Why yes, I do put a little cayenne pepper in my chicken soup. Why do you ask?
Isn’t this normal?
Is this an adhd meme?
Powdered spices specially, by the time you open the lid, you have already smelled it.
Don’t even need to try.
I’m pretty sure most cooks use spices according to their internal feelings on what contexts the spices work well in. Basically the smell test except they have enough experience with the spice already to just do it in their head. Pretty sure this isn’t that unusual.
I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and I still can’t do it. I’ll always add too much or not enough.
Amount is the experience part. Hard, if not impossible, to estimate by smell alone.
I’m the rabbit. I also do a lot of tasting.
You may scream now.
Tasting is how you’re supposed to do it.
I however just start throwing shit in and wait for the surprise at the end.
And now the rabbit is in the corner too, what animal are you?
I AGREE WITH YOU!
Blindly following recipes I will never get. How can you be comfortable with depending on a stranger’s whims for what you eat ?
I give them one try and the next time I do it my way.
I usually try to stick reasonably closely to the recipe the first time I’m trying something out. That way if I don’t like the result, I know it’s not just that I ruined the recipe with my modifications.
I don’t do it, because I usually get confused by them, but it makes sense to me. I don’t know what will taste good, and by following a recipe you can leverage someone’s experience to get something that tastes good. Personally I just accept that I often eat something mid in the pursuit of good cooking skills
I almost always follow a new recipe the first time around to understand what the dish is generally supposed to be. After that, I start riffing off of it to make it what I want it to be. But you gotta know which general direction the dish was originally headed before you can successfully play with it if you’re a Home Gamer in the kitchen.
Especially when there are so many absolute garbage recipes by people whose jobs are writing content for magazines or SEO where the only requirement is that the picture of the food look good and selling weird kitchen instruments.
Which is slightly better than our parents learning on recipes designed to use as many ingredients sold by Campbells as possible.
95% of recipes floating around these days just fundamentally misunderstand the dish they’re trying to create, like 3/4
Ever been to a restaurant, ate a meal cooked by somebody other than yourself? Pre-made frozen meal? Fast food?
Dont want to sound mean or anything but most people are comfortable with having somebody else prepare a meal, so why is it different when you prepare it but somebody else tells you how to do it?
I think that’s why some people “can’t cook”. They treat a dish like a magic potion, where you’ll destroy the house if you add 2g too much chilli or something.
No, they are just lazy.
All cooking is vibes based.
It’s baking where you’ve got to plan it out like d-day.
I just follow my family’s habit , add reasonable amount
Wait until OP discovers that spices don’t always taste like they smell…
And the taste changes with salt, with heat, with boiling, with cold extraction (like an overnight marinade). You really just have to experiment.
Once pepper cooks into a meal it’s a whole 'nother thing and miles above what it tastes like when added at the table
Terrible how they decieve us
tried beer for the first time yesterday, thought it would be better than the smell. Nope. Struggled through 3 sips then gave it to someone else 😭 I don’t really get alcohol tbh. Ive only had like 3 or 4 drinks but no matter what it is they all taste bad :/
Beers are very much an aquired taste. There’s your commodity beers and your piss beers from the big national brands like Pabst, Miller, Coors, etc. which largely are trying to sate a pallete that never liked the moonshine from the prohibition era (and all are crap in my personal opinion. It’s good for getting you buzzed and that’s about it), then there’s your microbrews which will vary wildly in style and flavor (if it’s on tap you can just tell the bartender you’ve not really had beer before and ask what they recommend and if you can try it before you commit to a full glass) and then there’s the stuff people don’t talk enough about: ciders (it tastes like apple juice but with a sharper, fuller flavor!) mixed drinks (again, ask the bartender if you’re unsure), and probably some other ones I’m not thinking of before you move onto the whiskeys and bourbons.
So basically it’s a wide world of alcoholic beverages and honestly people don’t encourage experimenting enough
It’s a bit of am acquired taste but beers are by far not all created equal. There’s a stupid amount of diversity and large differences.
But if you don’t enjoy it don’t feel the need to force yourself.
So, the first thing you need to know about alcohol is it’s an intoxicating drug. It is a depressant, its short-term effects include reduced inhibitions which in the moment can feel like increased confidence, and overall reduction in physical motor skills, plus a mild euphoria. Also makes your face feel slightly numb. That’s most of alcohol’s selling point.
