I think this is completely false and it's unfortunate that people have this perception of cooking. Yes, it's true that if you want to be able to cook all the sorts of food you're used to having delivered, a lot of skill and hardware is probably required. However, you can cook a lot of great, tasty meals with a single pot and pan and a few inexpensive utensils and limited skill required. I think some of the biggest challenges to more people cooking at home is that it will always take more time than ordering.
If you are forced to do it, you will do it. Besides, regarding the learning curve, it feels similar to going to the gym for the first time in your life. Initially you will see a lot of newbie gains (never knew I could make eatable food) which later plateau unless you want to reach the next level.
You can do almost everything with a 12" skillet/frying pan, a large sauce pan (4 qt maybe since you probably want to cook pasta in it), and one of those sets of 3-6 utensils (you don't even need that many) if you are cooking for 1-4.
Y'know how, in old movies, single people would live in single-room apartments, often with a Murphy bed that played a part in some amount of slapstick humor? They weren't cooking in there - dinner was served downstairs.
For me the most important skill is scoping. If I can scope the meal to something inside my skill range I can complete it competently and on a reasonable timeline. I can also choose when I want to push my bounds and allow extra time, or perhaps buy some extra ingredient in case I make a mistake. I think a lot of people don't have the skills and experience to do this and as a result the experience is negative. I can now look at recipes and analyze them reasonably accurately.
Things can be a challenge at different stages:
* Plan what to cook (Do I have the right tools? do I have ingredients I can use? Can I substitute something for this one odd ingredient? Do I need to go out of my way or will my regular grocery store have everything?)
* Acquire ingredients (They don't have something. What substitute is readily available?)
* Prep ingredients (Mostly this is just monotonous, but technique can play a part. Good quality basic tools like knives can make a difference. A more skilled person will be thinking about how to get the cooking step started at this point.)
* Cooking (Skill and experience prevent annoyances like things sticking, cooking too fast, burning etc. Many beginners can't get enough context from many recipes. If you didn't choose a meal that you had all the hardware for do you have alternatives? Should have been caught at the planning stages, but the inexperienced can miss something.)
* Cleanup (It drives me crazy to see this happen only at the end, and for the surfaces and sink to covered in items that need cleanup. A mountain of effort at the end can be unpleasant, especially if you are asking someone else to cleanup and they can't even get into the sink.)
It's ridiculous to have kitchen hardware * apartments, with abysmal utilization rates.
Throw some long benches and tables in there for people to eat if they want to. Good floorplan. Have bring your own wine Wednesdays or whatever.
The biggest misalignment in home cooking is scaling. It's trivial to make 6+ portions instead of 1-2. And often cheaper per portion.
Yes, there are challenges (dishes, cleaning), but nothing reasonable adults shouldn't be able to surmout (or lose kitchen rights).
There used to be something called a 'dining club' -in the Anglosphere it mostly descended from Oxbridge student dining clubs (some were regimental dining clubs). Various social clubs in the 1800s Anglosphere descended from these sorts of things. I used to belong to one; the Berkeley City Club. In addition to providing maybe hundreds of people with the services of a professional chef, it provides something not appreciated in the modern day, with people staring at their phones: an actual social circle, and a place to go after work that isn't a bar.
These sorts of things used to be quite common, and formed the nucleus of many political associations and movements, but they became less popular with the social atomization of the 1960s.
Cooking to scale is also not a problem if you know what you're doing in the kitchen. Smaller kitchens and a lack of proper hardware can make cooking more challenging, but it's super easy to scale a recipe up and store away the extra portions. There are entire communities dedicated to meal prep tips and strategies.
It more comes down to training and time for most people, not a lack of hardware.
Yes and yes. Successfully.
Being part of a community takes communication and negotiation.
Without that, we might as well all be living in the suburbs.
I used to think in terms of communal efficiencies (hence moving into a warehouse), but that idealism was quickly abated by the realities of living with other humans, most of whom it turns out, are broadly selfish and inherently lazy.
not going to lie, this is a story that I'd love to hear more about. I've been thinking more about the co-living/co-working space these days, and a kind of a warehouse commune idea too.
