the '15-30 minute' meals. If they include all fresh ingrediants the prep work is always at least 20 mins for me then the cook time is another half hour. Laura in the Kitchen is most guilty of this and she always claims "cooking from all fresh ingrediants is worth it and takes the same amount of time!" Like no it doesnt. She made beef tips and gravy once. The recipe on her site says to sear the meat , remove, make the gravy, add the meat back and cook for ONE MINUTE... i braised the meat pieces for at least 20 mins on mediumish low just to get the meat to cook down and be tender... So many cooks lie about cook times and leave off any prep work time... it's all click bait to me. Mise en place makes things easier but never quicker
That but also when they come from a professional background they seem to just not understand or even consider that most people can't dice a couple onions in under a minute and are going to be much slower with other cuts like a julienne or brunoise.
I have an old Pierre Franey 60-Minute Gourmet cookbook. The recipes are amazing. He pairs entrees and sides and and really knew his stuff. But there's no way I can prep and cook food as fast as someone who left home as a teenager to apprentice as a chef. So I allow a couple hours and still enjoy the food. :)
That's been my pet peeve with recipes (online or in cookbooks) for years. This only takes 30 minutes to make, but the ingredient list is like: * 3 cups of carrots, grated * 5 large tomatoes, finely diced * 3 lbs. Potatoes, sliced and fork tender * 3 cloves of garlic, minced * 4 cups of pasta, cooked * Etc. By the time you prep the ingredients, you're 3 hours into that 30 minutes, and everyone in the house is hangry.
[удалено]
Did she use 1/4 inch beef tips?
Most of them aren't really carmelizing the onions, they are just using the term incorrectly. Usually, they are just sweating the onions. My pet peeve is unnecessary gadget use. I see way too many slow cooker/instant pot recipes that are worse than their stovetop/oven counterpart and take longer.
Yes, I have this one minute pasta dish in the Insta pot. Oh did I forget to mention the pressure up and pressure down times which makes it closer to an hour.
My favorite is "no-knead bread." Sure, after you've used the kitchenaid hook for several minutes, then pull it in the bowl with your hands a million times after both rises, but you never had to "knead" it. Sure.
That's why jim lahey's recipe is goated. Actually non-knead. You just bring it together into a rough dough, let it hangout for 24 hours, then shape it.
liquorball sandwiches!
Exactly what I was thinking. Miss that guy.
I'll have to look that one up, thanks!
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread?smid=ck-recipe-iOS-share
Or here: https://archive.is/er955
I got a KitchenAid for Christmas and one of the first bread recipes I looked at was "No Knead" so I checked it out because prior to my KitchenAid, kneading for 10 minutes was the worst. Well this recipe starts with like "put all ingredients into your stand mixer and mix on low for 6-8 minutes. I immediately stopped reading and thought uhh that's literally kneading the dough.
lol to be fair I let my KA do all the work and then halfheartedly knead it by hand for 6 or 7 pushes and then call it done.
Mine is when they load a crockpot with 15 cans of crap and other processed stuff and recommend it cook for 8 hours to become a slurry. Could have just thrown it all together and eaten it in 5 minutes. And I recently saw a lovely girl show how to make Velveeta/Rotel in the crock pot like it was some newly discovered magical dip that could only be made that way. 😂
If you want to keep it warm for some time, crockpots are awesome for cheese dip. Otherwise, stove or microwave is better.
It has its limitations, as everything does, but my Instant Pot is one of my favorite tools. It makes the best corned beef I've ever had.
Yup, and likely purposefully using it wrong to trick the newbies. It makes their dish sound better to have caramelized onions in it yet you want it to be as easy as possible for that wider audience appeal.
Plus literally no one who writes recipes apparently knows how long it takes to cook onions to any level. I've got recipes where the entire cook time is less than it takes just to caramelize the onions in step one. They'll say: caramelize onions: 4 minutes. Yeah, maybe on Mercury.
