I'm not sure I agree with the basic premise though. Maybe I'm not bothered what others think, but for me, half of 'learning how to cook' is finding what works for you. I now buy 'proper' garlic, but I still buy the cheapest tins of tomatoes because that's what works for me.
I buy the frozen ginger and garlic cubes TJs has and that’s been a revelation. Fresh taste, no prep, only slight modifications to use. The snobs can go rub stainless steel with their garlic scented hands!
I buy ginger in a squeezy tube that I keep in the fridge. And I use real garlic. And I have bags of frozen herbs in the freezer. But often I use fresh ones.
As I think we all agree here - it's about what works for you. Not just in general, but on that day.
Small modifications = don’t plop it into hot oil like you’d do with fresh ginger garlic or it will splatter on you. Usually I saute onion or something else and then add the cube. The brand I find in my local grocery is the same as TJs — Dorot
I think also what happens is that some people feel that the comparison is between doing everything from scratch and taking a couple shortcuts. Sure - not using jarred garlic or some other timesaver won't taste as good as starting with the original ingredients.
But really, it's more often between taking shortcuts and not cooking at all. When I have time, I love doing everything myself. But after a long work day, I often don't have the energy. But if there's something like a meal kit that I know I can cook, that'll stop me from having dinner delivered.
Go deep into any topic that excites or interests you, and you will find the worst of people's behaviors on display. Very often there will be a vocal, toxic minority whose opinions sit firmly in the realm of gatekeeping and polarization, and a silent majority will stay silent as it's simpler to avoid confrontation, or not think about the implications of such. Author's unfortunate disability made them realize this, though you can see this pretty much everywhere.
At the same time, a lot of people put too much stock (ha...) in what other people think is right and 'proper'. It's entirely possible to love cooking and use prepared ingredients, do what works for you. It's entirely possible to enjoy pineapple on a pizza, and a well done steak, with a cocktail, eat what you like and for yourself, don't eat for others.
So if it's not inherently wrong OR right, then it must be inherently neutral. Which means it can be used for both positive or negative purposes. You gave a negative purpose. I would argue that health and safety can often be seen as a form of positive gatekeeping. In context of the original post, using a knife "properly".
Sure, but that's not what we usually mean by gatekeeping.
Controlling who can and cannot join the community based on some arbitrary, subjective critera is what we usually mean by gatekeeping.
E.g.: FDA does not gatekeep - they enforce safety criteria to products; metal music fans often gatekeep - they enforce their own opinion of other metal music bands/fans and are trying to police the metal music scene.
I didn't realise there was a delay in replying and I edited my post. I didn't mean regulation based safety. I've noticed people get quite defensive if you tell them sharp knives are safer and their blunt knife is dangerous. I can see having to buy sharpeners and honing rods and being told what you're doing is wrong could be considered gatekeeping.
They very much are. You are prone to mishandle a blunt blade to try and get it to cut.
You have to put a lot more force into a blunt blade. When it finally gets through (or jumps from) what you're hacking at, it's going somewhere, fast.
The blade will do much more damage to your skin, tearing it instead of slicing, takes longer to heal from a blunt blade, infection more likely.
It's much safer to have a sharp knife that you can handle with finesse. Not a dull one you have to hack with.
I wouldn't really call this gatekeeping either, it's pretty much knife safety 101. Right up there with curling your fingers and pushing not pulling the blade.
This. You don't need 600 dollar hand forged, single bevel damast knifes so to have a sharp tool. Butchers are definitely not usong those, despite having a daily, professionally in the sense of earning their living, need for sharp knifes.
And even the 600 dollar knife gets blunt ultimately.
It depends. I used the cheap knives for a long time before I was more successful in my career. It was a chore to keep them sharp as they tended to dull very quickly.
Once I had more money to spend, I bought a knife with more desirable steel properties which came at a much higher price. The upside is that I have to spend far less time keeping the knife sharp and safe.
As for all tools, for most use cases, some decent middle ground tools do the trick. Pro grade tools have some properties that benefit pros (and can be hard to get by non-pros). Above that tools are an object of d!sire. Ehich os totally fine, if you want that 12k pro grade telephoto lense, by all means, go and get it. Shoot great photos with it and enjoy it everytime you use it. Or everytime you use that fancy knife to prepare a meal. Just don't make it a prerequisite for what you do, because you don't have to justufy the purchase. The simple joy you get of using it ia reason enough, and someone doing the same thing with less expensive gear is by no means diminishing the value you get from your expensive purchase.
It's hard to see something as not gatekeeping when you think that it's the right thing to do. That's my whole point. It's going to be difficult to give examples of positive gatekeeping that people aren't going to dismiss as "That's not gatekeeping thats".... "just good advice", "just the right way to do it", "knife safety 101". Encouraging someone to do something the right way is pretty close to discouraging them to do it the wrong way. Gatekeeping is a spectrum and the gates move. Everything on one side feels like it's the correct way and on the other the wrong way. Imagine you posted a cooking video to a cooking community. You did everything right but you had a blunt knife and were slipping with the knife and crushing the vegetables some times. You would feel like it's a gatekeeping unfriendly community if the majority of the replies you got were "OMG YOURE GONNA STAB YOURSELF" and "you should stop using that knife till you buy a sharper one" and "go and get yourself a knife sharpener and a honing steel and throw that glass chopping board in the bin and buy a proper wooden one". And yet this is common. It may be "knife safety 101" but I learnt about it working in a kitchen. My parents didn't tell me how to use a knife. They didn't sharpen knives. I know people who use glass chopping boards. People are likely to have grown up all their lives using a knife without ever thinking about looking up on YouTube "how to use a knife properly and safely". I.e. unknown unknowns.
I believe that it's important to do things safely and "properly" to get the most flavour/value. Turns out many activities are like that unless you're going to discover everything yourself from first principles. Gatekeeping is seen as something bad because the internet has made communities really discoverable and people entering new communities are finding that there are some mistakes that don't need to be made, they need to learn first, and the people of those communities tell them that. Some of those people are arseholes, and give advise in a very rude way. Since negativity has such a big effect, "Gatekeeping" comes up as a big negative term.
Complete nonsense, blasting something out of proportion to fulfill some elitism.
If you have handled blunt knives for years, you are accustomed to handling them and have muscle memory. You know how to use them, and the blades of most blunt knives develop a saw-like edge that helps in cutting.
Might not be as cool or impressive as a $200 damascene hand-forged pseudo-japanese knife, but they just work. What's dangerous is going from blunt to sharp or the other way round.
Sad to read that the same gatekeeping attitude from the article seeps in here as well.
Uhm no? If you want to saw something use a saw, don't misuse a tool.
-edit-
You specifically said a blade would get so dull it would become a saw.
You weren't talking about serrated knives as you said "and the blades of most blunt knives develop a saw-like edge"
Using serration on a knife to saw is not misuse, using a dull blade to saw is misuse and dangerous.
Basic knife safety is not gatekeeping. Sharpen your blade, or at least use the knife alone so you only hurt yourself if you're that insistent on using knives improperly.
Serrated knives are for sawing, not slicing. They don't really need to be particularly sharp. Chopping knives are similar; a dull chopping knife will waste your time, but isn't particularly dangerous. But a dull paring knife, or a dull wood carving chisel? Beware.
Anyway, per the rest of this discussion, definition of 'gatekeeping' is clearly contextual. Paraphrasing the exchange above: "What about safety?", "Sure, but that's not what we usually mean by gatekeeping."
Telling somebody they shouldn't weld without goggles isn't gatekeeping, it's safety advice. Telling somebody they aren't a real welder because they're using a cheap but functional brand of welder is gatekeeping, because there's no good reason to malign a welder for having an unfashionable brand of equipment.
Gatekeeping is only 'true' gatekeeping if there isn't a good reason for keeping that gate; safety advice in particular is generally exempted. Since gatekeeping is only true gatekeeping in contexts where there isn't a good reason for it, claiming that something is gatekeeping without explaining why is basically worthless. Such accusations are assertions without supporting arguments. It often boils down to circular reasoning: You're gatekeeping which is bad, and it's bad because it's gatekeeping.
> You have to put a lot more force into a blunt blade. When it finally gets through (or jumps from) what you're hacking at, it's going somewhere, fast.
Exactly right. I've wound up in the emergency room twice because of exactly this effect.
Blunt knives are for spreading, or maybe sawing. Using blunt knives for slicing is just plain stupid. And let me tell you, learning this the hard way hurts a lot more than somebody 'gatekeeping' you with a warning, no matter how rudely phrased.
The parent means blunt in the sense of "sharp enough to cut things, but not sharp enough to cut things easily". This can lead to slips and need for excessive force, increasing the likelihood of injury.
> I can see having to buy sharpeners and honing rods and being told what you're doing is wrong could be considered gatekeeping
It depends on the context, of course. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and standards of what they consider right and wrong.
I that that the essential factor of "gatekeeping" is demoting others unless they don't fit your standards, e.g. "you are not a real cook if you use blunt knifes". Simply telling someone that using sharp knifes is safer than using blunt knifes wouldn't count as "gatekeeping" in my book, unless someone tried to keep you out of the gate because of it.
I used everything from pull sharperners over stones to polishing the hand forged, multilayer tanto I made for my dad's birthday using sand paper and a stone-water paste.
The pull sharpener works wonders if the knife has to be sharpened quickly. If you do it long enough, the edge is ruined (I talk actually years of daily use of the knife here, and even then a decent knife will be rather sharp). Stones are good to get nice edges, I prefer to run newly made, or abused, blades over a belt grinder first (I'm a lazy and impatient person sometimes).
And the full blown 160 - 3000 grid followed by stone-water paste polishing is something I'll only ever do for special occassions. Everything after 1000 grid, stone or paper, is for optics only. And even bread crust will cause scratches at that level.
Is all of that necessary? Course not, I do it because it is fun (sometimes), and well cutting knifes are a pleasure to work with.
Do those knifes improve the quality of the meals we cook? No, they just make the preparation easier to an extent. And in tje end the meal counts, not the tools you used to cook it.
Those people are a cancer and make up a significant portion of the population. Internet forums are breeding grounds. I've developed some strategies for dealing with them. Before I engage or do something I ask three questions:
1. Is someone telling me how to behave?
2. Am I doing this to be better than myself or better than someone else?
3. Does this change really add value to my life or labour and cost?
As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.
#2 really nails the root of the issue. #3 is big too, you can save a lot of money and time and still get basically the same value by recognizing the diminishing returns in any domain.
