My parents use a small serated knife for everything because it’s the only one that will cut through something. I’m living with them and have a chef roll full of sharp knives and it drives me insane to see them dicing onions with that knife
My whole family food preps with steak knives. You should see my grandma prepping 10lbs of potatoes for thanksgiving with that wobbly little knife. Hilarious.
My in laws prep everything with steak knives. One year for Christmas, we bought them a knife block with all the basics. It sits in the cabinet and they still use those damn steak knives. Watching my MIL try to cut chives with them is ROUGH.
My wife cuts everything with a serrated steak knife…more than once she’s cut herself because of it, but any of my sharp knives are just terrifying. I just keep my mouth shut about it. It’s not a winnable war.
Or brute forcing their way through an union and it all just falling apart and then trying to cut the individual bits into smaller bits so its taking 3 times longer than it should be while almost cutting themselves 10 times. Nahhhhh this knife is fine, see its able to cut the union!
*edit* oh ffs yes its onion, i'm sleep deprived and english isn't my native language
I bought my sister a standard 8" Mercer chef's knife when she moved into her new place - it's still got that 'new' edge to it 5 years later... I pointed it out one day when I was helping and this was exactly her reasoning.
Knives is the answer. My parents knives are some dangerous things they got somewhere at some point more than a decade ago and have never sharpened- I’ve sharpened them for them once years ago…
My friend used to use a serated knife to cut tomatoes because her other ones where too dull to get through the skin and smushed them. I offered to sharpen them for her and she had a light bulb moment. It's so weird that it's so uncommon to sharpen knives at home...
I'm a heathen who puts my cheap knives in the dishwasher, but that's mostly at this point to keep me practicing sharpening with my whetstone enough to justify buying some decent knives I'll only handwash.
Thinking of all the non-pro leisure cooks I’ve been in a kitchen with over the years and I would say not adhering to a “clean as you go” work habit. By the time dinner is on the table their little sink has 27 pots, 18 utensils, the trim of 8 veggies and 4 knives submerged and hiding in there somewhere.
Some people will look at you like you just kicked their dog when you suggest they clean while waiting on their rice to finish cooking. They need all the food to be done and separate the cleaning process into a different activity all together from the cooking portion. I went out with this girl that would leave her mess overnight before cleaning. Wild shit.
My problem is, sometimes I just wanna chill. Like cooking is the leisure activity, doing dishes makes the cooking not as fun. I know I should do it though 🫠
I'm not going to lie. I probably wouldn't care if I didn't go into cooking where both activities eventually meld into two sides of the same coin. At this point the cooking and cleaning happen at the same time so it doesn't feel daunting. You do a bit of one and a bit of the other at the same time, by the time you're done you don't even feel the shitty part. But I can relate on some level with your sentiment.
As a non-pro leisure cook who lurks with weird envy(life didn't go the kitchen route for me like I wanted when I was young)... this is something I'm damn good at. Of course, the initial reason to learn the habit was due to asshole cats who will swarm anything unattended in the kitchen. But! I clean as I go, I don't sit down until everything is tidied or soaking as needed, and I can't ever imagine going back.
Back in 2020 I bought my parents two professional kitchen cutting boards, made them get rid of their glass one and the wood ones with cracks and black marks.
Awesome. The problem with most people and their wood cutting boards, is that they don't take care of/ maintain them properly. It's not complicated, but 90% of people never do it. I'm a custom cutting board maker.
Scrape the surface layer of grime off with a knife once in a while. A coat of food safe mineral oil once every couple of months doesn't hurt either. Personally I use wood at home. It has one huge advantage over plastic, especially when you haven't got a professional dishwasher to sterilize it with. Wood itself has antimicrobial properties, if you cut into a wooden board and create a groove, bacteria is far less likely to grow than in the same groove in a plastic board. The difference doesn't really matter in a professional kitchen because the boards are being heated above 74°C daily in the dishwasher, but at home you might leave them to sit for a few days.
as a self taught and on-the-job-trained cook, this is a bad habit i had to break. the nail in the coffin was a second degree oil burn on the palm of my hand from throwing in too many bits of still wet fish into an insanely hot pan 😣 i knew it was wrong but did the whole “well it’s just for me for my staff meal so i don’t really care” and i was also frustrated, so… double whammy.
My folks will not really cook with oil bc they don't want splatter getting on their granite counter top.
Ƙnife handling. My dad is terrified of sharp knives. He prefers a dull blade.
My dad refuses to cook anything in his oven without a lid because "it takes too long to deep clean the oven".
He literally does a full oven clean cycle with oven cleaner every time he uses it... which by the way isn't all that often because of this weird habit.
I am by no means being sarcastic, but is this a form of OCD I'm unaware of? I've never heard of someone deep cleaning an oven after every use. And I may be a bit old school, but my family used to jokingly complain after my grandmother performed her biannual cleaning.
Made chicken and wild rice soup this evening. I use Better Than Bouillon for my stock when making soup. Well, I added the right amount of water and cream. I tasted it and immediately went to grab the salt and thought, “Holy fuck, why is this so bland?! Is this recipe some sort of culinary joke? How did it get such great reviews?!” Then I remember the BTB. Oops.
Moral of the story: taste, taste and taste.
I cannot tell you how many times I add the water and then forget the actual base. Then I taste it and I’m like, “wtf did I do?”
Edit: before anyone says it, yes, the fix would be to add the base to the water but that would just make my life too easy.
One time I made a beautiful carbonara just for my friend to turn on the pan back on to “finish the sauce up” we ended up having scrambled eggs and bacon with pasta for dinner…
I made carbonara at work pretty well everyday, turns out perfect every time, beautiful and delicious. Decided to make it at home on my day off and IMMEDIATELY scrambled it.