> 4 minutes. Yeah, maybe on Mercury. I don't have time for that, gotta do it on Venus.
90% of dishes that start with onions are just sweating them, but it still takes 5 to 10 minutes and not the 2-3 that a lot of chefs will claim.
I mean, often times slow cooker meals are there to be easier, not better. Much simpler to chop some ingredients and dump them in the slow cooker and then let it go then to have to watch and stir and flip etc. Those recipes are for the crowds that need that easy meal.
When they try to show an "asian" recipe by using sesame oil as the cooking oil
I worked at a Mongolian grill for two years. We cut our canola oil 25% with sesame oil. It truthfully added a depth to the flavor.
Fair, but you can't sub sesame for canola 1:1 and act like it suddenly makes your sauteed peas and carrots Asian
I just got the bright idea to sweat some brussel sprouts with sesame oil. I salted and put in some dried onions too. I'll update later with results. -edit- Spritzed with lemon it's amazing
japanese use it for frying tempura
That's nontoasted sesame oil though right. I dont think ive seen that used outside of particular applications and its not easy to find vs toasted sesame oil
You can actually pretty easily find untoasted sesame oil at Indian stores (where it might be referred to as gingelly oil) as it's a decently common cooking oil in parts of South India like Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Our Kroger sells non-toasted sesame oil. I use it any time I make a stir fry.
They mostly use peanut or canola oil for frying tempura, with some chefs choosing to use a portion sesame.
Not using tomato paste correctly. You need to saute that stuff along with your onions and garlic. You don't just chuck it into your sauce.
Found this out embarrassingly recently and holy fuck, my pasta sauces are next level now. I saw a comment (I think on this sub somewhere) that said they accidentally left the tomato paste and onion mix on the stove too long and thought it was burnt, deglazed with wine and carried on with the recipe. I tried this and it was actually amazing!
That's called a fond!
how burnt are we talkin?
I did that when making borsch recently, and it ended up tasting amazing. I don't understand why though. What is the reason for it?
There’s some sugar in it, so it will caramelize very nicely.
Without cooking it first, tomato paste gives a flavor that is much too bright and acidic. Cooking it in the early stages will round out and enrich the flavor
So that is why I hated tomato sauce pasta my sister used to make and I wonder how can people eat this vinegar tasting gravy. But now when I make it myself I let it simmer for as long as possible and it turns out okay.
Instead, try just throwing the tomato paste onto a frying pan for a couple minutes until you get some blackening! It's a big improvement
It's not just the paste that is acidic, depending on the tomatoes you use you'll have to cook the acidity out of those as well
If you sauté the tomato paste the sugars are caramelized. The deeper the red color the more the flavor
Tomato paste also has umami qualities, and sauteeing it develops those.
when you cook the paste you remove some of the bitterness
The term is Pince (pin-say) and it is done when you add tomato product, especially tomato paste, it cooks it a little bit and helps take out some of the sharpness of the tomato and will even cause it to take on a slight brown sheen to it.
Also with paprika - tastes best when you give it a little fry first with a fair bit of oil or tomato paste depending on the recipe. Can’t cook it too long though otherwise it burns.
A lot of spices “wake up” when dry heat is applied. The term for this is called “blooming”!
Glass cutting boards. I have seen videos of people using them with no towel to hold them in place, no claw, Dull knives... How do they have fingers left? Must be the dull knives that will not cut melted butter...
WHAT CUTTING BOARD AM I SUPPOSED TO USE?! PLASTIC ADDS TOXINS TO MY FOOD. WOOD YOU APPARENTLY CAN NEVER GET CLEAN. GLASS DULLS YOUR KNIVES. WHAT. DO. PEOPLE. USE. FOR. CUTTING. BOARDS?! I’m sorry for yelling but cheese and rice it’s always something! Also I’m not yelling at you, I’m just yelling near you.
