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[Paula Deen] : Evil, Sadistic Monster of a Woman
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Personally, I tried to save every drop of bacon fat when I'm making bacon. Bacon fat is damn tasty.
The problem is with food network itself. Specifically, the fact that Food Network gets most of their funding from corporate food companies. So they encourage a lifestyle that encourages people to want the type of food that the corporations want them to buy.
I gather you're primarily familiar with those dishes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking which are featured in "Julie and Julia?"
I don't necessarily follow Julia Child's recipes most night, but I became an incredibly competent home chef by learning the techniques she uses. So, like, Boeuf a la Bourguignon isn't something I'll make but once or twice a year, but I will braise a protein at least once a week, and it's not a particularly labor intensive style of cooking once you've got it down.
That for me is the difference between Paula Deen and Julia Child. Child's an eminently qualified chef who can explain otherwise impenetrable techniques in a way that you can learn it in your own kitchen. Deen knows that butter tastes good, so if you add more of it to a dish, the dish will probably also taste good.
British Ramsay is the best Ramsay
Fox Ramsay is... well can you blame him for that? Fox gives him what amounts to semis full of money to act like that
Ramsay's trip to India to learn traditional Indian cooking was a great watch too, guy will go to a mud hut and eat chutnee made with fire ants, and tell everyone how fucking great it is
Cooking is something you're almost solely doing because you need to eat, not because you actually enjoy the process and results. My wife and I cook because we love it, and we love what we eat. We do spend 4 hours after work cooking sometimes. We don't find it impractical, rather, we find it completely enthralling.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm putting a name on what impractical and practical is. Practical is utilitarian. Impractical is enjoyment.
To be fair, she's right.
Really, when you consider that Europeans completely restructured global trade and invented the institutions of Colonialism in large part because they were sick of eating salt pork and boiled beef and desperately wanted to get into the spice trade after a few centuries of doing without after Constantinople had been sacked, you start to realize that we as a species have done some pretty goddamned impractical things in the quest for a good meal.
Ramsay will also promote specials like this:
When was the last time Food Network discussed the subject of sustainability?
This whole thread amazes me. Paula Deen's cooking being compared to big tobacco? Seriously? I watch her show occasionally, not because I want to cook like her, but because she's entertaining and her recipes represent the old school recipes that some Americans grew up with (and I'm a northerner). There is nothing about her programming that says, "make this every time you can, health be damned."
Sustainability and the pursuit of fine dining are typically at odds. The inconvenient trurth that most foodies (who often are environmentalists) manage to ignore.
Paula Deen is more like Joe Camel.
The people who watch Food Network are not into fine dining.
And yet, here we are, in today's world, upping sugar and fat content of meals because it's become impractical to spend 2 hours of a day cooking a meal.
Seriously. It's like the television equivalent of Olive Garden.
I don't spend anywhere near that amount of time cooking, I predominantly cook with raw ingredients, I can't remember the last time I've used sugar for anything other than sweetening coffee, and my cooking is fantastic.
We don't up the sugar and fat content of meals because it somehow makes food cook faster, we do it because we're fucking stupid. Also because making your glycemic levels pitchy increases your food cravings so that you'll buy another cheeseburger in 2 hours, but mainly because we're fucking stupid.
Fine dining was the wrong term. However, I don't think marginalizing it to that extent is quite accurate.
No one denies this!
Also, sustainability and american consumption is at odds. It's actually a good thing in some way that we didn't have a predilection for eating fish as a culture (not that I could ever imagine such a thing coming to pass given the development of the nation and the vast land we had available for grazing.) because we probably would have run out of wild fish stocks in the 1990s.
Dude, they have cooking shows where the grand prize is to serve a dish at Applebees.
I don't believe I'm marginalizing it precisely; I'm only suggesting that they package their content for mass consumption, as Olive Garden does in their close to 800 different restaurants.
And it's really not fair to say people who are into fine dining don't watch food network, I'm certainly into fine dining to the extent that it is economically possible for me to be into fine dining (hopefully more so in the future), I also watch chopped and restaurant impossible
How are those two things at odds
Heh, yes. True. Perhaps the network in aggregate averages out to Olive Garden. I was overlooking most of the crap seeing the couple shows that do have a good bit of culinary merit.
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I guess for regular people, milk is good, lactose isn't as bad as fructose
My contention is that high fat and sugar content is a means of getting ourselves into thinking something has an overtly pleasing flavor. It masks shortcuts of time on prep and fire.
Sandra Lee is the best example of this.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
That was said tongue-in-cheek right?
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Ales, Red Wine, Vegetable Juice.
Only if it can get around the deep-fried butter.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
You know what? Is there anyone else from DC here in this thread? Gather round, people, take a knee:
Many people on those food competition shows can't cook, or if they can, they can't run a fucking restaurant. Not to save their lives. Case in point: Good Stuff Eatery on Pennsylvania Avenue, run by Chef Spike from Top Chef. That place is terrible. It takes them 20 minutes to make a goddamned hamburger, and it's not like they're forming each individual patty by hand or anything, it's only that their kitchen is run like the 15 people in there are all each speaking a different language.
The cult of personality which attaches itself to the people involved in network cooking competitions has got to be one of the worst things to happen to American cuisine in the last ten years. And it all goes back to my earlier point about the role personality plays on food network. They push personalities at you because no one is capable of judging the quality of dish by observing it on a television screen. You can't smell it, you can't taste it, you can't poke it with a fork or feel it between your teeth, so all they have to go on is pushing these personalities at you so that you'll somehow equate the name as a brand with good food.
Heavy cream.
Seriously, I don't begrudge Paula Dean for serving lots of butter. Although one problem is that most people will think they can make the recipe healthier by using country crock instead, which of course is a terrible idea.
I actually cut down on fruit.
I don't follow paleo diet because it's way too restrictive and impractical, but it does have a lot of good ideas. Agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago. Before that, we didn't have grains, we didn't have legumes, and we didn't have selective breeding. Fruit today is a LOT sweeter than it was back than, because we made it sweeter. But our digestive tract hasn't caught up. Also, we didn't have produce being shipped around the world. You ate vegetables when they were available, but they weren't always available.
That's the basic model I follow. Chicken skin tastes good, it has always tasted good. Our caveman ancestors would have eaten it, so should you. Sugar tastes good, but our caveman ancestors didn't have access to processed sugar, so you should avoid it. Any diet that requires strict calorie control should be avoided. Our ancestors didn't need to count calories, and if the diet requires that they do, it's because something in the diet is fucked up.
What are the popular meats in Asia? Duck and pork. These animals are not low fat. In fact, they were probably chosen specifically for their high fat content. Eat them. But industrial vegetable oils are a recent invention. Avoid.
I'm in the area but haven't frequented his restaurant before. But, running a restaurant requires managing people which is an entirely different skillset. I don't doubt for a second that 98% of good cooks are unable to do that effectively and as a result either are unable to run a restaurant at all or do so very poorly.
Poultry and pork were popular in asia because they required little space to raise as opposed to cattle.
Average life expectancy is only that low because of infant mortality. Not because they were dying of heart attacks and diabetes.
Numerically that doesn't even make sense to claim that it was all infant mortality.
Also we didn't have penicillin.
I cook sort of the same way you eat. It makes me think I should probably invite you over for dinner. My general rule of thumb when selecting ingredients is that if my body won't efficiently burn it and my kidneys and liver haven't been conditioned over millenia of evolution to easily filter it out of my system, I'd rather not eat it.
I do tend to remove chicken skin because it's tough as shit to marinate a bird with the skin still on, however.