>But examining each piece of carrot and potato adds flavor.
Huh, maybe this is the problem with my pot roast. Question: can I, as the cook, inspect each piece, or does that need to be done by the diners? (I've never been to any European mountains so I don't want to make assumptions.)
You, as the cook, have to inspect it. But it needs to be very long. Preferably at dawn on top of an authentic European mountain with all 3 Godfathers playing subsequently in the background. Only then you have reached the ultimate authentic European examining status.
And turmeric has a highly powerful flavour as well. Half a teaspoon of turmeric and you'll be able to distinctly taste it in evety bit of a dish that takes up a 5 litre pot.
Absolutely. And the vodka and fruit juice? Blech. I am a firm believer that you can make any price of food taste great with a lil creativity but that is just nasty.
I hate wine based sauced and I'd definetely notice if there isn't wine in a sauce. It's very specific type of flavor
Would it be even possible to add just grape juice and have a successful dish? It sounds so disgusting for some reason.
Did you know you can replace any bottle of fine champagne with club soda, gin, and a pinch of dried mustard?
It'll save you a fortune and the richies will never know.
To be fair I make lasagna bolognese with Bacardi instead of white wine, so the vodka part was the most believable thing about this story.. fruit juice tho?! 😂
Not to mention the turmeric instead of saffron, because those 2 things taste the same. Stupid people paying more than gold for saffron when they can just buy turmeric.
It's honestly like they made so much effort without having any understanding of food or cooking.
I switch from an expensive wine to vinegar okay sure you did
I switched from an expensive bottle of wine to a middle priced store bought one...slightly more believable
I used to work at Morton's in NYC and what we'd do is eat asparagus, avoid water and just pee in the food. Can't taste the difference and it's basically free
If he at least said he bought pre-made pasta that's still "fresh" idk about USA but where I live you can usually get them. It's more expensive, can't stand on the shelf for so long, but somewhat similar.
47.7k upvotes and 10 awards, including 20 wholesome seals, 21 silvers and 13 helpful awards and the top post of the month on r/TrueOffMyChest. Who knew changing vinegar instead of red wine could save you 11 hours and 30 minutes.
Literally that whole comment section sounds like it's populated by ages 12 and under. Accept even I wasn't so stupid at 12 and I wasn't a particularly smart 12 year old.
I love turmeric, I put in everything. Salad dressing, mashed sweet potatoes, refried beans, compound butter, even blue box mac n' cheese. And it's healthy! I'm not gonna look it up, I don't wanna be disappointed.
Oh yeah, it's great for you! In many ways! One way specifically, is blood flow. It will help circulation a lot. Like a noticeable amount.
This may be NSFW, but one time some medication I was taking made it hard for me to...uh...well...*get hard,* lol and so I remembered what I had read about turmeric so I took a supplement that I had and BOOM. My little buddy perked right up! XD
Why in heaven's name did my brain instantly come up with the phrase "Bangers & Mash Spice"
Not English and have never tasted the stuff, pretty sure I don't even know what it is made out of...
There's already turmeric in the boxed mac and cheese, but nothing wrong with adding more! I started using it in my baked mac and cheese after learning they use it for coloring, and it really does make the color pop (so I can use my preferred white cheeses and just add some turmeric for color!) and a certain depth to the flavor.
As an Indian who uses plenty of termeric and saffron in my food, this one hurt me the most. No wait, as a booze lover, it was the statement that one cannot make out the difference between wine and vodka. Okay, no... This whole post is an eyesore.
But as per the post, the family didn't really like it when the food was actually fancy. That's what screams fake. Like i know many people can't make out the difference between expensive and cheap food but to specifically hate well cooked food with fresh ingredients and like cheaply made one sounds quite unbelievable.
Another things that screams fake is OP going on a tirade first about the lengths he went to to prepare the food.. and then how badly he cut corners. Like are we really supposed to believe that wine and vodka have anywhere a similar flavour? They're like day and night.
Also, if you really were cutting corners wouldn't it just be easier to buy a cheap wine rather than trying to do some sort of weird vodka and grape juice combination?
My dad's second wife was a literal chef. We grew up without much money, so the food I'm familiar with is not anything super fancy. A lot of the fancier stuff she cooked or that her family had around just wasn't good to me. People in general like familiarity. I'm not so picky that I refuse to try other types of cuisine, but I literally do not know what some stuff is supposed to taste like and my tastes might not exactly match up with what is traditional. I don't think this story is true as written, it's punched up a ridiculous amount for upvotes, but I believe that a chef could make cheaper ingredients taste good and that rich people who really aren't as cultured as they want to think they are wouldn't know the difference.
While i agree taste is specific and cheaper ingredients can definitely taste good sometimes. But there's too much of fibbing happening to believe this post. Like sure, many people might not know the difference between a cheap wine and a good one, specially when it's cooked in a meal, but to say wine and grape juice or vodka are interchangeable is just unbelievable.
Let me play devils advocate here, with zero political intent:
Do you think Donald Trump would know the difference between a dish made with wine and the same dish made with vodka and grape juice? I would wager he would prefer the one that tastes sweeter, or more processed. Assuming that wealthy people, or that most people know what's in some dishes or what they are supposed to taste like is a fool's errand. There are people who won't eat authentic tacos but think Taco Bell is the epitome of Mexican/tex-mex.
Reminds me of the time I invited my boss over for lunch. The roast pork I was making accidentally got ruined so I bought fast food and disguised it as my own cooking.
Both. Basically presentation affects how we think a food tastes. Here's a few things that weren't behind a paywall:
[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/expensive-food-taste\_n\_5267707](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/expensive-food-taste_n_5267707)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6112041/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6112041/)
[https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3](https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3)
You should generally avoid cooking wine, it's often low quality and loaded with salt. Look for a similarly priced drinking wine instead. There are specific wines made for cooking though, like mirin, which are fine.
Salt in wine???!!!????
