Surely this can’t be a spelling error. I’ve seen too many serials improperly prepared. Half-baked, a lot of them.
There is an episode or YouTube video from America’s Test Kitchen/Cook’s Country where they ask all the chefs if they just use olive oil at home regardless of what the recipe calls for, and there answers were pretty much, yes, they all do that.
I used to do that until recently when the price of olive oil has gone up so much. I’ll use vegetable oil in places where a neutral oil is good enough.
This made me think of some lunches I was served in the Netherlands, where the ham and “cheese” turned out to be ham and very thick slices of butter. All of the sandwiches had thick slices of butter. It was strange, and good, but I’ve never bothered to recreate it at home.
And then you mention this weird Dutch treat. Definitely a country with thoughts about butter.
Recently at breakfast the waiter asked one of my companions how she wanted her eggs poached, to which she replied, “soft, if I wanted hard boiled eggs on my Benedict, that’s what I’d’ve ordered.” Obviously they ask because people have different preferences, but I thought that was a good answer.
I like my tea “wrong.” I’ll heat the water in the microwave, with the tea bag in it, and I’ll leave the bag in the cup the entire time I’m drinking it. This is probably because for the bagged up tea dust, even in premium brands, there is barely any difference between “right” and “ruined.”
One of the best sandwiches I ever had was from a little deli type place in Paris. I don’t speak French, but I recognized Jambon Fromage, and ordered that. Nice baguette, thick cut ham, slab of cheese, and butter, which really tied the whole sandwich together.
I do it that way too! But I have learned not to do it in front of houseguests. I’ve horrified witnesses a couple of times.
I don’t eat breakfast cereal now but when my mother insisted I ate breakfast, I always had cornflakes or frosties dry. She couldn’t understand it but I hated them soggy.
I was however lucky that she didn’t force me to eat the porridge she cooked for my father and brother. Can’t stand the lumpy slimy texture.
Then if you’re in Greece and want to, er, ‘surprise’ a companion, order some retsina!
Actually I don’t mind a glass now and again, but my wife hated it…
Not just poor households here in England! My mum used to save the beef dripping and on Sunday evenings, that would be a suppertime treat, the scrapings off the bottom of the solidified dripping, on hot toast. I can taste it now …
So did mine. You can use the dripping fat to fry the bread too… yum!
Heart attack on a plate, I suppose, but it was rib-sticking good…
I’m with the fat man. Cook the damn broccoli, don’t just warm it up a little!
Agreed, which is funny because I adore tartar and order my steaks still mooing. But the burger had better be completely cooked thru or its going back.
Also with the group that demands rubbery scrambled eggs. Any runny egg anywhere near my food gets the whole plate dumped into the trash.
Yeah, olive oil has fruity and vegetal notes - if you like it, it goes with a lot of things people say it shouldn’t.
Cookery is often a massive circle-jerk. All it takes is for some TV chef (Alton Brown and Gordon Ramsay seem to be the figureheads) to assert a thing and it just gets repeated until everyone treats it as a fact, then the more zealous types go out of their way to shove it in the faces of anyone who is doing anything even slightly different. It’s not just a cuisine thing, it’s got a streak of toxic masculinity running through it too.
LOL, this reminded me of a Dad experience I had when I was a young kid.
I had been invited by a little friend to lunch and we were served tuna salad sandwiches made with celery and some other things. This addition of cool vegetables to tuna was revelatory to me, so I asked my Dad, who was in charge of packing the daily lunches for we kids, to put some celery in with the tuna mixture.
My sandwich that day consisted of tuna mixed with mayo and 3 celery sticks placed atop the tuna mixture. Not a food prepared “wrong” that I prefer.
Tried yogurt instead of milk? Actually, the only “cereal” I routinely eat these days is granola, and I have never had it with milk - but my reason is that I don’t like milk. (Black coffee, no sugar thank you.)
Anyway, granola doesn’t go soggy in yogurt. It does go soggy in stewed (or tinned) fruit, but I’m fine with that.
j
I like the “Break the horns off, wipe his ass, and trot that sumbitch out here.” cooking instructions.
I learned a huge amount about cooking from the original run of Good Eats, where one of the primary themes was separating well known “food facts” into fiction, suggestions, and truths. Of course this generated new “food facts,” but I guess I’m not too surprised people took those as dogma about cooking, not starting points for cooking.
I’ve barely followed Alton Brown in the 20+ years since, and I’d be disappointed to learn he’s gone down some sort of toxic masculinity path about food rights and wrongs. The original Good Eats was so liberating from the prior generations of cooking shows, which were often at best little more than video recipes, and at worst were proscriptive commandments about cooking.
I prefer to read things by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, as he includes the science behind what he is recommending; sometimes in excruciating detail.
One person’s overcooked vegetable is another person’s junk food…
Fried Fava Beans (Habas Fritas), approx. 1/3 lb.: The Spanish Table.
If fava beans cooked til they’re crunchy isn’t overdoing it, I don’t know what is. If you don’t know them, they’re more-ish in the way that heroin is reputed to be.
j
Yeah, over the years, the show Top Chef would occasionally do a French omelet. Like it was the only way an omelet should be made. It always looked under-cooked and slimy to me. Unappetizing. I like my omelets with a little brown on the outside. Horrors!
Maybe the thing with the runniness or not of omelets and scrambled eggs has something to do with the different aproach that the USA and Europe adopt for preventing salmonella infections. The EU tries to avoid salmonella at the source, keeping the birds free from the bacterium as far as possible, while the US tries to eliminate them afterwards (this is a bit simplified, granted). With US eggs it is better not to risk undercooking, with European eggs the risk is negligible. That, with time, changes the acquired tastes and the recipes.
He also often tests various methods and shows you the results of those tests.
It’s possible that the safety of eggs is a factor but I get the distinct impression that part of the reason the classic French omelette is the way it is, is because its rather difficult to get it exactly right. A little too much heat and you get browning. Fold it a little to early and it tears - a little too late and it cracks, or folds too flat. Despite the simplicity of the ingredients and the end result, it’s a thing that takes a disproportionate amount of skill and care.