I've encountered it in work-related discussions, where people would confidently label something as "professional" or "unprofessional". When in fact, it would be a completely arbitrary standard.
I'll have to give it a try. All of the jarred garlic I've tried tastes too much of the preservative, usually ascorbic acid. I don't have any objection to the preservative; it's just a flavor I wasn't expecting and didn't want.
One of the biggest problems with jarred garlic is the fact that it is often wet, and in a preservative with a flavor that imparts to the food. Because it is not fresh, it will not have the same health benefits either.
This means in order to prepare it, you need to rinse it, dry it, before it is ready to go. Doing these things will mute the flavor even more for what is an already mute flavor compared to fresh garlic.
Given these issues, I would vastly prefer using the garlic tubes more commonly found in Europe, than I would a wet can or wet jarred garlic. Garlic tubes are fresh, preserve well, and in many cases have that pungent ajoene and allicin still present that give it a zing!
To add to this, I would prefer using a dried garlic spice over a can of jarred garlic if forced into deciding between the worst of most garlic options.
>Research performed by the University of Georgia confirmed that mixtures of garlic in oil stored at room temperature are at risk for the development of botulism. Garlic in oil should be made fresh and stored in the refrigerator at 40 °F or lower for no more than 7 days. It may be frozen for several months. Package in glass freezer jars or plastic freezer boxes, leaving ½-inch headspace. Label, date, and freeze.<
Search on Bing for "botulism poisoning from garlic in oil":
At the time I had some chopped garlic cloves in oil in the fridge but tossed the lot out since it had been > 1 week since preparation, precisely the scenario where one death had occurred.
Possibly commercial preparations of garlic pastes use preservatives to prevent such an occurrence. It would definitely hurt sales were a customer to croak b/c of botulinium in a product.
BTW I love garlic salt - it improves most anything and is so easy to use.
>As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.
First they started pushing the canned garlic, then they came for proper knife technique, and ultimately, they outlawed a good chiffonade as far too "ableist"
I think automatically saying that the strong recommendation of a preferred cooking approach is snobbery or elitist is incorrect. The same thing could be said about gentle-rewarming of a steak, vice blasting it in a microwave producing a dry husk.
Some of us are sensitive to certain flavors, and choose not to use preservatives to the extent possible. There is an adjective even used to describe things of quality "hand-made".
There's a fine line between preferring fresh garlic, and turning your nose up at garlic in a jar, and your preferences can be a lower priority. It's very situational.
If I'm making it myself? Fresh. If I'm at a restaurant and paying top dollar? Fresh. Fast food? Lol. At a friends' house being treated to meal? I'm not saying a word whatever they use.
Microwaves particularly are popular targets for snobbish malignment. They're great at doing a lot of things, but many people refuse to use them for anything for the silliest reasons (muh radiation). Of course they're not good for everything, but nothing is good for everything.
Woks are very versatile, but even woks aren't the best tool for every job. You could probably bake a pie in a wok, but I think a pie tin would work better.
No tool being the best tool for every job is one of my core truths (and is perhaps its own sole exception.) I think it's true for any class of tool you can think of; kitchen tools, construction or manufacturing tools, software, even ideologies (which are tools for making sense of the world.) Some tools are more versatile than others, and some are basically worthless even for their intended use. But even a tool that could be used for virtually anything (in that tool's natural domain) will never be the best tool for all of those things. I could bake a pie in a wok or make mashed potatoes with a knife; those are very versatile tools. But there are better tools for both, like pie tins and potato mashers.
Get this, I had a foods teacher in high school whose whole lesson plan (And decorations in the class) were a time machine back into the 1980s. She taught us how to cook an entire beef roast in the microwave.
For what it's worth, this is actually pretty popular in Japan where they've got much more limited kitchen space and often the only cooking appliance available to people is a microwave.
It requires a lot more basting and probably a larger amount of electricity compared to what you'd be doing in a conventional oven (especially if you've got a gas oven in terms of energy costs). It's like 40 mins to do though and it turns out... not bad, though I would absolutely prefer a proper convection oven to better results at around the same amount of time.
The microwaves Starbucks used are really good. The average home microwave is great at steaming things in a closed or mostly closed container and mediocre at best at other tasks
I find inverter microwaves are much better at reheating - you can set it to say 30% power which lets the heat conduct through the food better whereas older microwaves would blast at full power 30% of the time resulting in the usual inconsistent heating where one part is overcooked and the other part cold.
Of course lower power means it takes longer, but its still much more convenient to put something in a microwave vs getting a pot out.
I've been playing dnD 5e for several years, and when I was more active, had a nearly didactic memory of the rules, or where to find the specifics of a rule.
I'm currently playing with a new group at a game shop, and have to actively hold myself back from saying too much at once. There's a certain level of "enough has been said" to give enough detail to let things continue, without making people feel like they made suboptimal character choices.
If it's all the same to you, I think we'll just put a hazmat bag around you and the pizza and bury you as is. I'm not touching that pizza.
My partner orders pineapple pizza then takes the pineapple off. It's there to cover the pizza in pineapple juice and that's it. She also likes teriyaki sauce to a fault so I probably shouldn't be surprised.
I raise you a salad pizza. It's basically a plain margherita with a mixed green salad, cooked eggs, sliced tomato, fine ham slices and joghurt dressing added after baking. Offered by one "okay, would order again" delivery service around here, it's surprisingly viable.
also almost all chefs out there used preprepped and canned and jarred ingredients in restaurants.
no matter how high end of a restaurant, if it is at all asian related/themed food you will still see Huy Fong Foods Sriracha sauce everywhere. And it's delicious.
They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.
Having experienced that first hand, twice, that's definitely true. For the person it happens to. But for the people who have to deal with that person? The worst is when that person sublimates their need for belief into a bunch of 'secular religions' that they cling to like a... I don't know what word to use here, but let's say ninja is to mall ninja as crusader is to <clever word for atheist zealot>.
As for the steak, I often order medium well even though I want well done. Unless you're at a very high end steak house, which most of us aren't, they are always bloodier than you ask for and you rarely get a decent crust below medium well. At one point I had perfected the well done steak at home, but it's been so long that it would probably take me a couple hundred dollars in steaks to dial it back in.
Its interesting you use "The Dark Night of the Soul" in reference to atheism cause the first place I heard it was with regard to meditative practice (and Buddhism) while its original use was in Catholicism, coming from a poem of that faith. The term has certainly got around!
From what I understand it got adapted by the existentialists as well, which is where most people would hear of it. No idea how they got it from the Catholics.
Lately there have been a lot of historians working backward looking for cases of 'history is written by the victor' situations and rewriting the histories. There's a great video out there, based on someone's PhD thesis, that places David Hume in a town in Southern France where a certain Jesuit priest had recently returned from a monastery in Siam and written a book about what he learned about eastern philosophy.
So they can't prove that Buddhism caused the Enlightenment, but we know for sure that one of those guys in those coffee shops had the opportunity to spend time in another coffee shop interviewing an academic who lived with Buddhists.
Edit: it was Siam, not eastern India, and definitely Hume
> They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.
They're often wrong in my observation. That's the best moment of your life: it's the bright, shining point of true intellectual freedom and real free will in action (as opposed to being caged by dogma, the fantasy opinions of others, and or outright dread of a psychotic omnipotent god looking to torture you for fun).
It's the point where you get to decide what the meaning of life is for you and what matters most to you. As opposed to allowing someone else to set the board for you (parents, teachers, evangelists, preachers, assholes) and tell you what's supposed to be important to you and how you're supposed to live. It's spectacularly wonderful, and about as far away from the worst moment as you can get.
It's technically 'cheating' but it's perfectly acceptable to most people because it gets the job done as well as you could do it without it. People who complain about it are snobs.
I feel like snobs really miss out on enjoying the full spectrum of the thing that they’re snobby about. I know people who only drink single origin coffee and single malt whisky and the like, but to me often a good quality blended product of either usually tastes just as good, and far cheaper.
For me, being free to enjoy something for what it is, rather than what is not, makes life much more enjoyable.
Beer is pretty funny that way. The most fancy, expensive and artisanal beard guy stuff is often impossible to distinguish in a blind test, it's just sharp tasting hop juice.
It's not about the actual thing, it's how consuming it makes you feel. So if drinking one beer makes you feel cool and part of a group and another beer that tastes the same doesn't, then many people will think the first beer is authentic and more real.
In a way the author of the article is actually wanting this phantom sense of belonging and authenticity. They are looking for that feeling of buying and consuming stuff.
Atleast with beer you can actually get different tastes.
The tests with water are funny, when knowing the name or price people pick the most expensive one as the best tasting, when it turns out that all the bottles were filled with tap water.
Maybe it's also different levels of carbonation, there are definitely at least 2 brands of locally available water that I can pick out. One just tastes a little bit off (and is REALLY carbonated) and the other one is so salty you can only stomach it when you're used to it. My parents used to buy the brand and only after not drinking it for a few years I was unpleasantly surprised...
But in general, yeah - uncarbonated ones I've never ever tasted any difference to local tap water.
Dasani's uniquely terrible. IDK what they do to it, but it's awful (to me—apparently someone likes it). I've not had another name-brand non-super-cheap bottled water that was outright bad.
Every now and then I'll get a cheap gas station or local brand bottle of water (when traveling, say) and on the first sip it's like "yep, that's just not-very-good tap water, not even filtered". Other times it's fine, but it's pretty obvious the ones that just went with whatever the cheapest local source was and didn't do anything to it.
Dasani is owned by Coca Cola and is very much filtered. Taste could differ based on the source of water though. But I would be skeptical of being able to taste the difference if the source of water was the same.
That said there was a YouTube video about 4 years ago for bottled water in China. They tested like 8 Brand’s of bottled water and all contained stuff that could make you sick and the suggestion was to still boil water.
> For me, being free to enjoy something for what it is, rather than what is not, makes life much more enjoyable.
This is honestly the mature endpoint of any snob or obsessive's journey - relearning how to enjoy the bad and the ordinary. But I'd argue the chasing-the-dragon phase comes with the territory of diving really really deep into anything.
By learning the deep intricacies of some area (be it food, coffee, music, musical instruments, headphones, chefs knives, fountain pens etc etc) you learn to appreciate the highs of the best, most nuanced things that area has to offer. But you also learn how to pick apart all the flaws and imperfections in things you otherwise may have enjoyed.