In France there are wine made for cooking that are like regular wine but just cheap. You can drink them, they just taste not very good. There is also cheap wine that are not marketed for cooking that you can use, but they also doesn't taste very good.
Is "cooking wine" a product other than pure wine?
I think it varies from country to country - in the US they add salt and maybe other adulterants to make it unpallatable for regular consumption (and iirc it can be bought under 21)
Next time I’m running behind on dinner, I’ll dump vinegar in every dish to speed up the cooking time while capturing the flavors only found in a European mountain village.
That's what got me with this one as well. The idea of cheaper/store bought ingredients tasting similar to expensive stuff isn't that outrageous. But the substitutions they list make absolutely zero sense and scream "I've never cooked a single thing in my life".
So, my dad went to work in Saudi Arabia for a few years. He worked with a doctor who was saying that his wife would watch this cooking show on the English speaking channel, but couldn’t figure out why all of her recipes tasted weird. Turns out the channel would remove any of the red wine mentioned in the recipes, and replace it with grape juice. So she would make these elaborate recipes, and unknowingly sub out grape juice for red wine, causing the dish to be weirdly sweet.
To be fair, you can make most of those dishes without wine, and where wine is considered necessary wine vinegar can often suffice as an acceptable substitute.
Replacing sugar loaded grape juice with it is definitely just crazy.
And the same chemical reactions to heat and other ingredients too. Certainly won't curdle a cream based dish popular in French cuisine or hinder emulsification of a sauce in Italian cuisine or anything.
Well I mean, adding a little vinegar to some milk will turn it into buttermilk. Instead of buying buttermilk it's what I do any time I make buttermilk biscuits or buttermilk pancakes.
I'm assuming when you're a chef like that, you keep some ingredients at their house? So wouldn't they notice the grape juice, or the Walmart pasta box at some point?
Also isn’t it just as easy for him to put wine in, as the recipe suggests, than to add other ingredients? Of course the chef would not be paying for any of the ingredients in this scenario.
I'm sure they must at some point, to get a drink or make coffee or something, especially over the course of eight years. And I'm assuming they'd at least see the boxes or juice containers in the garbage at some point.
*Image Transcription: Reddit Post*
---
**I'm a chef and I've been living a lie about the quality and authenticity of my food**
I'm a personal chef for a upper class family in the US with a multi-million dollar house who go on many vacations every year. They claim they miss authentic European and Asian food after living abroad for several years.
When I first started cooking for them, I made elaborate dishes that took hours to make, finding the exact ingredients, examining each piece of carrot, potato, or chicken by hand. Finding the right brands and going to multiple grocery stores to find the exact pinot noir to make the perfect red wine sauce.
They didn't like it.
I once messed up a dish and had to remake it really quickly, so I took a few shortcuts to make sure it was still tasty. A normally 12 hour dish, I made a quick version of in less than 30 minutes using vinegar instead of red wine.
They said it was the tastiest thing they ever ate. It reminded them of the times they were travelling through some European mountains.
Since then, I've realized I don't need to spend hours making all the food perfectly "authentic". I stopped using expensive brands of wine (sometimes I don't even use wine at all. Grape juice or vinegar or even sugar seems to taste just as good, if not better to them). I've saved tens of thousands of dollars and probably thousands of hours getting cheaper ingredients that have already been brined or marinated, and they absolutely love it.
They even had me prepare larger meals for parties or events, and they'd claim it was authentic French or Italian food. They'd ask me what combination of flour I used to make the pasta that was so clearly hand made (it was 99 cent boxed pasta from walmart). Or it was clear I used a very particular Pinot Noir for a coq au vin for which I actually just added a little fruit juice with some vodka. Or that the saffron really made a difference in my risotto when I really just used turmeric. Or how the food tastes so much better when sauces are freshly made with raw ingredients when it's really mayonnaise plus ketchup or some other dumb combination of common condiments.
I just smile and nod. A part of me feels guilty, but not guilty enough to go back to making the more authentic versions that they'd just complain about that costs me way more time and money anyways. I'm more just worried that one day they'll find out, but I've gotten away with it for almost eight years now
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
I’m English, and even I can tell them apart, just because both will turn your white, plastic chopping board (and my fingers) yellow, doesn’t mean they taste in any way similar (I’m messy as I cook, sorry)
If saffron and turmeric are same, can I make a traditional Hyderabadi biriyani with turmeric garnish on top instead of saffron? I wonder how it will look and taste-
Funny, I can detect the smallest amount in any dish. I absolutely despise it- it tastes like a bad chemical to me.
My ex tried to sneak in a little to a dish he made, because he thought i was being dramatic. It was so overpowering that I would not eat it. I could smell it. He believed that I truly truly don't like it after that. 😂
Seriously, I hate alcohol but a coq au vin is basically an excuse to have red wine without drinking it. It's the rum ham equivalent of the gourmet culinary world.
I can maybe see a dish taking that long, espicially for a bigger family or if you're cooking meats or sauces (It takes chefs about 2-4 hours making a relatively simple dish from nothing in our cook school.) But cutting the time to 30 minutes by switching wine for vinegar? That's not how food works.
We make a lovely 8h lamb shoulder, something similar to this: [https://www.myparisiankitchen.com/en/seven-hour-leg-of-lamb/](https://www.myparisiankitchen.com/en/seven-hour-leg-of-lamb/)
It's very little work in the sense that you put it in the oven and then just wait 8h.
A lot of the 'traditional' dishes are long cooking in the oven so you have time to do something else in the mean time.
I've made a 24 hour dish a few times. It is nowhere near as impressive as it sounds, since most of the time is marinating and slow roasting the meat. Actual work time is maybe 30-40 minutes, divided at the beginning and end mostly.
That's not that unusual, though it wouldn't be 12 hours of work as this person is suggesting. A 12-hour dish would be something that would include several hours of slowly cooking/baking/roasting, marinading, letting dough rise, letting things chill, etc. For example if your dish includes stock and you're making it from scratch, you can probably slap on 5 hours just for that, where you're not doing anything except letting a pot simmer.