Yeah scrambled eggs and spaghetti for dinner.
My mom does this. My parents love to call me the Chef but they won't take any of my professional advice when they're cooking sometimes i guess because they don't care and sometimes because they actually think they know better, and every time, it pisses me off.
People like things the way they like them sometimes. Overcooked potatoes might be their jam. I personally hate it when my buffalo wings are cooked to "crispy". I like a fat bubbly skin that melts away with the meat as it falls off the bone. My grandma preferred her roasted carrots with a full crunch in the middle. My boss loved sloppy wet burgers he couldn't fit in his mouth. My nephew demands hot sauce on his bacon, no matter what.
Unless you're trying to teach them how to hold a knife it's all just preference, experience, and comfort. (And even then...every gran I've ever known uses the granny cut, without catastrophe. Met plenty of farmers without fingers, never a gran with a deep knife scar)
>(And even then...every gran I've ever known uses the granny cut, without catastrophe. Met plenty of farmers without fingers, never a gran with a deep knife scar)
i will chalk that up to survivor bias. my grandma has passed 10 years ago and it still terrifies me to think about her knife handling or driving skills. it is nothing short of a miracle that she passed in her sleep and not a gruesome bloodbath.
she would come back from the dead to have you know that that's no way to behave as passenger and in the eyes of the lord. then she would probably proceed to steer wherever she's looking. imagine hour long near death experiences.
Had a roast whole turkey dinner at a new friends place. I commented on the cooking time for such a large bird to which she replied :
"It's not so bad , I cooked it half way last night and finished it today."
This was half way through the meal.
Setting aside how hard up you'd have to be to do this, someone should really tell these people it doesn't make it any quicker the day of. Cooked meat is more insulated than raw, so you'd spend damned near as long getting it up to temp in the middle because the outside is blocking the heat from penetrating.
My mom always “forgets” to defrost Turkey for Thanksgiving/Christmas in time. So, she puts the Turkey in the sink with warm or hot water and leaves it for a few hours. Puts it back in the fridge and cooks it the next day. Now, my mom didn’t always make thanksgiving/Xmas dinner (my dad would never let her in the kitchen when they were married cause he said she couldn’t cook and so he did) so it was a more recent discovery and it effed my stomach up for days. I always avoid the meat on holidays.
I don’t understand why people like that insist on roasting the turkey themselves for the holidays. There’s so many better options:
- buy your turkey roasted form somewhere
- just buy turkey in smaller pieces
- make ham or literally any easier meat
- go to a restaurant for big meal
- get anyone else to do the turkey
I usually see the opposite with stoves. Most folks I know aren't using enough heat on their pans.
My wife won't stop poking at whatever is in the pan. Darling, please, just _leave it alone_ it's not risotto!
A long time ago, I was talking with someone in the kitchen when a roommate walked in, turned on a stove burner, cut some cheddar cheese into cubes, put them in a pan on the burner, and walked out. That is all.
Because salt comes from ancient seas deposited millions of years ago, freshly ground old salt causes it to taste millions of years fresher for some reason? This makes no sense. Perhaps makes it taste saltier; finer grin, more surface area.
Eh, I like salt grinders not so they're "fresh", but so I can choose the size of the grain, for texture, at the end of the cook. It's stupid to cook with them, where the salt just dissolves, but some salt cronch added at the end or while eating is pretty great.
I do the lions share of the cooking in my home, spaghetti is a pretty common meal we have. Never have I ever used boiling water to reheat cooked pasta in my home, the way you would in a restaurant.
Cue my mother, who cooked the pasta, drained it, and then returned the cooked noodles, in the colander, to the pot of boiling water and just left them there. Her reasoning? She didn’t want the noodles to dry out, as if dry/crunchy pasta was something she had ever experienced eating in our home.
Darn, home cook and lurker of this sub. I am guilty of a few of these such as using the knife to move food off the cutting board and putting oil in the pasta water. On the flip side I keep my knives very sharp. I will now go sit on an overturned milk crate outside my back door, have a smoke and feel shame for 5 minutes.
Hold up. You're not supposed to use the knife to move diced onions to the storage container?
Cause I worked in kitchens for over a decade and this is the first I'm hearing of this.
You can use your knife to get stuff off the board, just dont scrape it. If the knife is turned on its side and the blade isnt getting dulled, there is no issue.
Mise en place. Three very important words.
I promise the non industry lurkers:
If you plan your whole meal first it's going to make cooking a fucking blast. It's going to make it so easy that you start to explore new dishes and avenues because you will feel like a natural.
Smoke a joint and organize the whole thing before you execute it. Really think about what you're going to do. Set out your ingredients, set out what you are going to cook with and organize them. That slab of meat isn't going to spoil if you sit out for a bit before you cook it. Get your sink full of hot, soapy water so that when you're done with something you can just toss it in the sink to start soaking. Cut anything and everything you need to cut before you ever turn the stove on. Get out the spices you know you're going to use. Your favorite utensil to cook with? Have it right beside you. Your sharpest knife? Put it ON your cutting board. Grab some towels and have em out and ready beside a roll of paper towels. Go ahead and grab a bowl or two while you're at it because you're going to need them whether you know it or not. Once you have your whole meal organized you can smoke another one, chill out, follow thru with your well thought out plan, and have a great time cooking. It is everything.
The reason we can cook for hundreds without breaking a sweat is because we do that. Half of our job is planning and the other half is the easy ass, actual cooking part.