The problem is common work/school/etc. schedules mean that the bulk of the utilization is at the same time; there isn't a lot to be gained by sharing unless you are in a quasi-executive commune, where a shared kitchen (and other living space) is already a norm.
If you want more people to choose to live in communes, good luck.
It wouldn't have struck me, except I named that very concern in my initial comment, and that many people still felt it's the first thing they should inform me of.
Most of us had experiences in college, but yeesh: I like to think everyone's grown as humans since their dorm days.
And I'm not talking about it being expensive in how everyone needs a Sous Vide. Cooking properly requires some things a lot of people don't have like access to a stove. If you take the bare necessities - which I would argue are a chefs knife for chopping, sauce pan, frying pan, a single burner hot plate, and probably you really want some form of oven, even if its just a convection.
Just those alone is several hundred dollars for even the most scrapyard worthy picks. Maybe you can get lucky and happen in to some deals. But probably the greatest premium is space - a lot of kids growing into the "don't ever cook" mentality are sacrificing having kitchen space whatsoever in their multi-tenant living arrangements and thus have no where to go with all this stuff.
And operating with such limiting tooling in my experience makes cooking feel hugely restrictive. Its already bad enough to be endeavoring to put in the work to make something yourself, but to consider it flawed from the outset because you don't have a pizza stone for your homemade pizza where your oven can't even reach a consistent 200c you easily deflate ones interest in learning it.
And saying its easy is also bad for anyone trying it out. It makes them feel worthless when they do struggle to dice vegetables the first hundred times until you develop the knack for it, or can't flip an omelette properly and end up with scrambled eggs. Because people on the Internet kept saying it was so easy.
Theres putting ham on bread and calling it a meal and theres the ability to take the bounty of nature and create a sensation that nothing else can produce out of it. If you tell people its satisfactory to just do the former and thats good enough you shouldn't be surprised when they stop trying and go out to eat all the time because they want the later. And there is no shortcut there - I constantly strive to cook new things because I want to get better at it and have for a decade now, and I like to push myself in making complicated dishes to experience new things, but I'd never ever risk someones intrigue in the culinary arts by saying its easy.
> I'd never ever risk someones intrigue in the culinary arts by saying its easy.
I'm sure that's true from some. But the opposite could be true for others. I think saying it's easy as an isolated statement is pretty useless (note that I never said cooking was easy). However, I think rebuffing statements that cooking is hard coupled with pointers to easy dishes (which I admittedly didn't provide) are a good antidote.
Personally, I love to invite into my kitchen those I know who think cooking is too hard to try to equip them to believe otherwise :)
I too wonder if overall it's a bad habit (socially and environmentally) that I should try to change or if it's just a reasonable and efficient way to get food in the 21st century.
I live not too far from a very good couscous restaurant, and the tradition among the maghrebi matriarchs is to come to get takeaway with their own pots. I've picked up on the habit and it's a really good compromise - minimum eoclogical impact, delicious food, in the comfort of your own home (useful when you have babies)
What?!?!
I get the feeling your definition of "not a lot more expensive" is a lot more inclusive than mine.
Obviously cost of home cooking vs prepared depends a lot on where you'd eat out and what you'd make for yourself but in my experience fast food off the value menu is about the only thing that's close to cost competitive with cooking for yourself. I would have to eat almost exclusively organic and add a lot of wild non-frozen seafood to my diet if I wanted to make the cost of preparing my own meals close to the cost of buying Chipotle/Five Guys quality prepared food. Maybe the numbers are different for people who shop at Whole Foods or otherwise go out of their way to increase the cost of groceries but your statement that eating out is close to cost competitive with cooking for yourself seems like it's from another universe.
Cooking would probably still end up being cheaper in most cases but not by a huge margin. But then again Paris might not be very typical in that regard, food is notoriously expensive here.
Given that most delivery services have a minimum, it's pretty difficult to spend less than $15-20 to get your food delivered.