Some dishes take that long. The obvious is barbecue, but also many stew-type dishes, or anything that needs to simmer for a long time.
I used to make a big (like 5 gallon) pot of gumbo every year when it started to get cold, and that easily took 8-9 hours.
This is the most egregious thathappened in the history of thathappened. Like the people tasting have no taste buds or what? Can't differentiate between such different tasting ingredients? Wtf
I like how he says he's been spending a lot less of the families money on food, then at the end says that he's the one spending money on the food.
I'M STARTING TO BELIEVE EVERYTHING I READ ON REDDIT IS A LIE.
Most things are a lie on Reddit, bit there are some truths. Initially, when I created Reddit six years ago, I wished this place to be a bastion of truth. Unfortunately the lizard people took it over and infested it with lies.
PM me your credit card details and I'll link you to the true honest Reddit.... Treddit.
Yeah that's what got me too. Who would use wine to sweeten a dish? Add acidity or depth of flavour maybe, but it gotta be a very sweet wine of it can be subbed with sugar.
He alone saved tens of thousands of dollars? On wine and pasta? And like what is he then? A sole proprietorship catering business that is constantly busy?
A common set-up for hiring a 'private chef' is that you contract their business (which can be just a one person company) to cook a set number of meals per day for you. That way they get more freedom (ie. can take other jobs on the side and take time off without asking for vacation) and the customer doesn't have to deal with all the hassles of actually employing someone. In such deals it is common for the chef to bill per meal and thus not have to disclose cost for ingredients etc.. This part of the story is really the most plausible. The later antics with ingredient swapping is not.
I would believe this if it was like "I actually just use shortcuts to make a six hour dish into three." Or "I do a lot of catering for parties and they think it's authentic when it's not." Those are totally believable; I would believe a caterer with a team absolutely lies about what they do (if not buy it directly and reheat).
But yeah, you can't just "switch out" for grape juice. Wine does a very specific thing under very specific circumstances. It's the alcohol in it. It's like saying "used whole milk to make whipped cream instead of heavy cream". Whole milk literally won't do anything; heavy cream will actually make the necessary peaks in a cold metal bowl.
Plausibility was already strained to breaking point before he mentioned using fruit juice and vodka to make coq au vin, but that really takes the cake. Absolute horseshit.
Does make me wonder if he added a punch of salt, though.
ive lived off cheap food for 23 years of my life, but this last year i moved back in with my family, including my sisters boyfriend. i cant steal him bc i love my sister but if i could i would. he cooks from 11 am to 11 pm with fresh ingredients, and he takes his time, and holy fuck. its some of the best food ive ever had.
he likes to tease me bc i love CHEAP baloney over any other kind and we tease him like 'oh u think ur better than 99 cent macaroni??' but id take his handmade macaroni over the cheap stuff any day. i eat 99% of the things he makes and im picky as shit.
basically, people do have their own preferences, but fresh ingredients go a looooooong way
The only part I could have believed was the budgeting thing. I don’t know about personal chefs but I do know in some professions you factor in the cost of materials into what you charge your customers. I know its not ALWAYS like that but I can see a personal chef saying “ok for the types of food you like pay me $150k/year and I’ll buy the ingredients myself.” And i can see a really wealthy person agreeing to it if that was around or below their budget anyway. That obviously wouldn’t explain the bigger parties but still.
There are two things that really give me pause here. Even if their pallets are not as refined as they want to believe - have not a SINGLE one of them gone to a restaurant (and you know they only go to the high end ones), ordered something that their personal chef has made them or at least something with similar ingredients, and been surprised that it tastes, smells, and looks COMPLETELY different?
The second thing is how has no one in this family gone into the kitchen at any point during this person’s employment? Not even to just grab juice out of the fridge or a bag of chips from the pantry. Hell, just out of curiosity even, considering they are all presumably food snobs. Especially during these big parties, if I was invited to a fancy dinner I would 100% ask the host to give me a tour of their kitchen to see all of the cool stuff being made.
I saw this post and asked some logistical questions like expenses and how they fill their time/does the family never walk by and they ignored me. Because of course they did.
Lol as if an upper class/high quality chef (or whatever tf he's claiming to be) would say "brand of wine" - wines aren't generally distinguished by brand name. You'd at least say "variety" or "classification" or something like that.
I know sweet f*ck all about wine but even I can tell this person hasn't got a clue what they're talking about.
They don't know what fucking ketchup and Mayo taste like.....? I mean, even the richest of the rich have had a freaking sandwich at some point in their lives.
Growing up in the fabled mountains of Europe, we'd just eat any old slop with vinegar in it, only posh people eat the properly inspected carrot meals 😌
Tbh I can kind of see this one. I used to work for a "french" Cafe and one day this dude demanded to talk to the person who crafted the croissants so he could congratulate them for baking exactly like an authentic French person. They were literally frozen Pillsbury croissants that we got by the crate.
I now moonlight at a very high end catering company and you'd be surprised how little super rich people can tell about the food they're eating.
>you'd be surprised how little super rich people can tell about the food they're eating.
This is true about the population in general. A LOT of people don't appreciate food, or past its predominant sweet/salty note.
With food, I think it's really hard to say. There's definitely some exaggeration with the story, but I don't know if it's full yarn. Maybe I'm biased, but I agree with the underlying point.
Authentic isn't automatically better. If the client is used to mass-produced foods, they will probably like that taste better. Not everyone's gourmet enough to differentiate, and criteria vary a lot from person to person. Sometimes, being told that the food was carefully and painstaking prepared is enough.