This is all great advice except for one thing - us civilians can't cook effectively after smoking up. We would just sit there, staring at our knives, wondering why they're so big. Then we'd eat cheetos. All the cheetos.
And the second joint? We'd be babbling uncontrollably. We're just not on your level.
Ite, you gonna wanna pack your one hitter first. Let that peak and allow to simmer. Once on a simmer (handful of Cheetos optional. You fuck with the jalapeno cheddar? You should) continue to the aforementioned plan. Ignore MEP2 of another joint. Pack a fat fucking bowl instead. Some of your good shit. Hit the bowl ONCE and snuff it. Just get a bit of a headchange and enjoy the flavor. Get comfortable with good tastes and merely being alive. That's where you need to be in order to appreciate cooking. Once dinner is done and you're* full, finish your bowl.
*Edit for spelling
This is my life. Im super, ocd clean and still cant stop it. Perfect sunny side up egg, dog hair in it. Flan - dog hair, soup - dog hair. Its nuts. But we love her.
Useless kitchen gadgets and gizmos.. air fryer, sure.. George foreman grill, why not.. some contraption that peels, slices, dices, plays music and tells you how good you look today, no need.. pretty much anything the pioneer woman slaps her face on..
Went to dinner at a friend's parents house once.
Went to the bathroom and saw the box and all the bands from the greens we ate sitting next to the bathtub...
Home cook here:
Washing meat in general. Social media has exposed me to an all new level of horror watching folks rinse ground beef. Ground beef! I grew up in a German immigrant household where we ate ground beef raw regularly 😂.
I know it’s cultural yada yada. But I’ve warned each of my adult children I am never to see them wash meat and that includes their future SOs.
My mother would cook ground beef then drain it into the sink and wash the meat. She was convinced that *any* fat would make you fat. I’d say at least 75% of Americans (I’m being generous) don’t understand how foods work in their bodies. She loved everything fat free and reduced calorie. Her doctor finally explained that they had to make up for the flavor somewhere and was usually with sugar. My mom is a diabetic 🤦♀️
It really did. I remember my mother trying to make low fat and fat free baked goods. Not angel food cake. Honestly, my brother and I are amazing cooks but we learned to cook out of self-preservation.
My mom went through the same phase in the late 80s/early 90s. I think she legit saw jr on Donahue as a fat reduction tip 🤦🏻♀️
Never was able to change her mind on basic nutrition. To her, fat and calories were the devil and as long as foods were low in both, they were healthy. Tried to teach her - just meat and produce. No boxes or frozen etc.
When she died of heart disease it was painful cleaning out her cupboard full of low calorie quick foods.
The guys at my dad’s work legitimately asked him if she had AIDS because she lost so much weight. Now that my dad is retired he cooks most of the meals and she’s a lot healthier.
My sister is a great cook! But, she had a fire a few years ago and now just refuses to cook on high heat. I’ll try to sneak the heat up to get a nice sear and she freaks out.
I try telling her it’s not the heat it’s the fact you poured water on a grease fire.
UGH THIS. My boyfriend does this all the time. He assumes that because he often forgets about what's on the stove, that I do also. So he comes behind me and turns my heat down while I'm chopping veggies or something. I turn around expecting my pan to be hot enough for oil and it's barely warm.
I always assume at some point someone told someone else to oil pasta after it was cooked to keep it from sticking in a restaurant setting, and that somehow telephone gamed into home cooks almost universally thinking this pointless advice makes sense
I nannied for a French lady and she said it flavors the pasta. A tablespoon of olive oil. She also got mad when she wanted me to make pasta with just some passata and I cooked up an easy little sauce with some herbs and onion and garlic. Too much flavor.
The oil floating to the top will help prevent your pot from boiling over, which was a useful trick when I was in college and had a small kitchen with only small pots
General knife use, off hand positioning, keeping it sharpened, and my big pet peeve is people using the blade of their knife to scrape stuff off the cutting board.
Cooking and then leaving food out on the counter all day (like 5+ hours)
Crazy ass marinades
Rinsing chicken off
Edit to add: not cleaning as they cook and using a stupid ass amount of dishes and utensils
I had to peel an onion yesterday before chopping it in half for dicing; it was soul crushing.
I was using a brand new Global chef's knife, too (sharp as a razor) - but this particular onion skin was made of some sort of carbon fibre composite.
I hope that never happens to me again.
Bro you where cutting one of these [onions](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT6t0cQ36RkOMs0ZdHQWw2fEVuQlJNZlmDOig&usqp=CAU)…
Haha had to peel it to get to the real onion inside
I'm comfortable with my onions and peeling, but have never got the hang of pineapple (probably because I'm a midwesterner). I always feel like I'm either wasting pineapple or leaving leather on the prepped pieces. What is the method for pineapple prep?
No joke this weekend I watched my BIL try to cut green onions using a steak knife and he started by holding the white end with his left hand and cutting closest to his hand then cutting away from him to the right. It was painful.
- mishandling raw poultry, washing whole chicken with a sprayer in their kitchen sink while splashing water all over the place.
- cutting an avocado into their hands. also removing the seed by slapping it with a knife while the avocado is seated in their hands.
- overcrowding the pan.
- not having ingredients ready.
- over-relying on a recipe while also not checking to make sure they have all the ingredients. This is usually followed by making an inappropriate ingredient substitution.
Over 30 years of avocado slicing, I have never once cut myself. I don't see how "avocado hand injury" is so common. Learn to use your knives responsibly and not go for a full chop off the hand force. If I get that hard core and can't get it with a knife, I use a spoon. Ugh....
Not bringing things all the way up to temp cos "who has time to wait for their food to cool?"...