It takes a long time but I'd say the journey of expertise goes from enjoying the bad or ordinary for what it is, to disliking it for what is, to enjoying it because despite all its flaws, what it is is still pretty good.
"Qingyuan declared that there were three stages in his understanding of the dharma: the first stage, seeing mountain as mountain and water as water; the second stage, seeing mountain not as mountain and water not as water; and the third stage, seeing mountain still as mountain and water still as water." - https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html
I use normal bulbs of garlic as it was as I learned to cook (my country grows and uses garlic a lot) but I had no problems using 'pre prepared' garlic when I lived in other countries, BUT I would recommend everyone that does so to make sure it is sourced ethically (seems most peeled garlic in America comes from china, which doesn't have a good track record: https://www.ft.com/content/1416a056-833b-11e7-94e2-c5b903247... )
China has entire regions now, where they have to pollinate fruit trees by hand, due to excessive pesticide use. Saw it in a movie about declining bee populations.
So there are additional reasons to not eat garlic from China.
Not to go too far with commercial promotion, but I'm pretty sure that in the US garlic distribution, especially the processed options, are dominated by Christopher Ranch in Northern California: https://christopherranch.com/products/
I would just like to add: frozen peas and spinach are amazing. Doesn’t spoil, can easily be added to pots or pans and often tastes better than the fresh alternative for a fraction of the price.
Put them in a small bowl and microwave for a minute or two, add butter or olive oil and salt and pepper and you have a delicious, cheap and healthy hot side dish to any meal.
I’ve also experimented with buying frozen soup vegetables as an easy shortcut when making broth. Carrots and onions usually come out with a poor texture after being frozen but they are discarded when cooking stock.
Frozen veg is usually healthier and fresher than "fresh". The only reason to avoid it is because the texture changes. If you're making a casserole or anything where "crunch" doesn't matter then there's no reason not to use frozen.
I think in cooking, there is a joy that comes from the raw, fresh ingredients themselves. If you ever watch videos of Gordon Ramsay buying ingredients at Borough Market you see the passion he feels for fresh produce or a perfect piece of fish.
I very much share in that. I've tried to learn how to cook light and fragrant Vietnamese and Thai dishes lately. Coming home with grocery bags full of fresh lemon grass, thai basil and vegetables is just really satisfying in its own right and motivates to cook.
To care much about garlic itself, when the flavor is 99% based on how long you heat it, would be a pinnacle of snobbishness.
plus, though I'm not certain, doesn't the process of breaking down garlic change the flavor itself? freshly broken down garlic vs jarred broken down garlic, the latter I'd imagine to be "richer"
This sentence in the article quite contradict with itself:
"In a culture obsessed with the right and wrong way of doing things"
But it also have this negative sentiment towards culture and point out "the right and wrong way of doing things".
The only way for me to make it consistent is that it is a relative self-reflective view that "I am also part of the culture and this is destined to happen".
Someone who writes 2400 words on how hot takes on social media about garlic are wrong doesn't really have a cooking hobby, they have a cooking-themed blogging hobby.
> The only way for me to make it consistent is that it is a relative self-reflective view that "I am also part of the culture and this is destined to happen".
Consider the view that American culture is devoted largely to worrying about how evil American culture is, and that this is dysfunctional.
Forget whether it's accurate. As an American, you can't technically take this view without being part of the problem you're identifying.
But if it's enough of a problem, maybe it's worth sucking up the logical issues.
In europe garlic in jar is "snobbish" option. It is 5x more expensive, produces a lot of waste and has brand and "proper bio" markers. Normal garlic you buy at streetmarket or grow yourself, is noname option for poor people.
Most, or all, cooking pop-culture is coming from a standpoint that puts the taste of food before any other concern. And yes, in general fresh produce processed right before cooking is unbeatable in taste (ignoring the large world of home-made preserves). I don't think its ableist to focus on this in your cooking show, and sing the praises of the tastiest possible food.
Of course, in practice, for people who aren't working as cooks at least, there are many concerns more important than getting the last possible bit of taste from your food (that you may not even taste until you've developed your palate a bit). Convenience and prep-time are extremely important as well, and will often dominate your ability and willingness to cook half-way decent food far above the freshness of the ingredients.
The biggest problem is when such normal compromises start being associated with pride and shame. For example, I greatly enjoy high-quality coffee (especially Panama Gesha varieties), and I know how important is to freshly grind it to get the perfect taste. But most days, I just need a quick cup of coffee before work, so I make a cup of pre-ground cheap coffee. I don't think it's "just as good", but I'm also not in any way ashamed of using such inferior coffee.
A wise old co-worker once told me: "The secret to happiness in life is bad taste." He logic being that if you only expect the best, you will be disappointed most of the time and to learn to like the mediocre (or lower). Rather stoic in nature but applies to "snobs" as most people associate food/wine/coffee/booze snobs as always complaining about things not being correct.
I think what the author meant to say is to ignore your critics. No one ruined the author's love of cooking other than the author taking their statements to heart.
Also while some of the comments are needlessly harsh, they are at some level true. Fresh stuff usually does taste better and cost less.
If you told someone “I’m using this because I’m disabled so it’s easier”, no one is going to second guess that. But for the average person, they are better off doing things the suggested way.
I used to use things like pre grated cheeses until someone told me they are vastly inferrer to grating it yourself so I switched and my cooking improved.
Sure, some people make a song and dance about it and call ingredients dried cat vomit but they are correct that fresh is much better if you can manage it. And even the hardcore home cooks will look the other way on things like frozen puff pastry.
This is quite funny. We have a group of friends really obsessed with making great food. We cook together menus with top notch ingredients retrieved from local sources, spending days studying recipes and planning menus and practicing each step. I love to make great foods for any friends who visit, if I can make time into my calendar. At the same time, we also share all possible hacks for making fast and efficient foods, sharing information which ready made canned things taste good and which not. Never discarding something because it's not "pure". Some processed goods and premade meals are amazing! Everything has their time and place. Being food snob 24/7 must be super exhausting. It has its time and place, sure, but most of the time I want something tasty with minimal effort.
For this sort of thing. 'Cheat' where you dont care and and prep where you do. I have one recipe that is pretty much only canned items. I have tried doing scratch on it. That thing will just not come out the right way. But the 'right way' is it tastes the same as my mom made it. She used canned. Canned/pre-prepped has usually one thing going for it. constancy. The taste/shape/feel will be pretty much spot on every time. When going self prep though your ingredients can make a wild difference on how things come out. I have one I make from scratch and just depending on the day the cut of meat will be 'off' somehow. Looks identical to all the prev times. But still comes out different. The major downside to canned/pre-prepped is usually salt. Many are heavy in salt (which I personally like) but I know many dont. One thing I always cheat on is tomato sauces. I rarely can make it better than something out of a jar from the store.
I will never not default to using canned beans in recipes. My weekly meal prep involves mostly fresh ingredients, save for the canned beans and microwaved rice.
The whole process takes about an hour already, and I just have no desire to cook the beans or rice in my tiny kitchen. And, the packages they come in are perfect size for what I need.
Another problem is what counts as cheating. Often, “cheating” techniques are actually delicious or even superior but because they are coded as low class they get rejected.
In the UK we can buy Italian minced garlic (Gia brand) in a tube (like tubes of tomato puree) and it's pretty good, though a bit salty. Much better than the jars of oil-preserved garlic I've tried.
However my mind was blown when I discovered frozen minced garlic, and frozen minced chillies which are now pretty widely available in supermarkets here. Once the block has melted in the pan they're basically indistinguishable from fresh.
The frozen minced green chillies are also great because, being made from a mixture of chillies, the heat is basically standardised, so there's no risk of accidentally making the dish unsatisfactory to eat because one of the chillies was unexpectedly potent, or nearly as bad, unexpectedly weak.
I shop a lot at the Indian supermarkets in the UK and frozen blocks of ginger, garlic etc are totally normal. If anyone called my parents or relatives idiots or say they were unable to cook, when Indians basically make nearly everything from scratch, I would have told them to f-off and take their snobbery with them.
But those serve 2 different purposes. The diced garlic in preserved oil is good for cooking in a pan, but the tube of garlic is handy when you want to mix it with butter to make a dip or sauce.
If I need diced garlic then sure, though I'd probably just chop garlic cloves for that. For me the inconvenience of garlic comes from getting it to minced texture to maximise the flavour - peeling it's not that big an issue once you've learned the 'gently crush it with the side of the knife' technique.
But I can't really think of a dish I cook regularly where I must have diced garlic as opposed to minced. Even making aglio e olio I'm perfectly happy with frying minced garlic. You get much more garlic flavour for the same amount of garlic that way, and because you cook it lower and slower (larger surface area) there's less chance of burning the outside and making everything bitter.
Living in Singapore I discovered the diced garlic, it opened a whole new world. I love LOVE garlic but I hate the smell on my fingers that lingers after dicing up alot of garlic. So being able to throw like a few table spoons in the pan for cooking stir fry or such instead of dicing up 10 cloves is handy. And I don't need extra oil.
But the tube stuff, if you soften butter, mix butter, tube garlic, and any spices you like, then put that on bread or use it as a dip, omg. :-0~~~~ sooo good.
Both have their usages.
Soup I just throw the cloves in the soup without peeling. Or use black garlic. Chicken soup made with black garlic is the beez kneez.
Slow-roasted vegetables with unpeeled garlic cloves is one of my favourite lazy dishes. 5 minutes to prep: chop whatever veg is in the fridge, stick it in a roasting dish, smother in oil, healthy sprinkling of chunky salt crystals and black pepper, maybe add a few sprigs of fresh rosemary from the garden, give it a stir and a shake, slam it in the oven at 180C, come back and stir it every 30 minutes until it looks good enough to eat (usually about the 90 minute mark for me but depends on how fine I chopped the veg). Yum.
You're being downvoted, but I had the same thought. The garlic paste is going to be stronger in flavor than the diced garlic. If you use it, you'd need to adjust the recipe. This has nothing to do with gatekeeping: diced in oil or squeezed out of a tube are both fine, they're just not 1:1 equivalent.
If you regularly do Indian cooking it's a good idea to make your own ginger and garlic paste and freeze it in ice cube trays. It takes maybe 10 minutes to make a batch that will last a month. It's well worth it and costs probably a fraction what those pre-made ones cost.
I'd struggle to beat the supermarket frozen garlic blocks on price.
My local supermarket sells the 400g bags of frozen minced garlic at £0.95.