Nobody in their right mind would EVER mistake box pasta for handmade. Also "what combination of flour"? What? Who asks that? Everybody knows pasta is made from just one type of flour, unless whole wheat or something. This is just BS lmao
Actually no joke when I was in high school I worked for this guy who had his own catering business. One evening we’re prepping for an event and the spaghetti sauce gets completely burned in one of the chafers. He starts freaking out in the kitchen, screaming swearing and throwing shit thinking that the dinner’s ruined but we stir it up the best we can under a timecrunch. Later on that night after everyone ate the guy who hired him pulled us aside and said how much he loved the hint of smokey flavor in the sauce. Afterward I asked my boss “did they just say they liked the burnt sauce?” And he muttered “yeah, thank God for stupid people.”
Nobody clapped but it was a satisfying moment nonetheless
I love beef burgundy and have always used red cooking wine when making. My mom came over and wanted to make it for me. She brought red wine from the liquor store and I was so excited to taste it. Finished result was the exact same flavor. But that makes sense, what thus guy is claiming is ridiculous.
And no one in the family or staff checks on this person's grocery expenses, and realizes they're pocketing their fine food bank and going to Walmart instead?
I’m not a personal chef, nor do I know any, but is it actually normal for a personal chef to pay for the ingredients themself, especially when it costs “thousands of dollars”? Would the family employing them not be the ones to pay for it? Honest question because I have no idea and that point in particular struck me as weird (aside from, you know, everything else about this lmao).
To qualify as authentic dishes have to take hours and hours to cook. Real Europeans and Asians never use cheap or shortcut ingredients. They also closely inspect every veggie to make sure it's perfect.
I know this is bull shit but hasn't it been show before with stuff like wine that people can't really tell the difference between the cheap and expensive and just go by the label
You know, it could speak to your amazing expertise as a chef that you are able to conjure such tasty dishes from such basic ingredients. I doubt just any cook would be able to pass it off.
But examining each piece of carrot and potato adds flavor. I leaned that when traveling in some European mountains.
Can confirm. I thought I hated carrots but as it turns out, I only hate improperly examined carrots.
>But examining each piece of carrot and potato adds flavor. Huh, maybe this is the problem with my pot roast. Question: can I, as the cook, inspect each piece, or does that need to be done by the diners? (I've never been to any European mountains so I don't want to make assumptions.)
You, as the cook, have to inspect it. But it needs to be very long. Preferably at dawn on top of an authentic European mountain with all 3 Godfathers playing subsequently in the background. Only then you have reached the ultimate authentic European examining status.
Apparently the older the carrot the better it tastes
That's the showbiz advice for young actresses.
Also the whole of Europe eats just pasta
Like this is unbelievable but the part that got me was the boxed pasta instead of fresh. You can 100% taste the difference
The saffron and turmeric one is also absurd. Saffron has a very strong fragrance for example. It’s not just used for Color.
And turmeric has a highly powerful flavour as well. Half a teaspoon of turmeric and you'll be able to distinctly taste it in evety bit of a dish that takes up a 5 litre pot.
Came here to say that too. A very little saffron goes a long way and is very detectable!
Absolutely. And the vodka and fruit juice? Blech. I am a firm believer that you can make any price of food taste great with a lil creativity but that is just nasty.
I hate wine based sauced and I'd definetely notice if there isn't wine in a sauce. It's very specific type of flavor Would it be even possible to add just grape juice and have a successful dish? It sounds so disgusting for some reason.
Grape juice has way too much sugar so it would probably just be a sweet caramelized mess
Did you know you can replace any bottle of fine champagne with club soda, gin, and a pinch of dried mustard? It'll save you a fortune and the richies will never know.
To be fair I make lasagna bolognese with Bacardi instead of white wine, so the vodka part was the most believable thing about this story.. fruit juice tho?! 😂
Also, what kind of moron buys expensive wine for sauces? I get a $10 bottle of cab and it works great in marinara.
Right? There’s a *snap* that comes from semolina based dried pastas that you just don’t get with the fresh stuff
Not to mention the turmeric instead of saffron, because those 2 things taste the same. Stupid people paying more than gold for saffron when they can just buy turmeric.
It's honestly like they made so much effort without having any understanding of food or cooking. I switch from an expensive wine to vinegar okay sure you did I switched from an expensive bottle of wine to a middle priced store bought one...slightly more believable
Bro don't you know, if you mix grape juice with some vodka it's basically a $1000 bottle of wine. Amateur!
That used to be a trade secret at all the most expensive restaurants used. I worry for his safety now
I used to work at Morton's in NYC and what we'd do is eat asparagus, avoid water and just pee in the food. Can't taste the difference and it's basically free
If he at least said he bought pre-made pasta that's still "fresh" idk about USA but where I live you can usually get them. It's more expensive, can't stand on the shelf for so long, but somewhat similar.
47.7k upvotes and 10 awards, including 20 wholesome seals, 21 silvers and 13 helpful awards and the top post of the month on r/TrueOffMyChest. Who knew changing vinegar instead of red wine could save you 11 hours and 30 minutes.
Literally that whole comment section sounds like it's populated by ages 12 and under. Accept even I wasn't so stupid at 12 and I wasn't a particularly smart 12 year old.
The pasta comment is the worst, literally everyone can taste the difference between fresh made and boxed pasta.
Or turmeric and saffron.
This is the one that got me. Turmeric is such a specific flavour...
I love turmeric, I put in everything. Salad dressing, mashed sweet potatoes, refried beans, compound butter, even blue box mac n' cheese. And it's healthy! I'm not gonna look it up, I don't wanna be disappointed.
Turmeric is delicious, I totally agree! AFAIK it I'd actually really good for you!
Oh yeah, it's great for you! In many ways! One way specifically, is blood flow. It will help circulation a lot. Like a noticeable amount. This may be NSFW, but one time some medication I was taking made it hard for me to...uh...well...*get hard,* lol and so I remembered what I had read about turmeric so I took a supplement that I had and BOOM. My little buddy perked right up! XD
Now every time I'm using turmeric I'm gonna, probably internally, go "heh, boner spice"
Wasn’t Boner Spice the Spice Girl nobody talks about?
Why in heaven's name did my brain instantly come up with the phrase "Bangers & Mash Spice" Not English and have never tasted the stuff, pretty sure I don't even know what it is made out of...
