I thought one of the reasons bread has salt is to slow down (buffer) the yeast. Is that true?
There are different levels of salt. At low levels the salt brings the other flavors to life. You don’t taste the salt, you taste the food more powerfully. At higher levels you actually taste the salt as a distinct flavor.
A few things I’ve always pooh-poohed, myself;
“Al dente”. Notwithstanding the fact that I have and have always had bad teeth, pasta cooked al dente still tastes underdone to me. I prefer to cook it a few minutes longer so it’s nice and soft.
Rare steak/burgers. The taste of undercooked meat makes me gag. I want my meat cooked all the way through. If it’s a particularly good steak, I can forgive a sliver of pinkish-brown in the middle, but anymore than that and I’ll send it back. The snobbery attached to this one really gets my goat - people act like you’re insulting them personally by saying you want your meat cooked, and I hear talk of chefs using lower-quality steaks for people who want theirs well-done as if to punish them for daring to insist on having it their way.
Re: draining ground beef; I’ve found that if I’m only browning a small amount of meat (like 1/4 - 1/2 lb.), that even with the 73/27 stuff most of the drippings will evaporate on their own by the time the meat is fully browned, in which case there’s not even anything left to drain. Whether I do drain it or not depends on what kind of food I’m making - when I cook chili, for instance, I leave the grease in the pot and add cornstarch so it’ll thicken the broth.
“Don’t ever use cooking wine, use real wine instead”. If cooking wine weren’t meant to be used for cooking, why would it even exist? I have neither the budget, patience, nor scholarly knowledge of wine to know whether I should use a zinfandel or a pinot noir to compliment my dish, so I’ll just buy the bottle of white cooking wine that costs half as much and use that, and I haven’t had any complaints so far.
Using fresh herbs instead of dried ones. In my experience, fresh herbs cost 10 times more, don’t cook down as well, and I can’t taste the difference.
I would have sortof agreed with you about how to cook a steak until I started eating really good beef. Now I want my wagyu just over rare. Anything else is killing the flavor of that beautiful steak.
Cooking wine exists because rich assholes didn’t want the help sipping their claret while cooking with it. The stuff is an Abomination unto Uggan.
For most applications, fresh herbs are cheaper and cook better. Sorry about your taste buds.
Ttoal agreement on the ground beef, however. Greaseless chili is an oxymoron.
They just have different flavors and potencies. There’s certain herbs I used dried most of the time (like, say, oregano and marjoram) and there’s certain herbs I would never use other than fresh (like, say, basil or parsley or tarragon.) Some herbs straddle the line. But a lot of the “fresh” herbs I like I tend to use at later stages of cooking. Basil or parsley or cilantro goes in the last couple minutes at the most. I tend not to cook down those herbs. Dried herbs I generally choose for long cooking applications.
That’s all it is. Fresh herbs are not intrinsically better than dried herbs. It depends on the herb. Generally the “delicate” herbs (like parsley, tarragon, chives, chervil, cilantro/coriander, etc.) tend to lose a lot in the drying process. The more “woody”/“earthy” herbs like rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, etc., tend to do well. They’re different than the fresh version, but still good. Like I generally prefer my oregano and marjoram dried. Thyme I could go either way on. Rosemary I tend to like fresh, but it works well dried, too.
How much difference do you think there is in the taste of a well-done high quality steak and a well-done not so high quality steak?
I don’t think it’s to “punish” people so much as to decide which steaks would work best when cooking. Like, this steak would probably be better if it were made rare, but this other piece would work better as medium. You know? It’s just a better use of resources. That’s all. Some cuts of meat make a difference when they’re cooked a certain way.
There’s certainly some snobbery surrounding that issue, but facts are facts: rare to medium rare steaks are far juicier and more texturally appealing to most people whom enjoy a really good steak. I can’t eat well done steaks. Way too dry, and if it’s a poorer cut of meat it’s exaggerated even more. It’s like there isn’t enough saliva in your mouth to convince you that the bite you just took is ready to be swallowed even after extensive chewing.
I would suggest that if you are going to cook steak that way, particularly something like filet, to butterfly it so it can still cook all the way through without sacrificing all the juiciness.
Hope that didn’t come off as too…snobby!
It’s electric. (Boogie woogie.) The salt dissociates into sodium and chloride ions (charged atoms) on contact with saliva, and half of them - the cations - trigger our taste buds, making them more permeable to other flavor compounds. Works that way in frogs, anyhow.