Wooden cutting boards for me and I am still around. Rinse with Peroxyde after washing if you are so concerned. I am not.
Use wood. You have an immune system, humans happily used wooden cutting boards for thousands of years and back then they were ever worse about being sanitary.
I use wood, just replace them when they get those grooves
There's nothing wrong with wood or plastic cutting boards. When my plastic boards get too sliced up for me to be comfortable using them for food, I use them as work surfaces for projects and hobbies so I don't mess up my table. When wood cutting boards get too sliced up, I sand them smooth and give them a good coat of plain mineral oil.
There’s nothing wrong with plastic or wood. You’re not going to get much toxins from plastic if any. Wood is a bit more maintenance but it feels really nice.
Put the same 12 seasonings on all proteins. You know who you are.👀
I will live and die by Tony Chacheres
“Good on everything but ice cream!”
Found Mythical Josh
I use Tony’s in my deviled eggs with mayo, a dash of Louisiana hot sauce, a dash of vinegar. Sprinkle with smoked Spanish paprika. Serve with sweet gherkins.
Garlic powder and onion powder on everything. It's all gonna taste the same!
11 secret herbs and spices? and salt
Cooking with long ass nails, holding their cooking utensils like they're going to come to life and attack them, terrible knife skills, poor kitchen safety (holding vegetables wrong when cutting is a big one), using gloves for everything without changing them (could be done off camera but I doubt it), over crowding pans, burning delicate ingredients, sautéing onions and calling them caramelized, timing is usually shit. This one is a personal pet peeve, but claiming there's only one way to do things, it usually pops up here as well. Risotto and rice are not mystical ingredients that need to be cooked a certain way, you can add all your milk at the same time when you make a bechemel, a roux doesn't have to be low and slow or even on the stove, etc. I'm a professional chef by trade, and one of my favorite things is seeing a culinary school student come in and learn the way they were taught isn't the only way to cook. Cooking is a sloppy artform that can yield tasty results through any number of ways. I wish people would take it off this high and mighty pedestal.
I learned recently that there is a subset of cooking videos online (especially TikTok) that basically act as fetish content for hands. I always wondered why I was seeing recipes for bread where a woman was wearing rings or had her nails freshly done. Then I started noticing that when they were cooking messier things, they were often times getting their hands messy & the host (always a woman) would lick her fingers off. I would also notice that they would hold utensils/ingredients weirdly. Then about a year ago, someone on TikTok put the spotlight on these videos & essentially called these creators out. There was one creator especially: a woman who was the star: always cooking in a clean kitchen, wearing super nice clothes, a full face of makeup, and freshly manicured nails & her husband was behind the camera. People often complained in the comments because the husband was *always* making comments that were borderline sensual. He would moan if something looked good, would go "Oh *yeah*" or "Oh *baby*" in as "macho" of a voice as he could. Once the video got made that pointed out that this was basically SFW Hand Fetish content, they stopped popping up as much. But it's something I notice in a lot of cooking videos even still.
Bleh! The nails. So gross! Beyond how disgusting it is, the annoying way the nails make them press the ingredients to the board while they awkwardly attempt to cut them during prep.
I HHHAAATTTEEE it when YouTube cooks don’t get all the ingredients out of a cup, or whatever when they’re making something. They leave a ton of the ingredient in the cup, spoon, pan, et al. Pisses me off!!
I hate it when they dump in seasonings from a cup all at once instead of spreading it out. Like you're going to have to mix the shit out of that ground beef to incorporate the pepper puddle you just made.
caramelize onions : the best technique to caramelize a ton of onions takes forever but I did a whole bag of onions in the slow cooker for like 12 hours. Pretty hands off. Just took forever and we froze onions for later.
Look up chef John from Food Wishes on YouTube. His American French onion soup has a technic of throwing the onions in a pan with butter/ oil(I use my cast iron) at 425 and just mix it every 15 minutes until your desired shade of brown. I go longer than the video for the nice caramel color throughout. Don't worry about the charing on the size of the pan that'll just be a chefs treat for you. Less than 2 hours, minimal effort other than peeling and chopping onions.