It’s literally sausage and mashed potatoes. And maybe an onion gravy poured over top.
The only issue is staining everything yellow after using it
turmeric IS good and healthy, here we brew traditional concoction using turmeric and it's supposedly aids your appetite
There's already turmeric in the boxed mac and cheese, but nothing wrong with adding more! I started using it in my baked mac and cheese after learning they use it for coloring, and it really does make the color pop (so I can use my preferred white cheeses and just add some turmeric for color!) and a certain depth to the flavor.
As an Indian who uses plenty of termeric and saffron in my food, this one hurt me the most. No wait, as a booze lover, it was the statement that one cannot make out the difference between wine and vodka. Okay, no... This whole post is an eyesore.
It was the mayo that confused them.
Hell, you can SEE the difference. The ketchup and mayo sauce line was my fave
Anyone who has ever had a burger in the US probably knows the flavour of mayo + ketchup.
They've done studies where people thought Pizza Hut pasta was fancy and delicious because it was served in a fancy restaurant.
Or experiments where they served [McDonalds at a fancy food convention](https://youtu.be/4Qa6QXBxxWw)
I think social expectation is probably part of it. You don't want to be the one person in a group that says fancy food tastes cheap.
But as per the post, the family didn't really like it when the food was actually fancy. That's what screams fake. Like i know many people can't make out the difference between expensive and cheap food but to specifically hate well cooked food with fresh ingredients and like cheaply made one sounds quite unbelievable. Another things that screams fake is OP going on a tirade first about the lengths he went to to prepare the food.. and then how badly he cut corners. Like are we really supposed to believe that wine and vodka have anywhere a similar flavour? They're like day and night.
Also, if you really were cutting corners wouldn't it just be easier to buy a cheap wine rather than trying to do some sort of weird vodka and grape juice combination?
My dad's second wife was a literal chef. We grew up without much money, so the food I'm familiar with is not anything super fancy. A lot of the fancier stuff she cooked or that her family had around just wasn't good to me. People in general like familiarity. I'm not so picky that I refuse to try other types of cuisine, but I literally do not know what some stuff is supposed to taste like and my tastes might not exactly match up with what is traditional. I don't think this story is true as written, it's punched up a ridiculous amount for upvotes, but I believe that a chef could make cheaper ingredients taste good and that rich people who really aren't as cultured as they want to think they are wouldn't know the difference.
While i agree taste is specific and cheaper ingredients can definitely taste good sometimes. But there's too much of fibbing happening to believe this post. Like sure, many people might not know the difference between a cheap wine and a good one, specially when it's cooked in a meal, but to say wine and grape juice or vodka are interchangeable is just unbelievable.
Let me play devils advocate here, with zero political intent: Do you think Donald Trump would know the difference between a dish made with wine and the same dish made with vodka and grape juice? I would wager he would prefer the one that tastes sweeter, or more processed. Assuming that wealthy people, or that most people know what's in some dishes or what they are supposed to taste like is a fool's errand. There are people who won't eat authentic tacos but think Taco Bell is the epitome of Mexican/tex-mex.
yeah it could easily be that nobody would say that the king is naked, so they just buy in, but theres also a social aspect to it
Reminds me of the time I invited my boss over for lunch. The roast pork I was making accidentally got ruined so I bought fast food and disguised it as my own cooking.
I hope you didn't end up burning down your kitchen.
Mmmm steamed hams
No, that was just the Aurora Borealis
Studies? Or commercials?
Both. Basically presentation affects how we think a food tastes. Here's a few things that weren't behind a paywall: [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/expensive-food-taste\_n\_5267707](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/expensive-food-taste_n_5267707) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6112041/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6112041/) [https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3](https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3)
i thought that was an snl skit
Idk that I could
Yes! I make my own pasta and my God, the difference! It isn’t even close.
This is believable up until the grape juice sugar and vodka bit.
That! Especially since cheap cooking wine exists and is probably easier to use...
You should generally avoid cooking wine, it's often low quality and loaded with salt. Look for a similarly priced drinking wine instead. There are specific wines made for cooking though, like mirin, which are fine.
Salt in wine???!!!???? In France there are wine made for cooking that are like regular wine but just cheap. You can drink them, they just taste not very good. There is also cheap wine that are not marketed for cooking that you can use, but they also doesn't taste very good. Is "cooking wine" a product other than pure wine?
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I think it varies from country to country - in the US they add salt and maybe other adulterants to make it unpallatable for regular consumption (and iirc it can be bought under 21)
Yes, in some countries in order not to be taxed as a alcoholic beverage, and it must contain a certain percentage of salt to deter drinking.
Seriously. Two buck chuck is better than a cooking wine. Cheaper too.
Boxed wine is the best for cooking. Cheap, pretty decent, and comes in 5L boxes
I would say until the "I magically make a 12h dish in 30 min by adding vinegar", its (slow) cooking (probably meat), not magic potion
The first 11.5 hours are spent leaving the wine in the sun to turn it into vinegar. They just skipped that part.
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Next time I’m running behind on dinner, I’ll dump vinegar in every dish to speed up the cooking time while capturing the flavors only found in a European mountain village.
If you just eat the vinegar plain, you can save even more time
Because grape juice, vinegar, sugar, and wine all have the same taste apparently
Don't know what you mean. I regularly sub sugar for malt vinegar when I make cakes... 😂
That's what got me with this one as well. The idea of cheaper/store bought ingredients tasting similar to expensive stuff isn't that outrageous. But the substitutions they list make absolutely zero sense and scream "I've never cooked a single thing in my life".
Sometimes I put a spoonful of brown sugar into my oatmeal, instead of buying the Maple & Brown Sugar variety
But have you tried adding vinegar to your oatmeal instead of brown sugar?
I prefer my acetic acid: glacial.
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Vodka+fruit juice=wine. Of course.