The same supermarket sells 4 fresh garlic bulbs weighing approx. 280g for £0.99.
The same holds true for essentially every frozen vegetable. I believe the reason is that there’s less work and less wastage in the frozen product. It’s taken straight from the field to the factory without much chance to spoil, and the frozen product it simple to handle and doesn’t spoil easily any more.
Fundamentally, I’d also believe that in most cases, buying the frozen product instead of buying fresh and then freeze will give you a superior product since it’s much fresher when it is processed.
It’s taken straight from the field to the factory without much chance to spoil, and the frozen product it simple to handle and doesn’t spoil easily any more.
Thanks! I'd never really thought about it that way. That makes a lot of sense!
Those economics probably apply to some level, but the difference is more about the grade/quality of produce that can be hidden in a freezer bag of processed chunks vs what consumers expect to see in a grocers bin of fresh veggies.
Ugly cheap bulk and semi-failed crops can go to processing and more carefully/successfully produced stuff goes to various grocers.
In the US at least, you’ll also see differences in grade depending on the demographic of the grocery store. Community markets will sell cheaper produce that’s maybe softer, less ripe, more bruised, or just kind ugly and bougie markets will sell pretty veggies at higher price+margin.
Definitely, you can hide a carrot that not looking great in frozen chunks, but that alone doesn’t mean that you’ll get worse quality. It will lead to less wastage, though. People are often obsessed with the look of food items, to the point that supermarket groceries are bred to look good, regardless of taste.
Also, clearly, if you buy 0.99 dollar/kilo frozen peas you’ll likely get worse quality than 10.99 dollars/kilo fresh. But dollar against dollar, frozen vegetables will very likely be higher quality than you can buy fresh. Unless you’re buying straight from the farm - but most folks don’t.
The issue I have with some frozen veggies (peppers, onions, garlic, celery) is that the freezing process damages cell walls leading to a mushier result. They also tend to dissolve faster in longer cooking items like chili or red beans and rice. I'll use them in some dishes where it doesn't matter since it's a big time saver though.
Freezing does destroy the texture to a varying level, but the question here was not “frozen or fresh”, but rather “buy frozen or buy fresh and then freeze.” Your freezer will not treat those vegetables any more kind than the factory freezer.
better still, any fresh ginger that doesn't get otherwise used get turned into ginger bug (a yeast starter culture) for home brewing ginger-beer. again no peeling as most the microbes you want are on the skin anyway.
I've completely converted over to frozen minced garlic. I especially like that it comes in a blister pack you can push out without having to get garlic all over your hands.
I also buy cilantro frozen as well now too since dried cilantro is basically useless and I waste too much when I buy fresh.
personally i buy large amounts of onions and carmalize and then can them for latter use. Its major time saver and gives a quick savory flavor boost to any dish without having to cut and brown the onions which takes a long time if your are in a hurry which with three children and working full time
Everything is about trade offs. Raw ingredients are the peak of versatility because it's the base from which all the variations come from. But it takes effort to get those variations. Grating carrots can be annoying so maybe some people buy bags of grated carrots. But you won't be getting any carrot sticks from that bag. Mincing garlic is annoying so garlic can come pre-minced. You obviously won't be getting sliced or whole garlic or black garlic from the pre-minced garlic. Also, products oxidise and lose their flavour quickly. I prefer buying whole peppercorns and using a pepper grinder. Some people take it a step further and buy whole spices and temper+grind them. The garlic will lose flavour quickly when minced so it needs to be stored in either oil or vinegar or frozen. That again will limit its versatility. If it's in olive oil, I may not want to use it in east Asian cooking. Also, convenience products add sugar and salt which again is something that you may not want. In my opinion, if you know what's in it and you're happy with any limitations it creates, then by all means use it. I imagine cooking "snobs" like cooking and value the versatility of the raw ingredients. When given a bunch of raw ingredients the world opens up with possibilities.
This! Whole garlic bulbs (as well as onions, potatoes etc. etc.) will last for months if stored properly, the "convenience" versions need extra packaging, have to be refrigerated or cooled, and still can't be stored for very long. You don't have to dice the garlic by hand though, you can use a garlic press.
Before anyone calls me a snob, I use some convenience products too, e.g. pre-cut and mixed salad - I hate cleaning salad, plus in this case the convenience product has more or less the same shelf life as an uncut salad. Also, after several quiche disasters where we ended up eating "minced quiche" because it leaked or refused to be removed in one piece, I am a huge fan of convenience quiche crust - tasty, crispy, and (almost) 100% leak-proof!
If you go down the "only use base products" rabbit hole, you also have to make your own pasta, because after all that's also a convenience product...
> Whole garlic bulbs (as well as onions, potatoes etc. etc.) will last for months if stored properly,
Mine have a lot of green material growing in them by like 3 weeks, max. Fridge, not fridge, doesn't matter. What am I doing wrong?
My potatoes and onions also sure as shit don't last "months". Again, maybe 3 weeks before they're getting iffy, often sooner. Yes, kept in the dark, not like open on the counter in sunlight.
I find pre-grated cheese so bizarre. The cost alone compared to a normal block of cheese should be enough to put anyone off. It's not even like it's an arduous task to grate it yourself (Or is it... [1]).
I've noticed not much difference in price in the small blocks (The blocks that fit in your hand. I'm to lazy to look up the weight.) are sometimes more expensive than grated, or sliced.
I'm pretty sure the companies know most of us do not want 5 lbs of cheese in our fridge, so they jack up the smaller blocks?
While I'm here, I try to buy my spices, including dehydrated onion, at Costco quantities. Most restaurants use the same, but get better pricing through Sysco type companies.
Some Costco's sell yeast blocks which last a long time refrigerated.
If you are lucky, you can find high gluten bread flour there too. It's much cheaper than the better bread flours (King Arthur, etc.) at the supermarket.
The one thing I disagree with is bottled lime/lemon juice. After it's opened once, it tastes nothing close to a fresh lemon/lime.
And those ingredients add to the allergen potential. And even with them, it still has a fraction of the shelf life of cheese in block form due to surface area:volume ratio.
>The cost alone compared to a normal block of cheese should be enough to put anyone off
Hm, I find grated cheese is often cheaper pound by pound than blocks of cheese. Same for other precut ingredients like bacon for instance. The reason being that it's an easy way for producers to process the ends which can't be sold otherwise.
I suppose as long as we are comparing areas, my local grocery (Lucerne is a Safeway store brand). If you get the same size of each, do the prices come more inline? I'm used to paying fairly close to the same price regardless of packaging if it's the same size from the same brand. But of course regional and national influences, along with consumer expectations, surely play a part in the pricing.
- Lucerne Cheese Natural Medium Cheddar - 32 oz
- $9.99
- $0.31/oz
- Lucerne Cheese Shreaded Sharp Cheddar - 32 oz
- $9.99
- $0.31/oz
- Lucerne Cheese Sharp Cheddar = 32 oz
- $9.99
- $0.31/oz
weird, I have the exact opposite for where I shop for cheese. The blocks are usually cheaper (usually like half as much). Though they like to play games with the prices. Where 16oz will be one price one week and 2 8oz will be more than the 16. Then 2 weeks later the opposite will be true. The downside is grating it takes time. But if you do go with block get a firmer cheese. Some of the brand names will not be very firm and slime out the grater. I usually have pretty good luck with the 'store brand'.
I switched to block cheese when I found out that pre-grated cheese (SO convenient) has anti-caking agents which alter the flavor. The only thing I did to make this easy? buy a 2nd grater so I could still grate cheese if the first was in the dishwasher. I'm sure it's already paid for itself.
On a 5lb block of cheddar, I use a plastic sandwich bag over the exposed end of the block with a rubber band wrapped around to keep it fresh.
The anti-caking ingredient has a negligible effect on flavor. Where you want to avoid them is when you're cooking a dish where you want the cheese to melt smoothly. Using the pre-grated stuff is fine for things like tacos, burritos, pizza, and even omelets. For stuff like mac and cheese and other cheese-based sauces, that's where you want to grate your own if you can. --And if you can't, well, the food will probably taste just fine even if it doesn't look quite as good.
I prefer "mexican blend" (cheddar, monterey jack, asadero, queso quesadilla) cheddar for garnishing Mexican-type foods. Pure cheddar is great stuff, but I'd prefer store-brand Mexican blend over grated Tillamook Sharp if I'm making a quesadilla. Keeping and grating those individually would suck.
I get the finely shredded Mexican blends for hard-shell tacos.
It's impractical to get the thin, fine lines of shred off a block of cheese, and even if I do, without the cellulose it will just clump again when I try to stuff as much other stuff as possible on top of it. It's a better product for the dish.
My wife once bought us tickets to a cookery class. The leader, a professional chef, told us that he never minced garlic. He would take a couple of bulbs, peel the cloves, bung them in a blender with some oil, then pot up the mix and put it in the fridge for the next weeks' use.
Unless missiles are raining down on your kitchen or there is a famine in your area, there's no defense for using garlic in a jar. Never. Ever. Learn how to peel and then crush, slice, and mince garlic quickly. There are a variety of techniques. Watch some videos on YouTube.
If you are desperate to save time, you may use canned tomatoes. But that should be a last resort. Fresh garlic and fresh onions are two of life's simple pleasures. Seriously.
A lot of these 'lazy' or convenience foods aren't just useful in times of famine or war, but they make it easier for those who are less able to cook from scratch. Somebody with dexterity issues will benefit from pre-prepared foods.
I'm guessing you didn't actually read the article, just commented from the headline, because I think disability is a pretty good excuse to use pre-prepared ingredients.
Well, good thing people don't need your approval for their cooking. You should still stop spreading rhetoric like this because, as the central topic of the article demonstrates, some people will still take it to heart even though their cooking is none of your business.
if garlic is the main flavour e.g. in Cacik (ja-jik) in Turkey then yes you want to use fresh. Otherwise it really depends on where it's supposed to sit in terms of importance. On the whole though, a lot of classic foods can survive a bit of imperfection and still be delicious. Why would you crap on someone for taking an easy route when they need to if the food is still tasty?
Maybe the author should try James May's cooking show/book[1]. It's a decidedly anti-snob take on cooking, with a focus on amateurs ("You wouldn't be reading this if you knew how to cook") and convenience, unabashedly using low class preserved ingredients that last forever in storage (spam, alphabet pasta).