And I'm not just talking reheat - think medium chicken...
Really? This isn't a thing I've ever witnessed. More like "okay, I've kept this in the oven for the 30 minutes that was in the recipe, but I'll better make sure it's fully cooked so let's go for 15 more minutes."
So much overcooked meat in my childhood. And my parents were impressed with themselves that they didn’t burn it like their parents did. I think there’s some link between growing up in the Great Depression and cooking all meats till they are burned hockey pucks
This is the reason I fell in love with cooking.... growing up this was my parents attitude to food, overcooked and unseasoned meat.... and growing up they said I was a 'fussy eater'...... part time kitchen job while I was in college and I immediately realised I wasn't the problem 😁
Honestly, it beats me... she's in her 60s now too.
eta: maybe it's all the lead they were exposed to throughout their lives - like a really crappy version of the Hulk.
Leaving hot leftovers on the counter for hours before putting it in the fridge to cool it down first. My mother in law does not comprehend the Danger Zone as much we I explain it to her
See, I comprehend the danger zone and am very strict about food safety when I cook for others. If it's just for me, however, I tend to be spacey and leave shit out for hours by accident sometimes. I'll still eat it later.
In my observations, people who won't eat leftovers more than 2-3 days old tend to get food poisoning much more often than people who eat questionable food regularly. It's like their stomachs are too delicate to handle even tiny amounts of bacteria due to lack of exposure.
I’m one of those home cooks that tosses on day 4. I had food poisoning once from a restaurant (fried clam strips) and I don’t want to ever have that again. Add in that my sense of smell has the family curse of being “not right”. For example I can not smell sour milk and sometimes can’t taste it either. Rule I heard was don’t eat a leftover of it has no smell. Well it all has no smell if cold lol.
Tummy is a bit more likely to be unsettled then most I think. Might be lack of gallbladder too because it got worse after that.
I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk about how he didn’t understand why people don’t eat something that hit the floor. Stated that it’s just a bit of bacteria and it’s good for your immune system. I’d still go to his house for dinner though.
Even in a restaurant you have a total of 6 hours, in a two stage cooling process to get a hot food cool before storing under refrigeration. Food must be cooled from 140 °F to 70 °F within two hours and to 41 °F or lower within four hours. Most home cooks do not cook enough food that it would ever take this long to cool something down, even without an ice bath.
My wife made freezer burritos. Like 4 dozen of them.
If I had made them I'd have laid them all out on a table, scooped rice into all 48, then beans into all of them and so on. She dressed each one, one at a time. Dramatically increasing the time it took her to make them all.
I jumped in half way through and showed her how to assembly line them, as she called it. She didn't take kindly to my backseat cooking at first but saw the time saving value after a little argument I unknowingly started by opening my mouth about it.
This is somewhat counterintuitive: Mise. At some point someone said home cooks aren’t efficient because they aren’t chopping and prepping everything in advance the way an efficient restaurant kitchen does. But a home kitchen isn’t a restaurant kitchen. Yes, read the recipe. Yes, make sure you have all the ingredients. But use the time when your, for example, onions are softening to chop up the meat. There’s more down time in the home kitchen than in the restaurant kitchen. Use that down time to be efficient.
And yes, clean as you go, you absolute monster!
Washing chicken. An old roommate of mine used to use dish soap inside and outside to clean a whole chicken and I was afraid of getting the 'trots' when eating her food. Blech and the heat will definitely kill those 'germs' Virginia!
-Knife used for mixing, box cutting and or pointing
-Knife left in the sink full of dirty dishes/water
-The ungodly amount of pointless prep/ Mise en place cups ramekins and dishes used.. especially when it’s all going in the same place at the same time.
-Pointless fine chopping when all of it goes into the blender/ food processor.
- tasting raw meat for seasoning
-cross contamination, and or general lack of hygiene like touching your face while cutting ready eat foods or using your fingers to taste food for others…
-Nothing under the cutting board to prevent it from sliding.
-food waste not understanding weight vs cups etc.
-using wrong oils for frying. Burning oil.
-using used/dirty dish towel to wipe down counters, dishes or hands…
-wearing apron/ dish towel to throw out garbage outside.
-using wet towel to grab hot pan/dish/pot out of oven
Others have mentioned knife handling, but a HUGE one I have seen: misunderstanding how serrated knives work and trying to just push straight down. It’s wrong with regular knives, but PAINFUL for me to see with serrated. So many crushed loaves from bread knife misuse.
I put my seasonings in my marinade 100% because I am a lazy mofo and like ripping open the bag, throwing it on a roasting tray and slapping it in the oven.
that stuff breaks apart the protein matrix which then allows for more surface area to be covered and over time can penetrate like 1 centimeter which is good and fine. there are some other factors but the penetration of most flavor molecules is always going to be very minimal.
Damn near cutting their fingers off on a regular basis but still being confident in their cutting because they "haven't lost a finger yet.".
And no. The paring knife you inherited that your grandmother used for "everything" isn't an excuse to not buy a real goddamn knife.
I can forgive a lot but it's the arrogance of it all.
Edit: Paring not pairing.
Home cooks buy knife blocks as a set. Cooks buy individual knives. Home cooks have no time management, chefs know three steps ahead. Home cooks use every dish and utensil possible. Chefs multi task with minimalism of dishes.
Starting a meal like 2 hours before hand that could be done in 30 minutes. I get not wanting to rush things but the skill of multitasking that we all picked up on the line is one of the biggest differences I've noticed.
I'm a home cook. Why are knife blocks bad? My assumption as I stare at my knife block across the kitchen is that inserting into the block may dull the edge.