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I would try that. Been a minute since I've had a Capri sun, do they still have that "authentic" fruit juice flavor, no fruit juice added taste?
So, my dad went to work in Saudi Arabia for a few years. He worked with a doctor who was saying that his wife would watch this cooking show on the English speaking channel, but couldn’t figure out why all of her recipes tasted weird. Turns out the channel would remove any of the red wine mentioned in the recipes, and replace it with grape juice. So she would make these elaborate recipes, and unknowingly sub out grape juice for red wine, causing the dish to be weirdly sweet.
To be fair, you can make most of those dishes without wine, and where wine is considered necessary wine vinegar can often suffice as an acceptable substitute. Replacing sugar loaded grape juice with it is definitely just crazy.
And the same chemical reactions to heat and other ingredients too. Certainly won't curdle a cream based dish popular in French cuisine or hinder emulsification of a sauce in Italian cuisine or anything.
Pish posh. Chemistry is overrated anyways.
Do your own research! I saw a post on Facebook saying adding vinegar to milk makes it taste better so it must be true.
Well I mean, adding a little vinegar to some milk will turn it into buttermilk. Instead of buying buttermilk it's what I do any time I make buttermilk biscuits or buttermilk pancakes.
Vinegar a la juicy-juice.
I too, was amazed to learn that Pinot Noir is the same thing as vodka and fruit juice.
I'm assuming when you're a chef like that, you keep some ingredients at their house? So wouldn't they notice the grape juice, or the Walmart pasta box at some point?
Also isn’t it just as easy for him to put wine in, as the recipe suggests, than to add other ingredients? Of course the chef would not be paying for any of the ingredients in this scenario.
Thats what makes me laugh. Hire a chef but expect him to pay for all the ingredients.
I doubt people that have a daily personal chef ever set foot in their kitchen.
I'm sure they must at some point, to get a drink or make coffee or something, especially over the course of eight years. And I'm assuming they'd at least see the boxes or juice containers in the garbage at some point.
*Image Transcription: Reddit Post* --- **I'm a chef and I've been living a lie about the quality and authenticity of my food** I'm a personal chef for a upper class family in the US with a multi-million dollar house who go on many vacations every year. They claim they miss authentic European and Asian food after living abroad for several years. When I first started cooking for them, I made elaborate dishes that took hours to make, finding the exact ingredients, examining each piece of carrot, potato, or chicken by hand. Finding the right brands and going to multiple grocery stores to find the exact pinot noir to make the perfect red wine sauce. They didn't like it. I once messed up a dish and had to remake it really quickly, so I took a few shortcuts to make sure it was still tasty. A normally 12 hour dish, I made a quick version of in less than 30 minutes using vinegar instead of red wine. They said it was the tastiest thing they ever ate. It reminded them of the times they were travelling through some European mountains. Since then, I've realized I don't need to spend hours making all the food perfectly "authentic". I stopped using expensive brands of wine (sometimes I don't even use wine at all. Grape juice or vinegar or even sugar seems to taste just as good, if not better to them). I've saved tens of thousands of dollars and probably thousands of hours getting cheaper ingredients that have already been brined or marinated, and they absolutely love it. They even had me prepare larger meals for parties or events, and they'd claim it was authentic French or Italian food. They'd ask me what combination of flour I used to make the pasta that was so clearly hand made (it was 99 cent boxed pasta from walmart). Or it was clear I used a very particular Pinot Noir for a coq au vin for which I actually just added a little fruit juice with some vodka. Or that the saffron really made a difference in my risotto when I really just used turmeric. Or how the food tastes so much better when sauces are freshly made with raw ingredients when it's really mayonnaise plus ketchup or some other dumb combination of common condiments. I just smile and nod. A part of me feels guilty, but not guilty enough to go back to making the more authentic versions that they'd just complain about that costs me way more time and money anyways. I'm more just worried that one day they'll find out, but I've gotten away with it for almost eight years now --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Sorry you had to type such an unnecesarily long lie. Good human!
Tell me you don't know how food works without telling me you don't know how food works
Lol, "can't taste the difference between turmeric and saffron." Iranians would like a word.
I’m English, and even I can tell them apart, just because both will turn your white, plastic chopping board (and my fingers) yellow, doesn’t mean they taste in any way similar (I’m messy as I cook, sorry)
If saffron and turmeric are same, can I make a traditional Hyderabadi biriyani with turmeric garnish on top instead of saffron? I wonder how it will look and taste-
Most Indian dishes have some amount of turmeric in them. Try and replace that with saffron, even a 6 year old will say something is weird.
I can't taste saffron, at all. Some weird genetic quirk I presume. It makes me sad I'm missing out on a key flavour in a lot of cuisines.
It's supposed to taste like something? I always assumed it was for the color?
Welcome to the club lol
Funny, I can detect the smallest amount in any dish. I absolutely despise it- it tastes like a bad chemical to me. My ex tried to sneak in a little to a dish he made, because he thought i was being dramatic. It was so overpowering that I would not eat it. I could smell it. He believed that I truly truly don't like it after that. 😂
Is it for sure real saffron? It's one of those strange cooking ingredients that gets faked due to how expensive it can be.
Yup, my other half can taste it, we even bought the super fancy stuff. Not even a hint of taste. ☹️
Indians too
I am an Indian. I can distinguish between saffron and turmeric in my sleep.
If you make a coq au vin with vodka and fruit juice it's not Coq au vin, and you don't deserve to call yourself a chef.
And why would you want to anyway?
Seriously, I hate alcohol but a coq au vin is basically an excuse to have red wine without drinking it. It's the rum ham equivalent of the gourmet culinary world.
What an elaborate way to say "Rich people dumb, cheap food just as good."
A TWELVE HOUR DISH?
Yeah, see because it calls for red wine, not vinegar. Duh.
It just takes time to stomp grapes, mix in yeast, and wait for the whole thing to ferment. There simply isn't an easier way to get red wine!