On a similar note, real photographers use prime lenses. Zoom lenses are for noobs who can't relocate. You also put your prime lenses on DSLRs, mirrorless cameras are clearly ulterior. If you think smartphones are a camera, you're the reason we're behind as species.
For you coffee, by the way, you grind it yourself, then you use your weiss distributor and flattener before you tamp it. If your coffee doesn't cost at least 20$ per pound and involves at least 5 manual steps, there's no way it can be good. If you put pre-ground coffee in a machine, you might as well skip these steps and drink directly from the toilet.
And since we're on HN, real developers use Unix as an IDE. With vi, obviously - emacs people can quit right now. And don't even get me started on those IntelliJ script kiddies
---
Seriously, there are always be people in each niche who think that their way is the only way and people who stray from the path are to feel the wrath of god [0]. I could go on and on with examples like this. Funnily enough, this quite often doesn't even work for them (I can tell from personal experience that bringing a DSLR with gear up a mountain is not pure fun, for example). Simply do what works for you and ignore them - unless you asked them or they pay you, their opinion is pretty irrelevant.
[0] Although it should be mentioned that usually quite a few people just act snobby for the joke and aren't actually on a crusade. The pineaple-pizza-thingy seems to be mostly a joke, for example.
Something I believe is that persistent satire and sincere belief are indistinguishable in many settings, and that persistent application of satire tends to cultivate sincere belief in the same thing as the idea spreads around. Not that I think Italians look down on Hawaiian pizza as a result of satire, that's more that Italians often see a national dish that's been heavily evolved overseas in a negative light, and Hawaiian pizza is the shining example of it to be seized upon. Chicago Deep Dish being another.
But online it's definitely an issue - Ironic shit-posting of dumb things eventually leads to areas chock full of people with those exact beliefs for real. That's how meme magic works. Meme something, no matter how dumb, persistently enough, and it'll enter the collective conscious as a sincerely held belief.
> Sam Panopoulos, a Greek-born Canadian, created the first Hawaiian pizza at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, Canada in 1962. Inspired in part by his experience preparing Chinese dishes which commonly mix sweet and savory flavours, Panopoulos experimented with adding pineapple, ham, bacon, and other toppings. These additions were not initially very popular.
> The addition of pineapple to the traditional mix of tomato sauce and cheese, along with either ham or bacon, later became popular locally and eventually became a staple offering of pizzerias on a global scale. The name of this creation is, in fact, actually not directly inspired by the U.S. state of Hawaii at all; Panopoulos chose the name Hawaiian after the brand of canned pineapple they were using at the time.
Hah, that's great. Hawaiian pizza always made sense to me since I grew up in the UK in the eighties, where pork/gammon with canned pineapple rings was an ordinary evening meal (bear in mind, this was close to the era of Salmon Mousse, many culinary crimes were committed around that time). I guess the association between pineapple and Hawaii is in and of itself kinda odd too, since I think they're native to South America.
Hawaiian pizza was probably the most popular pizza in Australia in the 80s also.
Even though I'm a bit of a pizza snob I still enjoy a Hawaiian pizza occasionally, somehow the combination of trashy shredded processed ham and pineapple just works well.
There are lots of weird stories behind famous dishes. Like the Pu Pu Platter that is seen in American Chinese restaurants. The version everyone knows comes from Trader Vic's, which basically had (Americanized) Cantonese food like char siu and spring rolls with vaguely Pacific islander names. Then it started appearing in American Chinese restaurants.
I have been to Italy, a fair bit, and as far as I can tell their attitude is "pizza is a flatbread that you use to stretch out whatever other ingredients you have on hand". There are certainly regional traditions, and obviously pineapple isn't any of them, but I don't see why they'd object to you putting whatever the hell you want on your pizza.
Caveat: I haven't been south of Rome, and I gather that there may be more pizza grumpiness further south.
Having worked closely with Italians from all over Italy, living in London - every one of them I spoke to felt passionately about food being a specific way. Nothing would get my Italian colleagues more riled up over lunch than a British interpretation of an Italian classic dish. There's clearly a very strong traditionalist food culture in Italy.
In the more populous parts of America, Italian pizza is one of six or seven varieties one can find, generally (though not on the West Coast) dominated by the local take.
I've had pizza margherita in Italy, and at least three large US cities: the one in Rome was better, but frankly, that's probably because I was in Rome when I ate it. It was the same sort of pizza you get from Italian pizza joints in the States.
Once said that not necessarily all pizza in Italy is good, when it is good it is simply another thing from "international" pizza, I believe mainly because of the ingredients used that - generally speaking - are simply not available (at the same level of freshness/taste) outside Italy and in some cases not even everywhere in Italy.
A typical example is "mozzarella di bufala" that is easily available all over Italy, but if/when you taste the fresh one in the area around Caserta and Naples you will understand how it is different.
I'm sure I didn't have the best possible Italian pizza, it was good but hardly my most memorable meal in my (alas, quite brief) time in Italy.
All I'm saying is that a pizza margherita at an 'Italian style pizza joint' in the States is the same recipe, wood-fired oven, buffalo mozzarella, and so on. One would need to pay extra for the bufala, but the low-moisture cheese we Americans call 'mozzarella' is never used, it would be fresh ball mozarella.
Whereas a good New York slice can't be had in Italy for love nor money! (I suspect this isn't actually true; I found a Mission burrito in Guanajuato Mexico, good food has a way of getting around). Now, you can say that's like trying to find a General Tso's Chicken in Hong Kong, but I enjoy that dish as well.
Regarding prime lenses: If you are unable to take good pictures with a zoom pense you clearly have bad technique. And the only true way if taking pictures is on film, it forces to think about composition and exposure. Unless you are into wildlife and birds, there of course anything below a pro-DSLR, or maybe, maybe a pro mirroless action body and 600 mm OEM prime lenses, on a carbon fibre tripod, is clearly not enough.
On a serious note, as long as you like your pictures everything is good. If you make living selling your pics all is good as long as your clients are happy. And nobody cares about the gear used in taking a particular picture, or cooking a meal. No idea why we cannot simply enjoy common hobbies.
All that are reasons I stay away from forums and social media on my hobbies. With the sole exception of a very helpfull forum on the particular brand of my classic car, I need my technical advice from somewhere.
Something I keep in mind: The people who spend most of their time online talking about a hobby, are usually not the ones who spend most of their time doing the hobby.
With one potential exception being mechanical keyboard cultists. After all, the best use of a $1k keyboard is to talk hype about how great it is, and how trashy MX Browns are.
> Unless you are into wildlife and birds, there of course anything below a pro-DSLR, or maybe, maybe a pro mirroless action body and 600 mm OEM prime lenses, on a carbon fibre tripod, is clearly not enough.
DSLRs are far behind mirrorless these days for wildlife photography, especially birds in flight. The autofocus systems of the high-end mirrorless cameras are substantially better than any DSLR, and the frame rates (20-30 shots per second) allow far more chances to get a good shot.
Which doesn't mean DSLRs are useless. It just means you have to take more photos & spend more time to get the same number of "keepers", so depending on what you value (time editing vs time in the field vs money spent) you might want to get a wildlife-focused mirrorless for wildlife.
Tell me! Not sure on auto-focus so, the mirrorless sytems seem to struggle with gast moving objects. If there are eyes to track they beat DSLRs everytime so. Also frame rate can be better, the absence of a mirror really helps. Not that close to 10 fps is bad by any stretch.
Fully agree that mirrorless is the future, took long enough to fully get track.
There are some DSLR snobists, there are prime lense snobists, there are mirrorless snobists, there are frame rate snobists.
In the end the picture matters, whatever helps you get good pictures is good for you.
That beimg said, as of now I'd say a Z6ii is still behind a D780 a bit and quite a bit behind a D6 (I'm a Nikon shooter, so don't ask questions about other brands). A Z9 on the other hand... That being said, none of those options beats the one you can actually afford and know how to use.
Edit: Which DSLR (Edit 2: I mean mirrorless...) gets 20 fps? The Z6ii is at 12. Everything above is, what, 5k plus for the body?
Edit 3: That seems to be Nikon's Z9 with 20-30 fps in continous mode. Up to 120 in small JPEG. Impressive, and with 6k Euros almost reasonably priced when compared to other Nikon top mofels of the past. One can still get a Z6ii and a bunch of top notch lenses. Damn, I shouldn't have looked it up...
Yeah, I was thinking of the Z9 for the 20-30FPS. The Canon R5 & R3 are similar framerates, and the Sony α1 is 30FPS (at least for compressed RAW).
Nikon only recently got mirrorless cameras better than their DSLRs. Canon & Sony have had better mirorrless cameras for several years.
I've got a Sony α7Riv and their 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 zoom lens for wildlife. Only 10FPS, and slower autofocus (and no bird eye tracking) but still a great setup for the price. I tend to be in forested areas around small ponds, so while I'd love a big prime lens for more light, being able to zoom out actually gets critical since backing up would lead to falling into the water.
Most of my photography is landscape and architecture while travelling. For that travel part alone I like zoom lenses. If birds aren't too far away, 300 mm on a DX body are good enough, for Puffins at a distance of almost 100 m not so much.
zoom lenses are great, especially for the versatility they offer.
To illustrate your last point, this[1] is a Great Blue Heron photo taken at 280mm focal length, the heron was about 56m away. This[2] is the same bird, from the same location, taken at 840mm focal length (zoomed in all the way, using the 200-600mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter). And after a close crop, this[3] is a pretty decent photo of the heron. Somewhat distracting background and some branches in front, but I prefer not to edit everything out like some people do because I want to convey a sense of what the environment is like.
Later on the same walk, a Grey Catbird landed right in front of me. Fully zoomed in to 840mm I couldn't even get a good portrait shot showing the head and shoulders, just the head. So I zoomed out and got this[4], which I could easily crop for a good portrait. No need to back up and risk scaring the bird.
Money is one obstacle to a big prime lens (the Sony 600mm f/4 lens is $14,000!), but another obstacle is weight and bulk. I wouldn't want to give up having a zoom lens ready on a camera, to allow for otherwise impossible compositions. So I know I'd end up carrying two cameras, one with a 600mm behemoth and the other with the 200-600mm zoom, and my shoulders would hurt. And they'd be bulky and getting in my way, etc.
Primes are nice, but they're not perfect for every situation, and gatekeeping photographers for not having primes is stupid.