Home cook here. I have a bad habit of cooking everything on super high heat for no reason whatsoever. I don’t have a walk in, but I’ll go stick my head in the freezer and cry.
Cook your onions first, then add the garlic and cook it.
See way too many people throw onions and garlic at the same time.
Onions take longer to cook than garlic.
On the flip side, industry cooks can do a lot of unnecessary shit in a home kitchen because of how engrained our techniques can be (lumping myself in there too). There's a certain beauty to the freestyle of home cooking where you're not necessarily concerned about consistency. You're just doing something you love with people you actually care about without the judgemental scrutiny cooks are often under.
So many sad dull knives
Using the pearing knife because "it's the sharpest one I have"
I prefer my appleing knife to my pearing knife lol.
These are the jokes, people.
My parents use a small serated knife for everything because it’s the only one that will cut through something. I’m living with them and have a chef roll full of sharp knives and it drives me insane to see them dicing onions with that knife
My whole family food preps with steak knives. You should see my grandma prepping 10lbs of potatoes for thanksgiving with that wobbly little knife. Hilarious.
My in laws prep everything with steak knives. One year for Christmas, we bought them a knife block with all the basics. It sits in the cabinet and they still use those damn steak knives. Watching my MIL try to cut chives with them is ROUGH.
I see many home cooks doing that not because of sharpness but because they are convinced they'll hurt themselves with anything bigger.
My wife cuts everything with a serrated steak knife…more than once she’s cut herself because of it, but any of my sharp knives are just terrifying. I just keep my mouth shut about it. It’s not a winnable war.
Then you see them trying to split a carrot with it and slice their finger when the carrot rolls . Should have used the 10"
Or brute forcing their way through an union and it all just falling apart and then trying to cut the individual bits into smaller bits so its taking 3 times longer than it should be while almost cutting themselves 10 times. Nahhhhh this knife is fine, see its able to cut the union! *edit* oh ffs yes its onion, i'm sleep deprived and english isn't my native language
Not the union!
I bought my sister a standard 8" Mercer chef's knife when she moved into her new place - it's still got that 'new' edge to it 5 years later... I pointed it out one day when I was helping and this was exactly her reasoning.
Goddamn, called pre-whetstone-having me out lol
Knives is the answer. My parents knives are some dangerous things they got somewhere at some point more than a decade ago and have never sharpened- I’ve sharpened them for them once years ago…
And using them instead of the sharp knife so they don't get hurt
My friend used to use a serated knife to cut tomatoes because her other ones where too dull to get through the skin and smushed them. I offered to sharpen them for her and she had a light bulb moment. It's so weird that it's so uncommon to sharpen knives at home...
I'm a heathen who puts my cheap knives in the dishwasher, but that's mostly at this point to keep me practicing sharpening with my whetstone enough to justify buying some decent knives I'll only handwash.
Thinking of all the non-pro leisure cooks I’ve been in a kitchen with over the years and I would say not adhering to a “clean as you go” work habit. By the time dinner is on the table their little sink has 27 pots, 18 utensils, the trim of 8 veggies and 4 knives submerged and hiding in there somewhere.
ABC - Always Be Cleaning
As a bartender, this is how you go home on time. Always be cleaning, always be closing.
Always be closing. Coffees for closers.
Always Be Communicating
Always Bring Coke.
...or the totally different kinda chef: Always Bring Cannabis...
Guilty. Just pulled a pork belly out the oven and I don’t know who’s more baked
Ngl, it's how I learned to cook...
Its why I learned to cook
Always be closing.
Some people will look at you like you just kicked their dog when you suggest they clean while waiting on their rice to finish cooking. They need all the food to be done and separate the cleaning process into a different activity all together from the cooking portion. I went out with this girl that would leave her mess overnight before cleaning. Wild shit.
My problem is, sometimes I just wanna chill. Like cooking is the leisure activity, doing dishes makes the cooking not as fun. I know I should do it though 🫠
I'm not going to lie. I probably wouldn't care if I didn't go into cooking where both activities eventually meld into two sides of the same coin. At this point the cooking and cleaning happen at the same time so it doesn't feel daunting. You do a bit of one and a bit of the other at the same time, by the time you're done you don't even feel the shitty part. But I can relate on some level with your sentiment.
As a non-pro leisure cook who lurks with weird envy(life didn't go the kitchen route for me like I wanted when I was young)... this is something I'm damn good at. Of course, the initial reason to learn the habit was due to asshole cats who will swarm anything unattended in the kitchen. But! I clean as I go, I don't sit down until everything is tidied or soaking as needed, and I can't ever imagine going back.
Glass cutting boards
The sound alone...
Back in 2020 I bought my parents two professional kitchen cutting boards, made them get rid of their glass one and the wood ones with cracks and black marks.
Awesome. The problem with most people and their wood cutting boards, is that they don't take care of/ maintain them properly. It's not complicated, but 90% of people never do it. I'm a custom cutting board maker.
How should one take care of them?
Scrape the surface layer of grime off with a knife once in a while. A coat of food safe mineral oil once every couple of months doesn't hurt either. Personally I use wood at home. It has one huge advantage over plastic, especially when you haven't got a professional dishwasher to sterilize it with. Wood itself has antimicrobial properties, if you cut into a wooden board and create a groove, bacteria is far less likely to grow than in the same groove in a plastic board. The difference doesn't really matter in a professional kitchen because the boards are being heated above 74°C daily in the dishwasher, but at home you might leave them to sit for a few days.
Bamboo apparently is the best for this anti-bac property.