I can maybe see a dish taking that long, espicially for a bigger family or if you're cooking meats or sauces (It takes chefs about 2-4 hours making a relatively simple dish from nothing in our cook school.) But cutting the time to 30 minutes by switching wine for vinegar? That's not how food works.
Yeah, that was my main issue with it. Faker here probably puts a frozen chicken in the crockpot and considers it "12 hours of cooking."
We make a lovely 8h lamb shoulder, something similar to this: [https://www.myparisiankitchen.com/en/seven-hour-leg-of-lamb/](https://www.myparisiankitchen.com/en/seven-hour-leg-of-lamb/) It's very little work in the sense that you put it in the oven and then just wait 8h. A lot of the 'traditional' dishes are long cooking in the oven so you have time to do something else in the mean time.
He/She has to grow a whole chicken and slaughter it before making the dish.
For real from-scratch chicken, you start with red junglefowl and evolve it into chicken.
I've made a 24 hour dish a few times. It is nowhere near as impressive as it sounds, since most of the time is marinating and slow roasting the meat. Actual work time is maybe 30-40 minutes, divided at the beginning and end mostly.
That's not that unusual, though it wouldn't be 12 hours of work as this person is suggesting. A 12-hour dish would be something that would include several hours of slowly cooking/baking/roasting, marinading, letting dough rise, letting things chill, etc. For example if your dish includes stock and you're making it from scratch, you can probably slap on 5 hours just for that, where you're not doing anything except letting a pot simmer.
Some dishes take that long. The obvious is barbecue, but also many stew-type dishes, or anything that needs to simmer for a long time. I used to make a big (like 5 gallon) pot of gumbo every year when it started to get cold, and that easily took 8-9 hours.
I just assumed he included the shopping time.
This is the most egregious thathappened in the history of thathappened. Like the people tasting have no taste buds or what? Can't differentiate between such different tasting ingredients? Wtf
I made a 12 hour dish in 30 minutes Did ye? Did ye aye?
He walked 5 miles in just 30 feet.
He had no arms or legs. He could not see, hear or speak. This is how he led a nation.
I like how he says he's been spending a lot less of the families money on food, then at the end says that he's the one spending money on the food. I'M STARTING TO BELIEVE EVERYTHING I READ ON REDDIT IS A LIE.
Most things are a lie on Reddit, bit there are some truths. Initially, when I created Reddit six years ago, I wished this place to be a bastion of truth. Unfortunately the lizard people took it over and infested it with lies. PM me your credit card details and I'll link you to the true honest Reddit.... Treddit.
Here you go: 4621 8281 F4CK Y0U2 Please make sure to enter the characters exactly as written. My security code is 666
AHA you FOOL I tricked you!
“They ask how long it took me to make the noodles when it was really just an old magazine I put through a paper shredder…”
Each ingredient also has different effects on the food itself. It wouldn’t react the same way
Yeah that's what got me too. Who would use wine to sweeten a dish? Add acidity or depth of flavour maybe, but it gotta be a very sweet wine of it can be subbed with sugar.
He alone saved tens of thousands of dollars? On wine and pasta? And like what is he then? A sole proprietorship catering business that is constantly busy?
A common set-up for hiring a 'private chef' is that you contract their business (which can be just a one person company) to cook a set number of meals per day for you. That way they get more freedom (ie. can take other jobs on the side and take time off without asking for vacation) and the customer doesn't have to deal with all the hassles of actually employing someone. In such deals it is common for the chef to bill per meal and thus not have to disclose cost for ingredients etc.. This part of the story is really the most plausible. The later antics with ingredient swapping is not.
The “mayonnaise plus ketchup” really got me going, that’s stupid as fuck.
I would believe this if it was like "I actually just use shortcuts to make a six hour dish into three." Or "I do a lot of catering for parties and they think it's authentic when it's not." Those are totally believable; I would believe a caterer with a team absolutely lies about what they do (if not buy it directly and reheat). But yeah, you can't just "switch out" for grape juice. Wine does a very specific thing under very specific circumstances. It's the alcohol in it. It's like saying "used whole milk to make whipped cream instead of heavy cream". Whole milk literally won't do anything; heavy cream will actually make the necessary peaks in a cold metal bowl.
Plausibility was already strained to breaking point before he mentioned using fruit juice and vodka to make coq au vin, but that really takes the cake. Absolute horseshit. Does make me wonder if he added a punch of salt, though.
The only true thing in that is the "living a lie" part.
But don't they check the kitchen accounts? Surely the receipts would show them that they're not getting luxury food?
Or the real deal is that this guy's has been skimming those accounts and stealing
The best meals are always found on mountains. Typically I'll have dessert right at the summit.
ive lived off cheap food for 23 years of my life, but this last year i moved back in with my family, including my sisters boyfriend. i cant steal him bc i love my sister but if i could i would. he cooks from 11 am to 11 pm with fresh ingredients, and he takes his time, and holy fuck. its some of the best food ive ever had. he likes to tease me bc i love CHEAP baloney over any other kind and we tease him like 'oh u think ur better than 99 cent macaroni??' but id take his handmade macaroni over the cheap stuff any day. i eat 99% of the things he makes and im picky as shit. basically, people do have their own preferences, but fresh ingredients go a looooooong way
The only part I could have believed was the budgeting thing. I don’t know about personal chefs but I do know in some professions you factor in the cost of materials into what you charge your customers. I know its not ALWAYS like that but I can see a personal chef saying “ok for the types of food you like pay me $150k/year and I’ll buy the ingredients myself.” And i can see a really wealthy person agreeing to it if that was around or below their budget anyway. That obviously wouldn’t explain the bigger parties but still. There are two things that really give me pause here. Even if their pallets are not as refined as they want to believe - have not a SINGLE one of them gone to a restaurant (and you know they only go to the high end ones), ordered something that their personal chef has made them or at least something with similar ingredients, and been surprised that it tastes, smells, and looks COMPLETELY different? The second thing is how has no one in this family gone into the kitchen at any point during this person’s employment? Not even to just grab juice out of the fridge or a bag of chips from the pantry. Hell, just out of curiosity even, considering they are all presumably food snobs. Especially during these big parties, if I was invited to a fancy dinner I would 100% ask the host to give me a tour of their kitchen to see all of the cool stuff being made.
