• 3 Posts
  • 298 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 6th, 2024

help-circle
  • It sounds like they would, but techniques of scale (and, oddly enough, cooking things twice) are one of the reasons restaurant food always tastes different, and often better, though certainly often worse, than home cooked food. Parbaking or parboiling before finishing in an oven or pan is a really common way to be able to control texture and browning while also getting an even cook. Restaurants will do it with rolls, potatoes, steaks, large cuts of fish, and a lot of fibrous vegetables. With bread/crust, it changes how flexible and crispy it is, because water evaporates differently if it’s cooked twice for 5 minutes versus once for 10 minutes. With fries, it allows the inside to get soft rather than dry while the outside gets extra crispy. It offers lots of benefits, it just doesn’t make sense to do outside of a professional kitchen making dozens of servings at once.

    Of course, plenty of restaurants go the opposite direction with how they take advantage of scale, and they make everything as cheap as possible and wind up as an Olive Garden knockoff, but good restaurants, fancy or not, make good food by using it to their advantage.



  • Please_Do_Not@lemm.eetoHumor@lemmy.worldYou can't underestimate America
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    As a pizza enthusiast who’s lived in NY, Chicago, and multiple foreign countries, I have to disagree. I don’t think it’s the water like people say, though NYC’s filtration system is completely unique, but you’ve got thousands of people all trying to perfect a similar style within a few square miles of each other, all within a city that has a very different culture and economy than any other in the US.

    I think that that culture and competition alone lead folks to develop traditions and techniques that don’t happen elsewhere, and I think it’s also likely a commerce thing. NYC has the foot traffic to support dozens of shops making dozens of 24-inch pizzas, cooking them 65%, and then finishing them to order in a 700⁰ oven that stays preheated all day. Size of the pizza affects how the crust cooks, how they use the oven affects the even heating and final texture, along with a number of other tiny variables that only really make sense to do that way when running a counter service booth for 15 million people.

    Much thin crust pizza is similar enough, but I think folks who taste no difference between NY style pizza in and outside the city are probably not putting their full palate into it, and are probably just hungry for/happy with anything with bread, tomato, and cheese. And hey, fair game.




  • Please_Do_Not@lemm.eetoHumor@lemmy.worldYou can't underestimate America
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    2 days ago

    Honestly there’s nothing like it. I’ve never had a European hamburger with the same taste and texture as a classic American burger–which I say totally independent of/not about quality. Euro burgers use a totally different grind that changes the density and flavor of the patty, and then of course the toppings and bun tend to be a bit different. Sort of like NYC pizza being relatively simple, but apparently impossible to 100% recreate in any other city, there’s nothing immediately notable about an American burger that you couldn’t do somewhere else, but it does still come out differently. I hope you get your chance to try one!






  • Please_Do_Not@lemm.eetoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksKinda true
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    68
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    I am personally someone who is annoyed by NDT. But I am not convinced his actions are net negative, and think the opposite is more likely. Folks who find him insufferable and also don’t develop a passion for science probably aren’t dissuaded from entering the field as a whole because of this one annoying guy. However, kids who find one season of Cosmos interesting or only see 5 of his tweets may actually develop a love for science before realizing that NDT is annoying. He’d be a much better role model, reach more people, and make the science community look better if he was better, but that doesn’t make him bad when there are literally anti-science advocates out there. We need all the celebrity scientists we can get as long as they aren’t actively doing harm in my opinion.

    Edit: also, the number of ragebait debates he has started that get other folks talking about science isn’t insignificant. He’s probably gotten some people into science just so they could shut guys like him up lol