Alcohol on its own is rather unpleasant to have in your face. A lot of cocktail culture sprung up around hiding alcohol with other flavorings so they’re in any way pleasant to swallow.
You might try something like whiskey and coke, I’d specifically go with American or Canadian whiskies here; scotch doesn’t really bring the right flavors for this. There’s a reason Jack Daniels or Crown Royal are stereotypes. Vodka can also be a way in; it doesn’t bring a lot of flavor of its own so adding it to fruit juices can get you used to booze within familiar flavor profiles. Don’t worry about sticking to posted recipes, drop a tablespoon of vodka into a tall glass of orange juice and see what it does, then start upping the ratio.
Get used to that, you may then start exploring cocktails, getting into wine or beer, or neat spirits.
I fucking haaaaaaate hops, i hate the smell, i hate the taste, i also hate beer because i can literally smell the fermentation and it smells rotted.
Plenty of other ways to get turnt out there my friend
It’s an acquired taste.
Unless it’s an IPA, they’re gross and if someone drinks them then I assume they’re just suffering to be pretentious.
/s?
As for other booze, just make it like something you like to drink. Fruity vodka and sprite is banging. Rum and coke is a classic. I like creamy stuff so I put vanilla vodka, bailey’s, and milk together.
/sdefinitely not sarcasm.IPA haters rise up
It’s not that I hate IPAs, I don’t per se. I’ve home brewed IPAs for myself even though I prefer ales. The problem started with micro breweries trying to out do each other in seeing just how much hopps could be jackhammered into a beer. And it’s turned beer drinkers in pretentious snobs because they have no clue in what the reason is for IPAs to even exist in the first place or even how it’s supposed to originally taste.
Yeah I don’t actually hate IPAs either but as you said, finding one that does not contain an ungodly amount of hops is pretty rare nowadays. I like APAs more because they seem to have been spared by that trend so far
A lot of IPAs are gross. Some are quite good. Bitterness is the most maligned of all tastes. Tons and tons of bitter things that people love and every one of them is a love/hate acquired taste thing.
Grapefruit, bitter melon, bitter black coffee, any sort of bitter beer (IPAs aren’t the only one), heck even burnt sugar!
The biggest problem with IPAs is that crappy/inexperienced brewers use the bitterness of hops to cover up brewing defects. This leads to really gross aftertastes or overwhelming bitterness and only hipsters like drinking that crap.
For a hot minute there near the end of the Obama administration, craft beer was a thing in this country and we had some excellent beers. Then Trump got elected and I haven’t seen a craft beer that wasn’t an IPA or a token jet black “oatmeal stout” since.
The “craft” part got killed in the commercialization of the genre. So it’s become the modern version of Pabst. And there is a contraction of micro breweries at the moment as beer drinkers are slowly learning to pass on all the crap out there.
One of the weirdest takes I’ve ever seen. Bravo and well done for somehow working politics into this!
It’s a thing that happened and I’m not sure by what mechanism. 2018, lots of microbreweries and brewpubs most offering a wide variety, by 2021 you’ve got seven IPAs and one token stout on the menu.
Mostly because they can’t be good at all of them. And there were/are a lot of bad brewers out there that don’t care about mastering the craft.
We’ve moved on to sours or IPA/sour combos. I drink them because they are delicious to my palate. Always drank my coffee black even as a kid. I like bitter.
Honestly I fucking hate the term hipster. I’m not hip, I’m a laborer in my 40s. It’s just another way for people to divide each other.
Oh I don’t disagree with you. I’ve looked for decent non-IPA microbrews and have been puzzled at the lack of selection! I just wasn’t aware of the timing.
The double IPA, the “I’m not an alcoholic” drink of choice.
…let me introduce you to single cask-strength malts: one drop, drawn delicately through your lips, let diffuse across your palate by capillary action, that’s how i learned to appreciate alcohol for the first time after four decades of not getting it…
…the great thing about cask-strength sipping whiskies is that one bottle can last years if kept properly sealed between pours…
There is soon a great winnowing of craft distilleries coming also. There is a glut of barrels growing in rick houses are we speak and production is dropping. MGP, (probably the largest producer of custom/aged spirits for “craft” whisk(e)y brands in the US), has announced large cut backs in their production. The market share for spirits is declining in the US as the younger customers are swinging away from spirits to other types of intoxicants.