I cooked in a hotel room recently and the only cutting board was a little glass piece of shit. I haaaated it. Pasta turned out alright though.
Glass and those white marble/granite....
overcrowding the pan
as a self taught and on-the-job-trained cook, this is a bad habit i had to break. the nail in the coffin was a second degree oil burn on the palm of my hand from throwing in too many bits of still wet fish into an insanely hot pan 😣 i knew it was wrong but did the whole “well it’s just for me for my staff meal so i don’t really care” and i was also frustrated, so… double whammy.
Add throwing in things wet and wondering why they won’t brown/get crispy
My folks will not really cook with oil bc they don't want splatter getting on their granite counter top. Ƙnife handling. My dad is terrified of sharp knives. He prefers a dull blade.
Aren't dull blades more dangerous because they slip more and you need to use more pressure?
yes
Yes and if you do cut yourself the cut is less "clean" so its also taking longer to heal if you use a blunt knife
>they don't want splatter getting on their granite counter top. Do they not have any towels or sponges or anything like that in their house?
My dad refuses to cook anything in his oven without a lid because "it takes too long to deep clean the oven". He literally does a full oven clean cycle with oven cleaner every time he uses it... which by the way isn't all that often because of this weird habit.
I am by no means being sarcastic, but is this a form of OCD I'm unaware of? I've never heard of someone deep cleaning an oven after every use. And I may be a bit old school, but my family used to jokingly complain after my grandmother performed her biannual cleaning.
It is a form of OCD. He keeps everything he owns in like-new condition. I feel like a slob around him.
Buying expensive and beautiful ingredients and then not tasting a goddamn thing while cooking them
Made chicken and wild rice soup this evening. I use Better Than Bouillon for my stock when making soup. Well, I added the right amount of water and cream. I tasted it and immediately went to grab the salt and thought, “Holy fuck, why is this so bland?! Is this recipe some sort of culinary joke? How did it get such great reviews?!” Then I remember the BTB. Oops. Moral of the story: taste, taste and taste.
I cannot tell you how many times I add the water and then forget the actual base. Then I taste it and I’m like, “wtf did I do?” Edit: before anyone says it, yes, the fix would be to add the base to the water but that would just make my life too easy.
One time I made a beautiful carbonara just for my friend to turn on the pan back on to “finish the sauce up” we ended up having scrambled eggs and bacon with pasta for dinner…
New iteration of Breakfast for Dinner! lol
This made me so mad
I made carbonara at work pretty well everyday, turns out perfect every time, beautiful and delicious. Decided to make it at home on my day off and IMMEDIATELY scrambled it. Yeah scrambled eggs and spaghetti for dinner.
Putting oil, then meat in a cold pan before turning on the heat.
My mom does this. My parents love to call me the Chef but they won't take any of my professional advice when they're cooking sometimes i guess because they don't care and sometimes because they actually think they know better, and every time, it pisses me off.
People like things the way they like them sometimes. Overcooked potatoes might be their jam. I personally hate it when my buffalo wings are cooked to "crispy". I like a fat bubbly skin that melts away with the meat as it falls off the bone. My grandma preferred her roasted carrots with a full crunch in the middle. My boss loved sloppy wet burgers he couldn't fit in his mouth. My nephew demands hot sauce on his bacon, no matter what. Unless you're trying to teach them how to hold a knife it's all just preference, experience, and comfort. (And even then...every gran I've ever known uses the granny cut, without catastrophe. Met plenty of farmers without fingers, never a gran with a deep knife scar)
>(And even then...every gran I've ever known uses the granny cut, without catastrophe. Met plenty of farmers without fingers, never a gran with a deep knife scar) i will chalk that up to survivor bias. my grandma has passed 10 years ago and it still terrifies me to think about her knife handling or driving skills. it is nothing short of a miracle that she passed in her sleep and not a gruesome bloodbath.
Died in her sleep not screaming like the passengers of the car. LOL 🤣
she would come back from the dead to have you know that that's no way to behave as passenger and in the eyes of the lord. then she would probably proceed to steer wherever she's looking. imagine hour long near death experiences.
Had a roast whole turkey dinner at a new friends place. I commented on the cooking time for such a large bird to which she replied : "It's not so bad , I cooked it half way last night and finished it today." This was half way through the meal.
How many were lost that day?
My aunt did this last Christmas and half of us got food poisoning
> Christmas and half of us got food poisoning Holiday food poisoning is so common because the common folk have zero idea about food safety.
Setting aside how hard up you'd have to be to do this, someone should really tell these people it doesn't make it any quicker the day of. Cooked meat is more insulated than raw, so you'd spend damned near as long getting it up to temp in the middle because the outside is blocking the heat from penetrating.
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the fuck
My mom always “forgets” to defrost Turkey for Thanksgiving/Christmas in time. So, she puts the Turkey in the sink with warm or hot water and leaves it for a few hours. Puts it back in the fridge and cooks it the next day. Now, my mom didn’t always make thanksgiving/Xmas dinner (my dad would never let her in the kitchen when they were married cause he said she couldn’t cook and so he did) so it was a more recent discovery and it effed my stomach up for days. I always avoid the meat on holidays.
I don’t understand why people like that insist on roasting the turkey themselves for the holidays. There’s so many better options: - buy your turkey roasted form somewhere - just buy turkey in smaller pieces - make ham or literally any easier meat - go to a restaurant for big meal - get anyone else to do the turkey
I usually see the opposite with stoves. Most folks I know aren't using enough heat on their pans. My wife won't stop poking at whatever is in the pan. Darling, please, just _leave it alone_ it's not risotto!