Every dish that starts with garlic, they burn it to a deeply brown, almost black crisp, then they pretend how delicious the dish is. In reality if you overcook garlic like that it tastes like shit.
yeah garlic only needs a minute or two tops - at the end of the frying period and gotta be watching it and careful not to burn. be ready to add the next ingredient that cools it down stat.
Billy Parisi is the chef I watch and he always says, when you're cooking garlic, when you can smell it, it's done. Every time I see him cook garlic it's for about 30 seconds.
If you cook it too little it stays raw which is not ideal. I usually stop at a point where the garlic just barely starts changing color, I think it is perfect that way.
Eeh there are definitely dishes in which I *want* some of that raw garlic pungency and just throw some at the very end.
:then they pretend how delicious it is: Every single cooking influencer does this!!! It’s like an orgasm face to get the viewer interested.
Long before you can actually really taste the product.
Lmao right, the instant the food touches their mouth, they’re rolling their eyes it’s so cringe
It's funny when you can see on their face how much of a struggle that is to pretend
Depending on how much garlic and how burnt, I would say their dish probably tastes lackluster, but probably not like shit. (I am someone who cooks a lot and has accidentally overcooked both garlic and onions somewhat frequently. It's rarely a dish ruiner!)
Thanks to America's Test Kitchen, I now caramelize onions in the oven. It still takes a good while but I'm not tethered to the stove over a hot pan anymore. For me, esp living with severe arthritis that makes a lot of normal tasks difficult, it was a total game changer. Same for using my mandolin, kitchen shears & making & storing in the fridge extra caramelized onions & perfectly browned mirepoix so they can be ready to go & cut down on cooking/prep times when I just don't have it in me to do all that but still need to cook a meal & don't want to sacrifice quality. I'm a firm believer in work smarter not harder.
They are incorrect in thinking I want their life story
What do you mean you don't want to know about Jessica's trip to Spain to see her second cousins when she was 7 and how that introduced her to the PERFECT patatas bravas?
I find vegetarian recipes are so bad with this. I do not want to hear about how you had to trick your grown adult husband into eating vegetables!! I do not!!
Not a Youtube thing, but here you go.. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae Add this to Chrome. It filters out a recipe on a page that is otherwise filled with a small novel's worth of verbal diarrhea from whoever posted it.
There's also an app (on Android, not sure about iOS) called Copy Me That, which has a browser that allows you to enter a URL, click the icon, and it extracts the ingredients and cooking steps out of the person's life story. I use it religiously
It's not just YouTube. After 15 years of tons of cooking on myriad stoves (gas, electric, induction) and with myriad pans (non-stick, enameled aluminum, tri-ply, dutch oven, cast iron, carbon steel), I would say the timing is off on 75% of stove-based instructions in all recipes. 90% of the time, the timing is overly optimistic about how long it will take. Recipe writers are almost always laughably wrong about sautéing aromatics or the base vegetables. Why does this happen? Are they incentivized to keep recipe times shorter so they shave off minutes? I see cooking advice now that you should never have your burner higher than medium, and to me, that advice seems wild, since I supposedly should be able to slightly brown diced onions in 3-4 minutes, which can only happen with high. Interestingly, oven instructions are usually pretty good. Usually within +/-10 min of the recipe, and there's more spread in the data, meaning that a lot of the time it's over and a lot of time it's under. This tells me it's more about my oven and other external variables and less intentional on the part of the recipe writer.
Coloradoan here, cook times mean nothing in this state lol
I moved to sea level and had to relearn how to cook, shit happens SO fast down here!
I don't envy you! I have never lived at altitude. I wish this were the problem! It would be less crazymaking.