Beer is definitely an acquired taste. Plus there is a big fad around IPAs lately which are stupidly bitter even by beer standards
Im not usually a fan of alc but I do enjoy rice wine (korean flavored ones) and choya plum wine. Maybe you could try those? They’re moreso a sweet alcohol and doesnt have that weird earthy bitter taste imo
If you aren’t cooking by vibe, are you really living?
Baking on the other hand…
It requires more precision, sure, but there are absolutely bakers who can taste a dough and tweak the water/flour/oil etc. ratios to get the perfect bread.
It’s only different from other kinds of cooking because most people haven’t developed those senses. If you knew what you were doing, you could bake from scratch without a recipe easily and go by “vibes” (i.e. based on sensory input).
Baking is chemistry, cooking is jazz.
I have a Master’s Degree in chemistry, I can’t bake for shit. Cooking, on the other hand, I excel.
Baking is actually ranching.
Yeast is closer to the animal kingdom than the plant kingdom. It’s a living organism you need to feed so it will grow your food. You need to make it comfortable and give it an environment to thrive and then kill it when it’s the yummiest.
Man, now I love making bread even more.
It’s biochemistry
You can still get jazzy with it tho once you understand tha chemistry well enough.
Jazzy Chemistry sounds like the title of a textbook that is attempting to be more attractive to students.
Saxophone with little molecules floating up out of the horn end like notes, lol
Baking by vibe takes some work, and you should practice recipes by the letter before trying it, but it can be fun. It’s more so knowing the impact of what you’re adding.
Spices, for instance, can be added by vibe to some recipes. Flour, on the other hand, should be weighed out and a firm knowledge of ratio to fat rather then vibes.
My wife says that everything I cook smells the same. Yeah baby I know what I like.
I had to bake by vibes one time because I started a recipe then realized I didn’t have eggs and the friend the cake was for is lactose intolerant. Used a can of coconut milk. Turned into brownies instead of chocolate cake, but they were good enough that I’ve been intentionally making them since.
So like cooking, if you are making a recipe of something new it’s important to follow the recipe to know how it tastes then next time you know what to tweak to make it taste more like what you like
With a deep enough knowledge of how baking works, it can be done. My sister improvises baked goods very well. The sad thing is that when one turns out amazing instead of just good, she can’t replicate it because she doesn’t know the recipe. I’m particularly sad I’ll never again have the amazing butter rum pound cake she made for her daughter’s birthday last year. She tried to make it again later, but it just wasn’t the same. :(
Powerful eldritch knowledge tends to come at a terrible price.
“Can you share the recipe?”
“Nope!”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, I don’t remember.”
…that’s pretty much my improvisational style, everything eyeballed, nothing measured: sometimes things turn out amazing but of course the cost of those happy surprises is that i’ll never make it the same way again; couldn’t if i tried…
…i dated a girl who dogmatically followed published recipes, considered any deviations anathema to the authors’ labor developing them, and she was horrified to watch me cook…
for me it’s easy because i mostly remember what i just made. but that’s also because i pay special attention to what i do and what comes out afterwards, kinda to do semi-structured research.
Some people would definitely not remember all the details, but yeah, this might not be an issue for others.
Considering the majority of flavours we experience are in fact smells, if you can cook by your nose you’re usually pretty safe on how the end result will come out.
I’m not a foodie nor a chef but I’ve been able to break apart and reproduce restaurant dishes just by smelling.
Isn’t this just a sign of inexperience? If you have been cooking for a reasonable time, you will know which spices to use when going for what sort of flavour.
yeah but there’s also a lot of people just seeing cooking as a chore and never really paying attention to it, therefore not learning much or anything at all.
it takes patience and a bit of dedication to actually learn cooking in a reasonable way. otherwise you’re just following recipe.
My chef yells at me because I do this all the time.
Though he’s mainly mad because I didn’t measure a single fuckin thing and can’t recreate it
can’t recreate it
This is the main downside IMO
also, if you do write down the recipe and try to recreate it on another day, it doesn’t work because your mood has changed and now the flavor doesn’t match anymore.
has happened to me many times now.
If your chef has a nose and taste buds he should be able to figure it out by remaking it a few times.
It’s not that he can’t recreate it, it’s that my coworkers can’t.
That sounds like you are making yourself indispensable.