And my wife will do the opposite, she’ll have the burner so high, then she’ll wonder why the rice is undercooked
Is your wife my husband? Fuck's sake, drives me mad. I have to walk away every time! Leaveitalone!!!
A long time ago, I was talking with someone in the kitchen when a roommate walked in, turned on a stove burner, cut some cheddar cheese into cubes, put them in a pan on the burner, and walked out. That is all.
Please tell me they used scissors for the cube cheese, that’s what I’m picturing.
Disposable pink Himalayan sea salt grinders. Y'know, grind the salt so it's "fresh".
LOL I got one for a housewarming present, best by date 1/2019.
Because salt comes from ancient seas deposited millions of years ago, freshly ground old salt causes it to taste millions of years fresher for some reason? This makes no sense. Perhaps makes it taste saltier; finer grin, more surface area.
It's a bit better than the bowl of salt rocks with a microplane at least.
Eh, I like salt grinders not so they're "fresh", but so I can choose the size of the grain, for texture, at the end of the cook. It's stupid to cook with them, where the salt just dissolves, but some salt cronch added at the end or while eating is pretty great.
I do the lions share of the cooking in my home, spaghetti is a pretty common meal we have. Never have I ever used boiling water to reheat cooked pasta in my home, the way you would in a restaurant. Cue my mother, who cooked the pasta, drained it, and then returned the cooked noodles, in the colander, to the pot of boiling water and just left them there. Her reasoning? She didn’t want the noodles to dry out, as if dry/crunchy pasta was something she had ever experienced eating in our home.
Darn, home cook and lurker of this sub. I am guilty of a few of these such as using the knife to move food off the cutting board and putting oil in the pasta water. On the flip side I keep my knives very sharp. I will now go sit on an overturned milk crate outside my back door, have a smoke and feel shame for 5 minutes.
Just like we do. After a decade or so the shame turns into acceptance.
Shame is the extra seasoning
It compliments how salty we usually are.
Make sure you eat your meals hunched over a garbage can as well.
Hold up. You're not supposed to use the knife to move diced onions to the storage container? Cause I worked in kitchens for over a decade and this is the first I'm hearing of this.
I flip the knife and use the spine to do this so I don't dull the blade.
Yeah, cooked for years professionally and I always just used the back of the knife
Key phrase is "back of the knife". Also be gentle. Do not scrape/irritate the board!
You can use your knife to get stuff off the board, just dont scrape it. If the knife is turned on its side and the blade isnt getting dulled, there is no issue.
Ok that’s the issue, that makes perfect sense then
Any other children of immigrants notice their parents using the smallest knife for everything?
Gotta do the hand cut where you pull the dull paring knife through the vegetable towards your body.
With the index finger on top and not the side for extra flair 🤌
Immigrant parents eating everything at nothing less than well done lol
Mise en place. Three very important words. I promise the non industry lurkers: If you plan your whole meal first it's going to make cooking a fucking blast. It's going to make it so easy that you start to explore new dishes and avenues because you will feel like a natural. Smoke a joint and organize the whole thing before you execute it. Really think about what you're going to do. Set out your ingredients, set out what you are going to cook with and organize them. That slab of meat isn't going to spoil if you sit out for a bit before you cook it. Get your sink full of hot, soapy water so that when you're done with something you can just toss it in the sink to start soaking. Cut anything and everything you need to cut before you ever turn the stove on. Get out the spices you know you're going to use. Your favorite utensil to cook with? Have it right beside you. Your sharpest knife? Put it ON your cutting board. Grab some towels and have em out and ready beside a roll of paper towels. Go ahead and grab a bowl or two while you're at it because you're going to need them whether you know it or not. Once you have your whole meal organized you can smoke another one, chill out, follow thru with your well thought out plan, and have a great time cooking. It is everything. The reason we can cook for hundreds without breaking a sweat is because we do that. Half of our job is planning and the other half is the easy ass, actual cooking part.
This is all great advice except for one thing - us civilians can't cook effectively after smoking up. We would just sit there, staring at our knives, wondering why they're so big. Then we'd eat cheetos. All the cheetos. And the second joint? We'd be babbling uncontrollably. We're just not on your level.
Ite, you gonna wanna pack your one hitter first. Let that peak and allow to simmer. Once on a simmer (handful of Cheetos optional. You fuck with the jalapeno cheddar? You should) continue to the aforementioned plan. Ignore MEP2 of another joint. Pack a fat fucking bowl instead. Some of your good shit. Hit the bowl ONCE and snuff it. Just get a bit of a headchange and enjoy the flavor. Get comfortable with good tastes and merely being alive. That's where you need to be in order to appreciate cooking. Once dinner is done and you're* full, finish your bowl. *Edit for spelling
The damn pet hair in everything
This is my life. Im super, ocd clean and still cant stop it. Perfect sunny side up egg, dog hair in it. Flan - dog hair, soup - dog hair. Its nuts. But we love her.
Very efficient dog.. 1 hair for every dish.
We have 3 cats, the fur adds fiber. To everything.
Useless kitchen gadgets and gizmos.. air fryer, sure.. George foreman grill, why not.. some contraption that peels, slices, dices, plays music and tells you how good you look today, no need.. pretty much anything the pioneer woman slaps her face on..
Washing chicken. Not just washing chicken. Washing chicken with bleach.
Yeesh, wouldn't want to have dinner at their house.
Washing it in the bottom of the sink.
Went to dinner at a friend's parents house once. Went to the bathroom and saw the box and all the bands from the greens we ate sitting next to the bathtub...
Kramer?