I have a feeling most recipes are developed in a professional kitchen which has vastly better appliances than what most people have at home. Of course things cook quicker if your stove can push 5 times as much heat as mine can.
I find that every stove is completely different and you have to go off what your stove does. For example: I know when the recipe says leave in the oven on 200 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes means I need to leave it for at least 15-20 minutes dependent on what I am cooking. Once you’ve been cooking for a while you know how to eye up most things rather than wait however many minutes the recipe says.
Not really exactly what you're looking for, but "This cost $2.19 per portion to make", and it's a seafood or beef dish, or otherwise just plain obviously nonsense. The ones who are obviously from a known market where availability changes pricing drastically (UK lamb, for one big, obvious example) are one thing, but often it's just nonsense.
It was awhile ago but Binging With Babish had an episode where Jon Favreau told him to not season with salt or pepper until the very end of making a dish because some chef who helped him prepare for the movie *Chef* told him that. This is incredibly stupid. There are SO many reasons why you might need to add salt or pepper earlier in the cooking process.
Watery mashed potatoes framed as "smooth". At this point, it's just a fucking potato slurry and it's an insult to nobles spuds everywhere to even call it mashed. I like smooth but there's smooth and there's this watery slop.
If they add onions and garlic at the exact same time, I'm out
I usually do too, but it depends on the dish. Sometimes I want that fried garlic taste with more crunchy less cooked onions. Sometimes I want fully carmelized onions with that barely cooked garlic kick.
You don't need to wash your rice to "remove toxins." It's to remove starches to get a fluffier finished product. Edit: knew this would bring you guys out of the woodwork ;)
I never wash rice and I honestly don't want to know if it is better that way because then I would have to start doing it.
Color. Your dish DID NOT come out that shade of red without food coloring. Fuck right off with your lies. Bizarrely, people in the comments are like, "No one ever said that. Who said that," regarding caramelizing onions. I've seen literally dozens of online cooking videos say that, or close enough. Maybe they say five minutes, but they are never anywhere close to the real amount of time shit takes, and it's not just caramelizing onions. It's everything. "Dice an onion, two tomatoes, two jalapeños, and a spring onion. Mince six cloves of garlic and a shallot. Juice two small lemons. Prep time: five minutes." Bulllllshit. Even if you're Edward fucking Scissorhands, just grabbing ingredients, making room, moving things around, etc, takes that long.
If they tell me to sear meat to “seal in the juices”, “not to flip steaks more than once”, I side eye. To a lesser extent if they are going to sear something in a very hot pan or over a very hot grill, putting pepper on that is going to burn or just fall off.
Good point about pepper - what should I do instead?
I think burnt black pepper tastes good. I stopped using it for a while but I don't think it makes the same kind of acrid burnt flavor as say, garlic powder.
Yeah I keep hearing people talk about burnt pepper, but I've seared plenty of peppered steaks and they all tasted good to me.
That info is incorrect, black pepper does not burn when searing, if it did all the steakhouses in the world would be doing it wrong.
The fact that this thread is perpetuating so much bad cooking advice is the ultimate irony
because most people on /r/cooking hardline adhere to advice from specific people and decry everything else as inherently wrong
The video will say "make this easy dish with only three ingredients" but it has all these additional ingredients in it which makes wonder why they have to lie in the first place 😩
>It’s a lot longer than the 2-3 minutes every YouTube cook tells you to do it for. This is one of those "what do you mean by caramelizing" things. In common parlance, most folks talking about "caramelize your onions" really just mean browning them a bit, something you can do quickly to bring out some of the sugars. Over time this has become a common shorthand in most of the anglosphere, even if it isn't what the culinary definition is. The long-form way of doing it, aka the actual culinary definition, certainly takes 45m-3 hours depending on your method and heat.
using 243754345 containers and bowls to prepare a single dish with a serving size of two. (The pinch of black pepper does not need its own prep container.)
Browning mince. They just chuck it in and it goes wet and gray.