In my experience, it's about $2-4/meal to cook, $12-15/meal to eat out, and $20+/meal to get delivery. Imagine that over a year. If you're cooking at $4/meal vs eating out at $12/meal, that's ~$3000 over a year!
On the other hand, you are paying for convenience and some people are willing (and able) to shoulder that cost.
A game changer for me has been a high quality rice cooker. Put rice or quinoa in the cooker as soon as I wake up and my at my “lunch break” I prepare some other stuff, eat and get back to work. I work from home all day generally.
To use it, you have to transport your ingredients there, trust that the pots and pans were cleaned by the previous users, trust that no-one else is using it at the same time, trust that everything is currently functional, do the cooking, and transport the food back, or store your food there and hope no-one steals it.
The dorm kitchen only had 1 set of equipment (1 oven, 1 fridge, etc). Considering that most people in an apartment scenario would be prepping their main meals around the same time (dinner after work), there would have to be many sets of equipment so they could run in parallel. There would be little gain from shared equipment if you still needed ~5 sets for 10 families instead of 10 sets for 10 families. Also, if you have any specialty equipment (ice cream maker, wok, favorite stainless steel pans, any number of things) you either have to lock it up in the communal kitchen, transport it every time you use it, or just use it on-site in home.
The efficiency of a communal kitchen is too predicated on trust and good maintenance by the community or landlording organization. In practice, it limits people to simpler meals with less prep. It will rarely match the efficiency of individual kitchens.
That's kind of what restaurants are now, along with takeout.
While it might seem not intuitive it is actually 100% incorrect. Larger menus command smaller prices and shittier food, which is why all excellent restaurants converge on very small menus ( not more than 1 page ).
Places with large menus typically are diners, casual sit down restaurants and ethnic pre-gentrification places. Large menu non-chain restaurants are likely to have low grades from the health departments and use produce and proteins on the verge of spoiling. To compensate for that such places tend to have low prices.
interesting you say this -- I've been thinking along similar lines. I've been calling it "banquet style" restaurants : scheduled menu (crowd votes/RSVPs); pay by subscription (?), very reasonable prices (due to menu optimization), make the environment an interesting social/network/meetup experience; beer/wine/cocktails are extra and high margin...
- their recipes are not too hard and instructions are generally carefully sequenced and clear
- their hardware requirements are generally quite limited
I strongly disagree here. Or rather, I disagree that one sort of cooking is hard, and that's "normal" everyday cooking. Cooking restaurant dishes is probably hard, but that's fine because you probably don't want restaurant food every day. I certainly don't.
Sure, if you've never done it before it may seem difficult, especially if your expectations are that you're going to be eating something equivalent to takeout or restaurant meals, but it's easy to get started as long as you keep it simple. For instance the following 5 dishes are all pretty simple to make, the pasta dishes can all be made within 20 minutes with practice too. I've made all of these (except the carbonara) within the last week.
- Tomato and Basil or Parsely pasta (I leave out the mozzarella): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eabecxMhJlE
- Proper Carbonara: https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pasta-recipes/gennaro-s-...
- Coq au vin (easy, but takes a while): https://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/books/the-delia-collecti...
- Pasta with prawns: https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pasta-recipes/spaghetti-...
- Three summer antipasti: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/06/antipas...
> requires a lot of hardware to do
Again, disagree. I could make all of those dishes with two pans, one knife and a wooden spoon, all cheap. There is a lot of kitchen equipment out there, and better quality stuff will make your life better, but for most stuff YAGNI. Spiraliser? YAGNI. More than 5 knives* ? YAGNI. Stand mixer? YAGNI. etc. etc.
* I could survive with one knife, though I regularly use about 3. You don't need to spend a lot, my favourite knife was about $25.