I ran into some situations were a lens shorter than 24mm would have been nice, and some where something beyond 300 (400 on a DX body) would have been nice. 20mm prime lenses are cheap enough, the telezooms not so much. Currently my preferred one is a Tamron 150-600 G2. Weather sealing is nice, and the Sigma Sport is just too heavy and large, especially since I mostly shoot handheld / without a tripod. Funny so, that the Tamron is much less available used than the Sigma Sport.
And if, if, I had 14k free budget to burn on a lens I would still burn max. 1k on the elns and the reminder on travelling to nice locations where I could use said lens. But then I am no professional.
I personally really don’t care about this judgements. But an interesting thing to me is that all the claims are pointing to a category of people. I wonder why some people what to be categorised, like, even if “real programmer use vi”, why do I want to be a “real programmer” if I don’t like vi? What’s the charm of the arbitrary tag?
Don't forget to grind that coffee in a hand crank burr grinder, so you can control every aspect of the process. And don't even THINK about using water that is even a degree away from 200F (I know someone who uses boiling water -- the monster!)
While you're at it, if you're drinking tea, of course follow the RFC. Pouring the hot tea out of the pot and then adding milk is absolutely barbaric.
It cracks me up how defensive people get about what tools you use, meanwhile I'm just gonna keep building things because your audience doesn't give a crap what tools were used to make the actual end product.
This is so true. And that also defines "pro" tools, those tend to be the best money making devices, and not the technically best devices. They speed up work, maybe hold longer, or are a tad more ergonomically. Because all of that matters if tools are being used for hours every day to earn a living.
In the end, it is the end product that matters. And that is influenced a lot more by the person and ingeredients / raw materials then it is by the tools being used.
Purely on the coffee note: freshly grinding coffee is by far the best $-investment vs quality-improvement you can make. A $10 (or cheaper!) blade grinder makes a noticeable improvement over pre-ground for nearly everyone, and you can absolutely just stop there and enjoy the step up and that grinder will probably last as long as your drip machine.
Very little after that will achieve such a large improvement, and no matter what it'll cost a lot more money and time (e.g. to find and buy better coffee beans).
I'm going to assume this is satire but in case this isn't, modern mirrorless cameras are far superior to dlrs for most applications these days. my z5 does everything my previous dslr does and gives me realtime exposure preview. And don't get me started on the Z9. With that camera, the dslr's's days are numbered.
A game changer is a little silicon tube from amazon in which you can roll the garlic cloves and the skin peels right off. I can run through a bulb in less than a minute, and then you can mince the garlic and freeze it into ice cubes if needed for later.
Gently squeezing the clove under the blade of the knife on the cutting-board and it's easy to peel that way too. I find it works just fine, especially in combination with just chopping it afterwards (instead of using a garlic crusher).
413 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadAs I think we all agree here - it's about what works for you. Not just in general, but on that day.
But really, it's more often between taking shortcuts and not cooking at all. When I have time, I love doing everything myself. But after a long work day, I often don't have the energy. But if there's something like a meal kit that I know I can cook, that'll stop me from having dinner delivered.
At the same time, a lot of people put too much stock (ha...) in what other people think is right and 'proper'. It's entirely possible to love cooking and use prepared ingredients, do what works for you. It's entirely possible to enjoy pineapple on a pizza, and a well done steak, with a cocktail, eat what you like and for yourself, don't eat for others.
Many harmful effects, though. Alienating valuable members comes to mind.
Controlling who can and cannot join the community based on some arbitrary, subjective critera is what we usually mean by gatekeeping.
E.g.: FDA does not gatekeep - they enforce safety criteria to products; metal music fans often gatekeep - they enforce their own opinion of other metal music bands/fans and are trying to police the metal music scene.
You have to put a lot more force into a blunt blade. When it finally gets through (or jumps from) what you're hacking at, it's going somewhere, fast.
The blade will do much more damage to your skin, tearing it instead of slicing, takes longer to heal from a blunt blade, infection more likely.
It's much safer to have a sharp knife that you can handle with finesse. Not a dull one you have to hack with.
I wouldn't really call this gatekeeping either, it's pretty much knife safety 101. Right up there with curling your fingers and pushing not pulling the blade.
And even the 600 dollar knife gets blunt ultimately.
Sharp knife = good advice
Expensive luxury tool = gate keeping
Once I had more money to spend, I bought a knife with more desirable steel properties which came at a much higher price. The upside is that I have to spend far less time keeping the knife sharp and safe.
I believe that it's important to do things safely and "properly" to get the most flavour/value. Turns out many activities are like that unless you're going to discover everything yourself from first principles. Gatekeeping is seen as something bad because the internet has made communities really discoverable and people entering new communities are finding that there are some mistakes that don't need to be made, they need to learn first, and the people of those communities tell them that. Some of those people are arseholes, and give advise in a very rude way. Since negativity has such a big effect, "Gatekeeping" comes up as a big negative term.
If you have handled blunt knives for years, you are accustomed to handling them and have muscle memory. You know how to use them, and the blades of most blunt knives develop a saw-like edge that helps in cutting.
Might not be as cool or impressive as a $200 damascene hand-forged pseudo-japanese knife, but they just work. What's dangerous is going from blunt to sharp or the other way round.
Sad to read that the same gatekeeping attitude from the article seeps in here as well.
-edit-
You specifically said a blade would get so dull it would become a saw.
You weren't talking about serrated knives as you said "and the blades of most blunt knives develop a saw-like edge"
Using serration on a knife to saw is not misuse, using a dull blade to saw is misuse and dangerous.
Basic knife safety is not gatekeeping. Sharpen your blade, or at least use the knife alone so you only hurt yourself if you're that insistent on using knives improperly.
Why don't you tell this to the producers of serrated knives? I guess they would want to know that they are doing this completely wrong.
Anyway, per the rest of this discussion, definition of 'gatekeeping' is clearly contextual. Paraphrasing the exchange above: "What about safety?", "Sure, but that's not what we usually mean by gatekeeping."
Telling somebody they shouldn't weld without goggles isn't gatekeeping, it's safety advice. Telling somebody they aren't a real welder because they're using a cheap but functional brand of welder is gatekeeping, because there's no good reason to malign a welder for having an unfashionable brand of equipment.
Gatekeeping is only 'true' gatekeeping if there isn't a good reason for keeping that gate; safety advice in particular is generally exempted. Since gatekeeping is only true gatekeeping in contexts where there isn't a good reason for it, claiming that something is gatekeeping without explaining why is basically worthless. Such accusations are assertions without supporting arguments. It often boils down to circular reasoning: You're gatekeeping which is bad, and it's bad because it's gatekeeping.
Inexpensive knives can be sharp. America’s Test Kitchen recommends a $35 knife as their best chef’s knife.
Exactly right. I've wound up in the emergency room twice because of exactly this effect.
Blunt knives are for spreading, or maybe sawing. Using blunt knives for slicing is just plain stupid. And let me tell you, learning this the hard way hurts a lot more than somebody 'gatekeeping' you with a warning, no matter how rudely phrased.
It depends on the context, of course. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and standards of what they consider right and wrong.
I that that the essential factor of "gatekeeping" is demoting others unless they don't fit your standards, e.g. "you are not a real cook if you use blunt knifes". Simply telling someone that using sharp knifes is safer than using blunt knifes wouldn't count as "gatekeeping" in my book, unless someone tried to keep you out of the gate because of it.
On many forums some people think that ceramic pull sharpeners will ruin your blades and you should use stones and oil.
I've been using ceramic pull sharpener for 30 years on the same $100 chef knife.
It's still in better shape than 95% of the knifes I've used in other people's homes.
The pull sharpener works wonders if the knife has to be sharpened quickly. If you do it long enough, the edge is ruined (I talk actually years of daily use of the knife here, and even then a decent knife will be rather sharp). Stones are good to get nice edges, I prefer to run newly made, or abused, blades over a belt grinder first (I'm a lazy and impatient person sometimes).
And the full blown 160 - 3000 grid followed by stone-water paste polishing is something I'll only ever do for special occassions. Everything after 1000 grid, stone or paper, is for optics only. And even bread crust will cause scratches at that level.
Is all of that necessary? Course not, I do it because it is fun (sometimes), and well cutting knifes are a pleasure to work with.
Do those knifes improve the quality of the meals we cook? No, they just make the preparation easier to an extent. And in tje end the meal counts, not the tools you used to cook it.
1. Is someone telling me how to behave?
2. Am I doing this to be better than myself or better than someone else?
3. Does this change really add value to my life or labour and cost?
As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.
Thanks for the tip.
This means in order to prepare it, you need to rinse it, dry it, before it is ready to go. Doing these things will mute the flavor even more for what is an already mute flavor compared to fresh garlic.
Given these issues, I would vastly prefer using the garlic tubes more commonly found in Europe, than I would a wet can or wet jarred garlic. Garlic tubes are fresh, preserve well, and in many cases have that pungent ajoene and allicin still present that give it a zing!
To add to this, I would prefer using a dried garlic spice over a can of jarred garlic if forced into deciding between the worst of most garlic options.
Sounds really good. But FWIW there have been incidents where people ate garlic stored in oil for too long and died of botulinium poisoning.
https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Can-you-get-botulism-from-gar...
FTFA:
>Research performed by the University of Georgia confirmed that mixtures of garlic in oil stored at room temperature are at risk for the development of botulism. Garlic in oil should be made fresh and stored in the refrigerator at 40 °F or lower for no more than 7 days. It may be frozen for several months. Package in glass freezer jars or plastic freezer boxes, leaving ½-inch headspace. Label, date, and freeze.<
Search on Bing for "botulism poisoning from garlic in oil":
https://www.bing.com/search?q=botulism+poisoning+from+garlic...
At the time I had some chopped garlic cloves in oil in the fridge but tossed the lot out since it had been > 1 week since preparation, precisely the scenario where one death had occurred.
Possibly commercial preparations of garlic pastes use preservatives to prevent such an occurrence. It would definitely hurt sales were a customer to croak b/c of botulinium in a product.
BTW I love garlic salt - it improves most anything and is so easy to use.
First they started pushing the canned garlic, then they came for proper knife technique, and ultimately, they outlawed a good chiffonade as far too "ableist"
I think automatically saying that the strong recommendation of a preferred cooking approach is snobbery or elitist is incorrect. The same thing could be said about gentle-rewarming of a steak, vice blasting it in a microwave producing a dry husk.
Some of us are sensitive to certain flavors, and choose not to use preservatives to the extent possible. There is an adjective even used to describe things of quality "hand-made".