ETA: The point being, yes salt in the food makes food taste different than salt only on the food. Not “saltier”, but more flavorful.
I remember one time I was washing mushrooms prior to putting them into water (along with other stuff) to make soup. My kitchen companion at the time was horrified, OMG! washing mushrooms, they’re going to soak up liquid –
Uh. They’re going into WATER. To make SOUP. It doesn’t matter.
We play ‘rice cake or styrofoam’ in our house 
[we have a styrofoam cooler that some german food goodies arrived in that my cat will use as a step stool to get onto the bed, she is 15 and has a touch of arthritis that prevents her jumping up. She likes to occasionally sharpen her claws on one edge, and it flakes off little styrofoam pellets that look exactly like bits of rice cake/]
I cook pasta al dente out of a general sense that less is more, I don’t mind slightly overcooked pasta.
I don’t think the “using less-good meat well-done” is about punishment; well-done meat tastes – I’m trying not to be a snob here – mostly like cookedness, so the chef isn’t going to do that to the better steak when it’s not going to make a difference anyway.
I don’t really have the palate to detect subtle differences in the taste of wine, but cooked down I actually kind of can. Cooking wine does have salt, which half this thread has gone over, but it’s good enough for me. I mostly use it because I cook with wine more often than it is practical (for financial and other reasons) to drink wine with dinner, but if we are able to drink it I’m happy to put the same stuff in the food. That said, the requisite “scholarly knowledge” isn’t that difficult to pick up. I can manage.
I think a lot of the using a cheaper or less high quality steak on someone who orders a well done steak at a high-end steak place is more along the lines of any steak will be more or less tough if cooked to well-done, so why waste the good one on the guy who’s basically asking for a tough steak? They can’t serve that one to someone asking for medium rare, without getting it sent back, or having that guy bad-mouth the restaurant for tough meat.
The guy asking for well-done probably won’t be able to tell, so no harm, no foul.
And… generally speaking, once it’s past about rare, the meat’s been pretty well cooked, even if it’s a bit pink- there’s a distinct texture change that indicates medium/medium rare vs. rare.
I’m not a rare steak guy, but nor am I a well-done guy either. I do get burgers medium well, because generally, they come out well done, but not all dried up like if you ask for well-done. I’m just paranoid enough about foodborne disease to avoid non-well-done steaks.
Steaks all taste the same when overcooked, so there’s no point wasting the best ones on that order.
Might have missed if this was addressed, but getting pasta to not stick is incredibly simple: use a bigger pot with more water. Pasta leeches starch into the water. If it’s not diluted enough, it will form a glue-like substance and stick.
Steaks absolutely do NOT all taste the same when cooked well. I hate a well cooked steak as much as the next guy, but a well-done filet mignon is nothing at all like a well done t-bone.
But yeah, give it to me barely warm and bleeding. That’s how I like my steaks!
What’s the deal with that, anyway? I was given to understand that “cooking wine” was intended to be good wine to which salt had been added to prevent the kitchen staff from drinking it instead of cooking with it.
Did the kitchen marketing people look around one day, notice that hardly any households have a kitchen staff, and take that as permission to just start adding salt to any old horrible plonk and label it “cooking wine”?
Never underestimate the power of inertia.
It’s not that the base wine is horrible, it’s just that it’s probably the stuff Gallo didn’t think was good enough to go into Night Train. 
You are not supposed to put ketchup on a good brat, the acidity is suppose o dull the taste buds. It’s mustard, sour crout and maybe onions.
I like it, reminds me of childhood, so back off my brat.
Exactly. Food that’s not been salted while cooking is unbelievably bland and adding it at the end only makes it taste notably salty.
Also, if you don’t want your pasta to boil over in your too small pot, lay a wooden spoon across the top. Works every time.
I assume that, as with the steak thing, if you’re going to render wine undrinkable and sell it cheap, you may as well use wine that started out not particularly drinkable and was never going to command a high price (rather, there’s no reason to put in the effort to make it drinkable etc.)
They add salt to it to make it effectively undrinkable so it’s able to be sold as a cooking ingredient instead of an alcoholic beverage.
For example, here in Texas, I can’t go buy wine before 7 or after midnight, or before noon on a Sunday, and I have to be 21 or older.
A 5 year old can go into a Wal-Mart at 3 am on a Sunday night and buy all the cooking wine he can carry.