I think a good rule of buying kitchen equipment would mirror the rules of optimisation:
1. Don't buy it
2. Don't buy it
3. Maybe buy it if you repeatedly find it would make your life easier/food better.
> is an acquired skill that takes a lot of blunt learning
I'm not sure what you mean by blunt learning, but sure, you learn over time just like anything else, but if you start out simple (avocado on toast: good bread, good avocado, salt, pepper, olive oil) and work from there you can start winning in the kitchen straight away. This isn't a process where you produce crap for a few years before you suddenly start making something edible at year three. Work up to the complex stuff.
> a lot of minute details about how certain ingredients interact
Again, start out simple. Follow simple recipes (Jamie Oliver's Italian cook book is a pretty decent starter). You learn how ingredients interact over time as you're doing it, especially if you're thinking while you're cooking.
It's pretty rare (unless you're massively over stretching your abilities) to create something inedible, so as your experience and confidence grows you can experiment with flavours more with little consequence. For instance the other day I threw in some rosemary I had sitting around into my bread dough. It didn't work, but the loaf was still totally edible, and it got eaten. It was OK, just not great.
> In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking.
No, but you can certainly change the wipers on your car or self-prescribe over the counter painkillers. Start simple.
Tips:
- Start simple
- Buy quality ingredients where you can. Buy flavourless tomatoes, your food will be bad. Cheap beef in a burger? Bad burger.
- Buy and make what you need. Don't try to make restaurant portions, especially with good ingredients, you'll go bankrupt. 85g of pasta might not seem like an actual adult portion, but it really is enough.
- Yagni. Don't buy equipment unless you really worked out you need it.
- Learn when celebrity chefs are mucking about with simple food to make it seem more complex, they all do it. Learning to recognise the unecessary flourishes will make stuff simpler.
- Practice. You will fail, you learn from it, but at least you can eat the failures. Most of the time.
- If it tastes good it is good
Its hard because its not a sustainable place to put someone in to tell them they should be cooking more and then telling them to only cook the relatively limited palette presented as "entry level cooking". Probably the greatest turn off Ive ever seen to anyone aspiring to make their own meals is when they go for a month making everything themselves without ever having tasted a luxirious pan fond from the things they made because they both always played it safe and second were limited in their tooling to what they can make.
Its more endemic of a more general problem of people wanting results now, that if something doesn't result in instant success that its not for them. It took me a hundred hours of chopping and flipping pans to become good at it. If I hand a novice my knife it will take them three times longer to make larger cut diced vegetables because they have never done it before. Probably the best example is how long it takes to manage to flip omelettes out of pans without breaking them. It takes a while to do that! Its not easy!
And I recognize I'm a total amateur. I'm not some professional chef. Those guys are truly amazing. They make art out of the same tools I have. What they do is an incredible job. A hard job. It took them years to master their craft, and its disingenuous to them to say its so easy.
I just think the popular messaging of "just start cooking, its so easy if you just do only the basics"! Ends up causing way more harm than admitting that getting good at it to where you can confidently get up in the morning and not even think about eating out because you can make something you want at home if you want to is a time consuming and hard process. Sending signals about it being easy just makes someone wake up a few months down the road wondering why they still suck so much at it because everyone told them it would be so easy, but what they make to their palette still cannot compare to the diversity they want and get from eating out all the time so they stop trying. I just personally see that happen all the time in my peer group.
> Its hard because its not a sustainable place to put someone in to tell them they should be cooking more and then telling them to only cook the relatively limited palette presented as "entry level cooking".
Rubbish. There's nothing wrong with simple food, and the variety is huge. It's not intrinsically worse than "complicated" food.
> Probably the greatest turn off Ive ever seen to anyone aspiring to make their own meals is when they go for a month making everything themselves without ever having tasted a luxirious pan fond from the things they made because they both always played it safe and second were limited in their tooling to what they can make.
Nonesense. If you go for a month making food that tastes good without deglazing the pan then you ate food that tastest good. Deglazing the pan is just one technique in the reportoire of any cook or chef, home or otherwise and you don't suddenly go from dissapointing food to good food once you learn that one technique.
> Its more endemic of a more general problem of people wanting results now that if something doesn't result in instant success that its not for them.
That has nothing to do with how hard it is to cook good food at home.
> It took me a hundred hours of chopping and flipping pans to become good at it.
Yeah, it takes practice to become good at anything. It took me a while to learn to tie my shoelaces when I was a kid, but I didn't give up and pay for a communal shoe tieing service. The advantage to learning to cook is that you can become proficient enough (lots of recipes are dirt simple to follow) to start making stuff that's good in a short amount of time.
> If I hand a novice my knife it will take them three times longer to make larger cut diced vegetables because they have never done it before.
Yep, so? My kids are way slower in the kitchen than me. Speed isn't everything. Getting faster comes with practice, but an onion chopped slowly doesn't taste worse than one chopped fast.
> Probably the best example is how long it takes to manage to flip omelettes out of pans without breaking them. It takes a while to do that! Its not easy!
For some reason I am crap at omlettes, even after many years of cooking. But you know what? That two or three piece omlette that ended up on my plate is still edible and still tastes good. You don't have to produce perfect looking food with excellent technique.
> And I recognize I'm a total amateur. I'm not some professional chef. Those guys are truly amazing. They make art out of the same tools I have. What they do is an incredible job. A hard job. It took them years to master their craft, and its disingenuous to them to say its so easy.
You're putting words into my mouth there. I'm not saying that what those chefs do is easy, that would be ridiculous. It is clearly hard, but it's also completely irellevant. We're talking about home cooking. That's not hard.
> I just think the popular messaging of "just start cooking, its so easy if you just do only the basics"!
No, not "only do the basics", I'm saying "start simple". Simple food can be, and often is, good food. Start simple, make stuff that's good, but not complicated, and work from there. Grow the complexity as your confidence grows.
> Ends up causing way more harm than admitting that getting good at it to where you can confidently get up in the morning and not even think about eating out because you can make something you want at home if you want to is a time consuming and hard process.
What the hell are you eating for breakfast? Boil yourself a couple of eggs. Make avodado on toast. Make yourself some Pan con Tomate. Scramble yourself some eggs, maybe fry a little bacon on the side. This shit isn't complicated, and it's still good.
When you get home, reheat some Coq au Vin, it tastes great when it's sat overnight in the sauce.
> Sending signals about it being easy just makes someone wake up a few months down the road wondering why they still suck so much at it because everyone told them it would be so easy
It's not easy, but it's also not hard. It's one of those things that if you want to you can get good at to the point you can make good tasting simple food pretty quickly.
> but what they make to their palette still cannot compare to the diversity they want and get from eating out all the time so they stop trying.
You don't have to eat at home all the time. It's not all or nothing. Eat out sometimes, eat in sometimes. I go out for Cambodian food because I have none of the basic ingredients or skills to make it. That doesn't mean I can't then make lasagne at home the next day if I want that.
> I just personally see that happen all the time in my peer group.
Perhaps your peer group have just had some bad advice, or perhaps they've been put off by the incredibly negative narrative that you talk?
In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking.
That being said the true optimization would be that most people be content to eat in cafeteria style settings where there are limited options and the chefs are using whatever is freshest and most affordable and availability is fixed (even if you just grab and go with the food). There is a trade off between menu diversity, the prices you pay for it, and how good it can actually be where 16+ hour open restaurants with several page menus (including fast food) are making concessions on freshness / shortcuts in preparation to provide their diversity and availability.
I think a lot of this relates to how we are in a transnational period for density. In the coming decades I am almost certain we will trend globally towards packing people into apartment / condo style living in city cores because the trends of sprawl and mcmansion single families that are going to be inherited by unmarried or childless descendants without the incomes to support them falls apart. Right now trying to build up a "local" kitchen you can go to three times a day for regular, good, healthy and diverse meals isn't feasible because the density isn't there to get them to walkable convenience, but I hope rising density makes them a possibility.
At those kinds of scales it becomes a technical probability we might just get short range delivery drones where the kitchens advertise via app or notification whats on the menu and you just select what you want and a lil bot brings it to you a la room service but optimized in the aforementioned ways to make it more sustainable.