If I'm making it myself? Fresh. If I'm at a restaurant and paying top dollar? Fresh. Fast food? Lol. At a friends' house being treated to meal? I'm not saying a word whatever they use.
No tool being the best tool for every job is one of my core truths (and is perhaps its own sole exception.) I think it's true for any class of tool you can think of; kitchen tools, construction or manufacturing tools, software, even ideologies (which are tools for making sense of the world.) Some tools are more versatile than others, and some are basically worthless even for their intended use. But even a tool that could be used for virtually anything (in that tool's natural domain) will never be the best tool for all of those things. I could bake a pie in a wok or make mashed potatoes with a knife; those are very versatile tools. But there are better tools for both, like pie tins and potato mashers.
I hold oscilloscopes and santoku knives with the same regard :)
For what it's worth, this is actually pretty popular in Japan where they've got much more limited kitchen space and often the only cooking appliance available to people is a microwave.
It requires a lot more basting and probably a larger amount of electricity compared to what you'd be doing in a conventional oven (especially if you've got a gas oven in terms of energy costs). It's like 40 mins to do though and it turns out... not bad, though I would absolutely prefer a proper convection oven to better results at around the same amount of time.
Of course lower power means it takes longer, but its still much more convenient to put something in a microwave vs getting a pot out.
I'm currently playing with a new group at a game shop, and have to actively hold myself back from saying too much at once. There's a certain level of "enough has been said" to give enough detail to let things continue, without making people feel like they made suboptimal character choices.
I was with you up until this point. You go too far.
(note jalapeno are a valid topping)
My partner orders pineapple pizza then takes the pineapple off. It's there to cover the pizza in pineapple juice and that's it. She also likes teriyaki sauce to a fault so I probably shouldn't be surprised.
(lots of other aromatic things work great too)
no matter how high end of a restaurant, if it is at all asian related/themed food you will still see Huy Fong Foods Sriracha sauce everywhere. And it's delicious.
Having experienced that first hand, twice, that's definitely true. For the person it happens to. But for the people who have to deal with that person? The worst is when that person sublimates their need for belief into a bunch of 'secular religions' that they cling to like a... I don't know what word to use here, but let's say ninja is to mall ninja as crusader is to <clever word for atheist zealot>.
As for the steak, I often order medium well even though I want well done. Unless you're at a very high end steak house, which most of us aren't, they are always bloodier than you ask for and you rarely get a decent crust below medium well. At one point I had perfected the well done steak at home, but it's been so long that it would probably take me a couple hundred dollars in steaks to dial it back in.
Lately there have been a lot of historians working backward looking for cases of 'history is written by the victor' situations and rewriting the histories. There's a great video out there, based on someone's PhD thesis, that places David Hume in a town in Southern France where a certain Jesuit priest had recently returned from a monastery in Siam and written a book about what he learned about eastern philosophy.
So they can't prove that Buddhism caused the Enlightenment, but we know for sure that one of those guys in those coffee shops had the opportunity to spend time in another coffee shop interviewing an academic who lived with Buddhists.
Edit: it was Siam, not eastern India, and definitely Hume
They're often wrong in my observation. That's the best moment of your life: it's the bright, shining point of true intellectual freedom and real free will in action (as opposed to being caged by dogma, the fantasy opinions of others, and or outright dread of a psychotic omnipotent god looking to torture you for fun).
It's the point where you get to decide what the meaning of life is for you and what matters most to you. As opposed to allowing someone else to set the board for you (parents, teachers, evangelists, preachers, assholes) and tell you what's supposed to be important to you and how you're supposed to live. It's spectacularly wonderful, and about as far away from the worst moment as you can get.
Also, I use an ungodly amount of it.
(Same) Lol
Out of curiosity what makes react cheating to you?
For me, being free to enjoy something for what it is, rather than what is not, makes life much more enjoyable.
It's not about the actual thing, it's how consuming it makes you feel. So if drinking one beer makes you feel cool and part of a group and another beer that tastes the same doesn't, then many people will think the first beer is authentic and more real.
In a way the author of the article is actually wanting this phantom sense of belonging and authenticity. They are looking for that feeling of buying and consuming stuff.
The tests with water are funny, when knowing the name or price people pick the most expensive one as the best tasting, when it turns out that all the bottles were filled with tap water.
But in general, yeah - uncarbonated ones I've never ever tasted any difference to local tap water.
Every now and then I'll get a cheap gas station or local brand bottle of water (when traveling, say) and on the first sip it's like "yep, that's just not-very-good tap water, not even filtered". Other times it's fine, but it's pretty obvious the ones that just went with whatever the cheapest local source was and didn't do anything to it.
That said there was a YouTube video about 4 years ago for bottled water in China. They tested like 8 Brand’s of bottled water and all contained stuff that could make you sick and the suggestion was to still boil water.
This is honestly the mature endpoint of any snob or obsessive's journey - relearning how to enjoy the bad and the ordinary. But I'd argue the chasing-the-dragon phase comes with the territory of diving really really deep into anything.
By learning the deep intricacies of some area (be it food, coffee, music, musical instruments, headphones, chefs knives, fountain pens etc etc) you learn to appreciate the highs of the best, most nuanced things that area has to offer. But you also learn how to pick apart all the flaws and imperfections in things you otherwise may have enjoyed.
It takes a long time but I'd say the journey of expertise goes from enjoying the bad or ordinary for what it is, to disliking it for what is, to enjoying it because despite all its flaws, what it is is still pretty good.
So there are additional reasons to not eat garlic from China.
Regardless, source local is a good thing anyhow.
I used to eat at a restaurant in Shanghai which had a fridge in the back, in which enormous bags of pre-peeled garlic cloves were visible.
Put them in a small bowl and microwave for a minute or two, add butter or olive oil and salt and pepper and you have a delicious, cheap and healthy hot side dish to any meal.
I’ve also experimented with buying frozen soup vegetables as an easy shortcut when making broth. Carrots and onions usually come out with a poor texture after being frozen but they are discarded when cooking stock.
It's obviously not a salad ingredient. No one was claiming it is.
But that aside, spinach was a weird example to choose to disagree on considering I used the word "crunch"
I very much share in that. I've tried to learn how to cook light and fragrant Vietnamese and Thai dishes lately. Coming home with grocery bags full of fresh lemon grass, thai basil and vegetables is just really satisfying in its own right and motivates to cook.
To care much about garlic itself, when the flavor is 99% based on how long you heat it, would be a pinnacle of snobbishness.
plus, though I'm not certain, doesn't the process of breaking down garlic change the flavor itself? freshly broken down garlic vs jarred broken down garlic, the latter I'd imagine to be "richer"
The only way for me to make it consistent is that it is a relative self-reflective view that "I am also part of the culture and this is destined to happen".
Someone who writes 2400 words on how hot takes on social media about garlic are wrong doesn't really have a cooking hobby, they have a cooking-themed blogging hobby.
Consider the view that American culture is devoted largely to worrying about how evil American culture is, and that this is dysfunctional.
Forget whether it's accurate. As an American, you can't technically take this view without being part of the problem you're identifying.
But if it's enough of a problem, maybe it's worth sucking up the logical issues.
In 'my' Europe, shopping at street markets and growing your own food is a typical rich people activity.
Of course, in practice, for people who aren't working as cooks at least, there are many concerns more important than getting the last possible bit of taste from your food (that you may not even taste until you've developed your palate a bit). Convenience and prep-time are extremely important as well, and will often dominate your ability and willingness to cook half-way decent food far above the freshness of the ingredients.
The biggest problem is when such normal compromises start being associated with pride and shame. For example, I greatly enjoy high-quality coffee (especially Panama Gesha varieties), and I know how important is to freshly grind it to get the perfect taste. But most days, I just need a quick cup of coffee before work, so I make a cup of pre-ground cheap coffee. I don't think it's "just as good", but I'm also not in any way ashamed of using such inferior coffee.
If you told someone “I’m using this because I’m disabled so it’s easier”, no one is going to second guess that. But for the average person, they are better off doing things the suggested way.
I used to use things like pre grated cheeses until someone told me they are vastly inferrer to grating it yourself so I switched and my cooking improved.
Sure, some people make a song and dance about it and call ingredients dried cat vomit but they are correct that fresh is much better if you can manage it. And even the hardcore home cooks will look the other way on things like frozen puff pastry.
The whole process takes about an hour already, and I just have no desire to cook the beans or rice in my tiny kitchen. And, the packages they come in are perfect size for what I need.
However my mind was blown when I discovered frozen minced garlic, and frozen minced chillies which are now pretty widely available in supermarkets here. Once the block has melted in the pan they're basically indistinguishable from fresh.
The frozen minced green chillies are also great because, being made from a mixture of chillies, the heat is basically standardised, so there's no risk of accidentally making the dish unsatisfactory to eat because one of the chillies was unexpectedly potent, or nearly as bad, unexpectedly weak.
I wouldn't use the tube while cooking.
But I can't really think of a dish I cook regularly where I must have diced garlic as opposed to minced. Even making aglio e olio I'm perfectly happy with frying minced garlic. You get much more garlic flavour for the same amount of garlic that way, and because you cook it lower and slower (larger surface area) there's less chance of burning the outside and making everything bitter.
But the tube stuff, if you soften butter, mix butter, tube garlic, and any spices you like, then put that on bread or use it as a dip, omg. :-0~~~~ sooo good.
Both have their usages.
Soup I just throw the cloves in the soup without peeling. Or use black garlic. Chicken soup made with black garlic is the beez kneez.
My local supermarket sells the 400g bags of frozen minced garlic at £0.95. The same supermarket sells 4 fresh garlic bulbs weighing approx. 280g for £0.99.
Fundamentally, I’d also believe that in most cases, buying the frozen product instead of buying fresh and then freeze will give you a superior product since it’s much fresher when it is processed.
Thanks! I'd never really thought about it that way. That makes a lot of sense!
Ugly cheap bulk and semi-failed crops can go to processing and more carefully/successfully produced stuff goes to various grocers.
In the US at least, you’ll also see differences in grade depending on the demographic of the grocery store. Community markets will sell cheaper produce that’s maybe softer, less ripe, more bruised, or just kind ugly and bougie markets will sell pretty veggies at higher price+margin.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/vegetables
Also, clearly, if you buy 0.99 dollar/kilo frozen peas you’ll likely get worse quality than 10.99 dollars/kilo fresh. But dollar against dollar, frozen vegetables will very likely be higher quality than you can buy fresh. Unless you’re buying straight from the farm - but most folks don’t.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_freezing
I also buy cilantro frozen as well now too since dried cilantro is basically useless and I waste too much when I buy fresh.