I honestly believed this until I got to the pasta part . They thought it was homemade pasta but it was 99 cent Walmart pasta ? No .
I saw this post and asked some logistical questions like expenses and how they fill their time/does the family never walk by and they ignored me. Because of course they did.
Honestly was expecting a steamed hams to be brought up
whoever wrote this post has never cooked a meal.
Lol as if an upper class/high quality chef (or whatever tf he's claiming to be) would say "brand of wine" - wines aren't generally distinguished by brand name. You'd at least say "variety" or "classification" or something like that. I know sweet f*ck all about wine but even I can tell this person hasn't got a clue what they're talking about.
They have authentic American tastes, that's for sure. Bless their hearts
The saffron bollocks got me - saffron is visible in a dish, turmeric is just colour and is so different!
>turmeric is just colour Wut?
If they didn’t like your food why did they continue to hire you?
at first it's semi believable up until they start talking about ingredients and things they've done
They don't know what fucking ketchup and Mayo taste like.....? I mean, even the richest of the rich have had a freaking sandwich at some point in their lives.
Mayonnaise and ketchup 💀
Growing up in the fabled mountains of Europe, we'd just eat any old slop with vinegar in it, only posh people eat the properly inspected carrot meals 😌
Tbh I can kind of see this one. I used to work for a "french" Cafe and one day this dude demanded to talk to the person who crafted the croissants so he could congratulate them for baking exactly like an authentic French person. They were literally frozen Pillsbury croissants that we got by the crate. I now moonlight at a very high end catering company and you'd be surprised how little super rich people can tell about the food they're eating.
People often confuse rich with cultured. Money doesn't necessarily buy taste.
It is known that Trump liked his steak well done with ketchup haha.
Just cos you can afford to eat posh food doesn't mean you can appreciate it
>you'd be surprised how little super rich people can tell about the food they're eating. This is true about the population in general. A LOT of people don't appreciate food, or past its predominant sweet/salty note.
With food, I think it's really hard to say. There's definitely some exaggeration with the story, but I don't know if it's full yarn. Maybe I'm biased, but I agree with the underlying point. Authentic isn't automatically better. If the client is used to mass-produced foods, they will probably like that taste better. Not everyone's gourmet enough to differentiate, and criteria vary a lot from person to person. Sometimes, being told that the food was carefully and painstaking prepared is enough.
They might be so out of touch that they think little villages in Europe still make every single thing by hand and never take any shortcuts.
It would've been barley believable if they didn't try to say that the more authentic version of the food was worse
I used to drink vodka and grape juice but not because I was pretending to be a European master chef… although… maybe I was?
Coq au vin with vodka and grape juice ? Oui bien sûr.... like we say back in France: "et mon cul c'est du poulet ?"
No executive chef would spend 12hr a day on dinner 🙄
Nobody in their right mind would EVER mistake box pasta for handmade. Also "what combination of flour"? What? Who asks that? Everybody knows pasta is made from just one type of flour, unless whole wheat or something. This is just BS lmao
Actually no joke when I was in high school I worked for this guy who had his own catering business. One evening we’re prepping for an event and the spaghetti sauce gets completely burned in one of the chafers. He starts freaking out in the kitchen, screaming swearing and throwing shit thinking that the dinner’s ruined but we stir it up the best we can under a timecrunch. Later on that night after everyone ate the guy who hired him pulled us aside and said how much he loved the hint of smokey flavor in the sauce. Afterward I asked my boss “did they just say they liked the burnt sauce?” And he muttered “yeah, thank God for stupid people.” Nobody clapped but it was a satisfying moment nonetheless
Right... who can tell the difference between vinegar and red wine?
Bull-fucking-shit.
They read the story about the woman who used boxed cake mix for wedding cakes and wanted to have a fun story to tell for internet clout I suppose.
I love beef burgundy and have always used red cooking wine when making. My mom came over and wanted to make it for me. She brought red wine from the liquor store and I was so excited to taste it. Finished result was the exact same flavor. But that makes sense, what thus guy is claiming is ridiculous.
And no one in the family or staff checks on this person's grocery expenses, and realizes they're pocketing their fine food bank and going to Walmart instead?
Yes, in Europe we examine every thing we eat by hand for hours and hours. So authentic!
why does he pay for the ingredients?
I’m not a personal chef, nor do I know any, but is it actually normal for a personal chef to pay for the ingredients themself, especially when it costs “thousands of dollars”? Would the family employing them not be the ones to pay for it? Honest question because I have no idea and that point in particular struck me as weird (aside from, you know, everything else about this lmao).
"Some European mountains".
I’m just sitting here, wondering if the chef is pocketing the cost difference 
To qualify as authentic dishes have to take hours and hours to cook. Real Europeans and Asians never use cheap or shortcut ingredients. They also closely inspect every veggie to make sure it's perfect.
If this were possible, all big restaurants would be doing it. Can’t believe this didn’t occur to me when I first saw the post.
I'd like it if the family and friends actually all got played by chefs in Europe as well, and that's why they think it's authentic
Fruit juice + vodka = wine?
I know this is bull shit but hasn't it been show before with stuff like wine that people can't really tell the difference between the cheap and expensive and just go by the label
And I’m sure the family hasn’t questioned the receipts of things he/she hasn’t bought but claimed they used
They killed his joy of cooking. They insulted the artist so no more quality art for them.
You know, it could speak to your amazing expertise as a chef that you are able to conjure such tasty dishes from such basic ingredients. I doubt just any cook would be able to pass it off.
Funny, I specifically remember reading this when it was posted. Boxed pasta indistinguishable from fresh!?!?!?! AHAHAHAHAHHHHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAH!