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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I was with you up until this point. You go too far.
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)
(note jalapeno are a valid topping)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.