Dip into more frozen food. It's cheap and extremely tasty.
Before anyone calls me a snob, I use some convenience products too, e.g. pre-cut and mixed salad - I hate cleaning salad, plus in this case the convenience product has more or less the same shelf life as an uncut salad. Also, after several quiche disasters where we ended up eating "minced quiche" because it leaked or refused to be removed in one piece, I am a huge fan of convenience quiche crust - tasty, crispy, and (almost) 100% leak-proof!
If you go down the "only use base products" rabbit hole, you also have to make your own pasta, because after all that's also a convenience product...
Mine have a lot of green material growing in them by like 3 weeks, max. Fridge, not fridge, doesn't matter. What am I doing wrong?
My potatoes and onions also sure as shit don't last "months". Again, maybe 3 weeks before they're getting iffy, often sooner. Yes, kept in the dark, not like open on the counter in sunlight.
I find pre-grated cheese so bizarre. The cost alone compared to a normal block of cheese should be enough to put anyone off. It's not even like it's an arduous task to grate it yourself (Or is it... [1]).
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWS3IxfDOHE
I've noticed not much difference in price in the small blocks (The blocks that fit in your hand. I'm to lazy to look up the weight.) are sometimes more expensive than grated, or sliced.
I'm pretty sure the companies know most of us do not want 5 lbs of cheese in our fridge, so they jack up the smaller blocks?
While I'm here, I try to buy my spices, including dehydrated onion, at Costco quantities. Most restaurants use the same, but get better pricing through Sysco type companies.
Some Costco's sell yeast blocks which last a long time refrigerated.
If you are lucky, you can find high gluten bread flour there too. It's much cheaper than the better bread flours (King Arthur, etc.) at the supermarket.
The one thing I disagree with is bottled lime/lemon juice. After it's opened once, it tastes nothing close to a fresh lemon/lime.
Hm, I find grated cheese is often cheaper pound by pound than blocks of cheese. Same for other precut ingredients like bacon for instance. The reason being that it's an easy way for producers to process the ends which can't be sold otherwise.
Just had another look and while they don't sell a block that weighs the same as the pre-grated it is much closer in price for a similar sized block.
£9.00/kg for the pre-grated (250g) and £8.64/kg for the block (220g).
On a 5lb block of cheddar, I use a plastic sandwich bag over the exposed end of the block with a rubber band wrapped around to keep it fresh.
It's impractical to get the thin, fine lines of shred off a block of cheese, and even if I do, without the cellulose it will just clump again when I try to stuff as much other stuff as possible on top of it. It's a better product for the dish.
If you are desperate to save time, you may use canned tomatoes. But that should be a last resort. Fresh garlic and fresh onions are two of life's simple pleasures. Seriously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_May:_Oh_Cook
For you coffee, by the way, you grind it yourself, then you use your weiss distributor and flattener before you tamp it. If your coffee doesn't cost at least 20$ per pound and involves at least 5 manual steps, there's no way it can be good. If you put pre-ground coffee in a machine, you might as well skip these steps and drink directly from the toilet.
And since we're on HN, real developers use Unix as an IDE. With vi, obviously - emacs people can quit right now. And don't even get me started on those IntelliJ script kiddies
---
Seriously, there are always be people in each niche who think that their way is the only way and people who stray from the path are to feel the wrath of god [0]. I could go on and on with examples like this. Funnily enough, this quite often doesn't even work for them (I can tell from personal experience that bringing a DSLR with gear up a mountain is not pure fun, for example). Simply do what works for you and ignore them - unless you asked them or they pay you, their opinion is pretty irrelevant.
[0] Although it should be mentioned that usually quite a few people just act snobby for the joke and aren't actually on a crusade. The pineaple-pizza-thingy seems to be mostly a joke, for example.
Tell me you haven't visited Italy/don't know any Italians well, without telling me you haven't been to Italy.
I've always found that name amusing.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza :
> Sam Panopoulos, a Greek-born Canadian, created the first Hawaiian pizza at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, Canada in 1962. Inspired in part by his experience preparing Chinese dishes which commonly mix sweet and savory flavours, Panopoulos experimented with adding pineapple, ham, bacon, and other toppings. These additions were not initially very popular.
> The addition of pineapple to the traditional mix of tomato sauce and cheese, along with either ham or bacon, later became popular locally and eventually became a staple offering of pizzerias on a global scale. The name of this creation is, in fact, actually not directly inspired by the U.S. state of Hawaii at all; Panopoulos chose the name Hawaiian after the brand of canned pineapple they were using at the time.
Even though I'm a bit of a pizza snob I still enjoy a Hawaiian pizza occasionally, somehow the combination of trashy shredded processed ham and pineapple just works well.
Caveat: I haven't been south of Rome, and I gather that there may be more pizza grumpiness further south.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28327893
Seriously who cares what Italians think, are you that neurotic? Hawaiian pizza is great.
I've had pizza margherita in Italy, and at least three large US cities: the one in Rome was better, but frankly, that's probably because I was in Rome when I ate it. It was the same sort of pizza you get from Italian pizza joints in the States.
A typical example is "mozzarella di bufala" that is easily available all over Italy, but if/when you taste the fresh one in the area around Caserta and Naples you will understand how it is different.
All I'm saying is that a pizza margherita at an 'Italian style pizza joint' in the States is the same recipe, wood-fired oven, buffalo mozzarella, and so on. One would need to pay extra for the bufala, but the low-moisture cheese we Americans call 'mozzarella' is never used, it would be fresh ball mozarella.
Whereas a good New York slice can't be had in Italy for love nor money! (I suspect this isn't actually true; I found a Mission burrito in Guanajuato Mexico, good food has a way of getting around). Now, you can say that's like trying to find a General Tso's Chicken in Hong Kong, but I enjoy that dish as well.
Whatever gets a euro from a tourist is whatever they will sell.
When I was in Italy, all the pizza shops sold pineapple pizza, for a slightly higher price, cause it sells that well to North Americans.
On a serious note, as long as you like your pictures everything is good. If you make living selling your pics all is good as long as your clients are happy. And nobody cares about the gear used in taking a particular picture, or cooking a meal. No idea why we cannot simply enjoy common hobbies.
All that are reasons I stay away from forums and social media on my hobbies. With the sole exception of a very helpfull forum on the particular brand of my classic car, I need my technical advice from somewhere.
DSLRs are far behind mirrorless these days for wildlife photography, especially birds in flight. The autofocus systems of the high-end mirrorless cameras are substantially better than any DSLR, and the frame rates (20-30 shots per second) allow far more chances to get a good shot.
Which doesn't mean DSLRs are useless. It just means you have to take more photos & spend more time to get the same number of "keepers", so depending on what you value (time editing vs time in the field vs money spent) you might want to get a wildlife-focused mirrorless for wildlife.
Fully agree that mirrorless is the future, took long enough to fully get track.
There are some DSLR snobists, there are prime lense snobists, there are mirrorless snobists, there are frame rate snobists.
In the end the picture matters, whatever helps you get good pictures is good for you.
That beimg said, as of now I'd say a Z6ii is still behind a D780 a bit and quite a bit behind a D6 (I'm a Nikon shooter, so don't ask questions about other brands). A Z9 on the other hand... That being said, none of those options beats the one you can actually afford and know how to use.
Edit: Which DSLR (Edit 2: I mean mirrorless...) gets 20 fps? The Z6ii is at 12. Everything above is, what, 5k plus for the body?
Edit 3: That seems to be Nikon's Z9 with 20-30 fps in continous mode. Up to 120 in small JPEG. Impressive, and with 6k Euros almost reasonably priced when compared to other Nikon top mofels of the past. One can still get a Z6ii and a bunch of top notch lenses. Damn, I shouldn't have looked it up...
Nikon only recently got mirrorless cameras better than their DSLRs. Canon & Sony have had better mirorrless cameras for several years.
I've got a Sony α7Riv and their 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 zoom lens for wildlife. Only 10FPS, and slower autofocus (and no bird eye tracking) but still a great setup for the price. I tend to be in forested areas around small ponds, so while I'd love a big prime lens for more light, being able to zoom out actually gets critical since backing up would lead to falling into the water.
zoom lenses are great, especially for the versatility they offer.
Later on the same walk, a Grey Catbird landed right in front of me. Fully zoomed in to 840mm I couldn't even get a good portrait shot showing the head and shoulders, just the head. So I zoomed out and got this[4], which I could easily crop for a good portrait. No need to back up and risk scaring the bird.
Money is one obstacle to a big prime lens (the Sony 600mm f/4 lens is $14,000!), but another obstacle is weight and bulk. I wouldn't want to give up having a zoom lens ready on a camera, to allow for otherwise impossible compositions. So I know I'd end up carrying two cameras, one with a 600mm behemoth and the other with the 200-600mm zoom, and my shoulders would hurt. And they'd be bulky and getting in my way, etc.
Primes are nice, but they're not perfect for every situation, and gatekeeping photographers for not having primes is stupid.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52188406196 [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52188661399 [3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52187390672 [4] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52187392882
I ran into some situations were a lens shorter than 24mm would have been nice, and some where something beyond 300 (400 on a DX body) would have been nice. 20mm prime lenses are cheap enough, the telezooms not so much. Currently my preferred one is a Tamron 150-600 G2. Weather sealing is nice, and the Sigma Sport is just too heavy and large, especially since I mostly shoot handheld / without a tripod. Funny so, that the Tamron is much less available used than the Sigma Sport.
And if, if, I had 14k free budget to burn on a lens I would still burn max. 1k on the elns and the reminder on travelling to nice locations where I could use said lens. But then I am no professional.
While you're at it, if you're drinking tea, of course follow the RFC. Pouring the hot tea out of the pot and then adding milk is absolutely barbaric.
In the end, it is the end product that matters. And that is influenced a lot more by the person and ingeredients / raw materials then it is by the tools being used.
Very little after that will achieve such a large improvement, and no matter what it'll cost a lot more money and time (e.g. to find and buy better coffee beans).
I'm going to assume this is satire but in case this isn't, modern mirrorless cameras are far superior to dlrs for most applications these days. my z5 does everything my previous dslr does and gives me realtime exposure preview. And don't get me started on the Z9. With that camera, the dslr's's days are numbered.
All a needless justification of resisting peer pressure instead of letting it bounce off and enjoying life.