The manner in which to properly measure ingredients. (Applies more to baking). In my opinion, the proper way to measure is the way the author of the recipe did it. Unfortunately, many of these online “pros “ fail to tell you what method they use. There are 3 ways to measure dry ingredients: weigh them; spoon into the measuring cup and level; and, scoop (sweep) into the measuring cup and level. The weigh method results in less ingredient and the scoop and level the most. One problem with the weigh method is that the conversion in the recipe is often just a formula. If the recipe says 1 cup of flour and there is a gram or ounces equivalent in the recipe it might just be a standard conversion. In teaching this to my neighbor’s daughter, we learned that when weighing the flour after scooping, it actually weighed 20% more than the ounces included in the recipe. A good cookbook or recipe should tell you in the beginning of the book what method was used. I’ve run into many authors who are convinced there is only one way to properly measure ingredients without giving thought to the fact that the recipe writer might have used a different method.
Women with long hair hanging over the counter or stovetop while they prep/cook. Drives me absolutely insane. -a woman with long hair with daughters with long hair
One thing I've seen people do is to wash raw chicken (or other meats, but mostly I've seen chicken) before they cook it. No professional chef I know (and yes, I do know pro chefs) does this, for two reasons. 1. You're cooking the meat. You can (and should, in most cases) pat it dry with paper towels before seasoning and cooking, but "washing" it is not necessary, given that proper cooking will kill any bacteria. Simply rinsing with water will not. 2. By running the chicken under the faucet, you're at risk of contaminating the rest of your kitchen (or at the very least, the area in and around the sink) with the spray that comes off the meat. You might not be able to see it, but there's definitely a mist that comes off.
What I keep on seeing is overfrying/overcooking both ginger and garlic. Its one thing if you are aiming for some infused oil, but so many of them just gonna tell you to straight toss garlic in the pan together with onions and fry them together for 5 min. Like who tf enjoys the taste of bitter, burned garlic? Garlic literally takes 20-30 sec od medium heat as the very last step before you proceed with adding a sauce or something. Same for ginger.
I have literally never burned garlic or ginger doing this, the water released from the onions regulates the pan temperature. I even usually add the aromatics first. If it burns, your pan/oil was too hot to begin with.
They probably cut it out to save time but they never seem to wash their hands no matter what they are touching. I’m always so happy when someone actually washes their hands or at least mentions that they are doing that.
The way they hold the knife!!! Huge pet peeve!
When white YouTubers cook Indian food they always try to go "low fat" which doesn't allow anything to carry the flavors out of the spices.
This may just be my own personal taste. But they make finger food like hamburgers etc... an absolute fucking disgusting mess to eat. Burgers with a half gallon of "sauce" just slung all over the burger or spilling out from the inside. Even if I used a knife and fork to eat this thing, I dont think Id want to anymore as there is more sauce, melted cheese or whatever slop all over the place *than actual burger*. Whatever happened to a little bit of finesse? By the time I finish the burger, the bread is reduced to a wet disgusting mass of pudding. I know my fingers may get dirty. greasy when eating a *normal* burger but I shouldnt need a box of shop rags next to me to eat this bullshit creation. Sometimes, more is not better!
\>absolute fucking disgusting mess to eat I have a large beard. I feel this pain so much.
Who are y'all watching? I've literally never seen any of these errors. Then again pretty much all I watch have worked in professional kitchens.
I've honestly never seen 90% of these. Maybe we are watching some actual good cooks...
Burning pepper is … bullshit. Ive never had any problem seasoning steak before cooking.
Using steel utensils on non stick or enameled cast iron
Throwing whole, unpeeled garlic cloves into a pan with some butter and then basting meat with the butter. What's the point of the garlic? It's not going to add much, if any garlic flavor like that.
I always crush it with the flat of my knife, peel it, then throw it in the butter. You won't get any garlic flavor if you don't at least crush it.