What’s your ‘Heston’ experience?
I’m pretty sure making Phyllo pastry by hand is a myth made up by grandmas for ‘Kids today have it easy’ reasons, like walking up hills both ways to school
I used to watch my yiayia make phyllo by hand. She would cover the entire kitchen table in butter, spread out the dough with a wooden dowel that I just remember using as a lightsaber every time she put it down, and spend hours folding and rolling and mopping melted butter across it.
So much butter.
Eventually her arthritis made her give it up and she started using the frozen stuff, but she loved cooking and she was proud to make everything from scratch.
The recipe wasn’t complicated, you just need a large enough clean surface that can be covered in butter and a few hours to spend making it. The result is very similar to frozen dough.
the space requirements is the real killer for phyllo and puff pastries. I dont even know if i could fit a wad of rolled out puff pastry in my fridge.
I unfortunately dont even have the space to roll out pasta or cookies, it makes me a little dead inside
The simple things are the hardest to master.
Pie crusts, US style biscuits, scrambled eggs, steak, and sauteed chicken breast. If you cook any of these things exceptionally, I respect your skills.
I can make great macarons and croissants, but for the life of me I struggle with making perfect buiscuts
Honestly, the hardest part of cooking is the prep. Cutting everything perfectly, getting the right ingredients, making the right spice mix, making the sauces, and food that takes multiple days of prep. Cooking is the easy part, prep is the hard part
Edit: deboning anything is fucking rough especially fish, butchering anything is also rough and super easy to fuck up, making all the dough and noodles. I personally think a great chef on those cooking contests are just super good at prep and plating the food of course because it’s pretty in the end.
Trying to cook a lot pudding in a big steel bowl in middle school. The bowl was a forever casualty.
Hollandaise sauce.
Once you crack the code, it is easy peasy – but it’s very non intuitive until then. Either use a double boiler (I don’t recommend this approach, it makes it harder to tell whats going on, reduces your control and makes setup feel like a chorae) … or buy a few dozen eggs, a couple pounds of butter and a dozen lemons and just practice the sequence until it clicks.
The key is to control the temperature carefully, and keep that temperature homogenous and even… that means knowing how warm and cold your ingredients are, and steady whisking.
Two ways to do it:
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Whisk together eggs, water and lemon juice until the mixture thickens, and then add melted butter slowly (your slowest and most foolproof method)
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Whisk your eggs to aerate them, set them aside. Melt your butter, remove it from the heat and add your (cold) lemon juice and water. Should be about room temp now. Whisk it together and drizzle in the eggs, whisking constantly. Then put it back on the heat and whisk it steadily till it thickens, which will be quite soon.
The first path is the correct way, in that it minimizes the risk of putting the eggs into a hot pan (and curdling them), but it’s also slower and more involved. Basically, any way that ensures the eggs are about the same temperature as whatever gets mixed into them, and heated up gradually from there, works.
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Sous vide can make this easier
Sharpening a knife with one of those long sharpening things
That’s because they are not for sharpening, they are for honing the blade.
There’s your mistake. A steel is not for sharpening. It is for honing - i.e. straightening out a slightly rolled edge. You should do this periodically while or just after each use.
If your knife is dull, a steel is useless. You need to sharpen it on a stone first.
Or just buy new knives
A sharpening steel? https://cdn.cutleryandmore.com/products/large/36.jpg
Yes. The movement and blade placement is beyond me. I grew up in a tackle store and would watch my mom and dad sharpen filet knives super fast and i cannot replicate it
The average kitchen knife is sharpened at a 15-20 degree angle. So, hold your knife perpendicular to the steel. You’re at 90 degrees. Go halfway down, you’re at 45. Go halfway down again, you’re roughly at 22.5 degrees.
This is close enough in my opinion, but you can always angle down a tad more for those last few degrees if you want. You want to be a little bigger than the actual angle it is sharpened at though, since you’re focusing on the edge, not the whole bevel.
Noodle stretching
I do that every day
Is it getting longer?
Anything that requires a professional grade oven. Your home made pizzas won’t cook the same. Despite them having their own charm
We’ve got a simple little hot air oven, works awesomely for souffle, slow cooking, drying, even warm fermenting, you name it. Plus it’s extremely efficient. No one uses the large one anymore, especially now while my wife and I discover french kitchen en detail ;)
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A perfect omelette. Every egg is different, “the perfect pan” is a myth, omelette is simple to learn, extremely hard to master. Never had one.
Stop watching Food Network or the myriad of food channels on YT. Cooking ain’t that hard.
Can you follow the most basic of basic directions like “preheat oven to 350F” or “mix ingredient X with ingredient Y”? Yeah, of course you can. But it is in the food industry’s best interest in making it look far more complicated than it really is.
Lmao you’re out of your mind. There’s no big conspiracy of the food industry making cooking look harder than it is. I got really into home cooking from watching all those cooking shows and YouTubers and then trying the recipes out myself. Virtually every cooking content creator out there makes content because they want to share the love of cooking, not scare people away from it. Channels like Binging With Babish, You Suck At Cooking, Alton Brown, J. Kenji Lopez Alt, etc are all fantastic resources for people who want to learn to cook.
You ever try to make rough puff pastry? Good luck with that. Let us know how easy it is.
That looks a lot like filo dough. I’ve made cheese pie and spinach pie before. It’s not that hard. I don’t like spinach though.