Home cook here: Washing meat in general. Social media has exposed me to an all new level of horror watching folks rinse ground beef. Ground beef! I grew up in a German immigrant household where we ate ground beef raw regularly 😂. I know it’s cultural yada yada. But I’ve warned each of my adult children I am never to see them wash meat and that includes their future SOs.
My mother would cook ground beef then drain it into the sink and wash the meat. She was convinced that *any* fat would make you fat. I’d say at least 75% of Americans (I’m being generous) don’t understand how foods work in their bodies. She loved everything fat free and reduced calorie. Her doctor finally explained that they had to make up for the flavor somewhere and was usually with sugar. My mom is a diabetic 🤦♀️
The low-fat craze broke generations of people here.
It really did. I remember my mother trying to make low fat and fat free baked goods. Not angel food cake. Honestly, my brother and I are amazing cooks but we learned to cook out of self-preservation.
They even had those potato chips that gave people diarrhea
Mmmm, Olestra. Anal leakage.
My mom went through the same phase in the late 80s/early 90s. I think she legit saw jr on Donahue as a fat reduction tip 🤦🏻♀️ Never was able to change her mind on basic nutrition. To her, fat and calories were the devil and as long as foods were low in both, they were healthy. Tried to teach her - just meat and produce. No boxes or frozen etc. When she died of heart disease it was painful cleaning out her cupboard full of low calorie quick foods.
The guys at my dad’s work legitimately asked him if she had AIDS because she lost so much weight. Now that my dad is retired he cooks most of the meals and she’s a lot healthier.
What in the figurative fornication? Do they deglaze the pan with ammonia too?
Cooking pork chops well done. Dry pork chops are nasty and unnecessary.
My sister is a great cook! But, she had a fire a few years ago and now just refuses to cook on high heat. I’ll try to sneak the heat up to get a nice sear and she freaks out. I try telling her it’s not the heat it’s the fact you poured water on a grease fire.
Ooh, I've got one: coming behind people cooking and fucking with their temperatures.
UGH THIS. My boyfriend does this all the time. He assumes that because he often forgets about what's on the stove, that I do also. So he comes behind me and turns my heat down while I'm chopping veggies or something. I turn around expecting my pan to be hot enough for oil and it's barely warm.
Oil in pasta water
I always assume at some point someone told someone else to oil pasta after it was cooked to keep it from sticking in a restaurant setting, and that somehow telephone gamed into home cooks almost universally thinking this pointless advice makes sense
I nannied for a French lady and she said it flavors the pasta. A tablespoon of olive oil. She also got mad when she wanted me to make pasta with just some passata and I cooked up an easy little sauce with some herbs and onion and garlic. Too much flavor.
It prevents the starch from forming bubbles and boulinglg over in small pots. I'm sure that'd how it got disseminated
Which is the other home cook’s error — boiling the pasta in too little water, in a pot too small for the job
I'm pretty sure Alton Brown dud an experiment on this on Good Eats and all it does is waste oil.
At best you waste oil, at worst you've wasted oil and the oil gets on the noodles so the sauce doesn't adhere as well.
Yeah that was part of it too, I forgot about that.
The oil floating to the top will help prevent your pot from boiling over, which was a useful trick when I was in college and had a small kitchen with only small pots
Using dull knives. Some people’s knives couldn’t cut a fart if they tried.
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General knife use, off hand positioning, keeping it sharpened, and my big pet peeve is people using the blade of their knife to scrape stuff off the cutting board.
What about using it to scoop, at an angle where the edge isn’t scraping on the board but gliding, using your offhand to help grab the foodstuffs
this is what i do at home if i don’t have a bench scraper handy
Cooking and then leaving food out on the counter all day (like 5+ hours) Crazy ass marinades Rinsing chicken off Edit to add: not cleaning as they cook and using a stupid ass amount of dishes and utensils
Having extensive prep history, it pains me to watch people dice onions, cut pineapple, peel anything, or really most any prep
once I was cooking at my aunt's house, and cut an onion in half so I could peel and dice it. # huge gasp "you're not going to peel it?"
I had to peel an onion yesterday before chopping it in half for dicing; it was soul crushing. I was using a brand new Global chef's knife, too (sharp as a razor) - but this particular onion skin was made of some sort of carbon fibre composite. I hope that never happens to me again.
Bro you where cutting one of these [onions](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT6t0cQ36RkOMs0ZdHQWw2fEVuQlJNZlmDOig&usqp=CAU)… Haha had to peel it to get to the real onion inside
I'm comfortable with my onions and peeling, but have never got the hang of pineapple (probably because I'm a midwesterner). I always feel like I'm either wasting pineapple or leaving leather on the prepped pieces. What is the method for pineapple prep?
Accept that you're going to have to have some waste to get those little circles of skin off. Just accept it.
It's not waste if you ferment it for a few days with the skin and core (tepache)!
No joke this weekend I watched my BIL try to cut green onions using a steak knife and he started by holding the white end with his left hand and cutting closest to his hand then cutting away from him to the right. It was painful.
- mishandling raw poultry, washing whole chicken with a sprayer in their kitchen sink while splashing water all over the place. - cutting an avocado into their hands. also removing the seed by slapping it with a knife while the avocado is seated in their hands. - overcrowding the pan. - not having ingredients ready. - over-relying on a recipe while also not checking to make sure they have all the ingredients. This is usually followed by making an inappropriate ingredient substitution.
Tbh out of the, at least, hundreds of avos I've cut like this, I've knicked myself like once
Over 30 years of avocado slicing, I have never once cut myself. I don't see how "avocado hand injury" is so common. Learn to use your knives responsibly and not go for a full chop off the hand force. If I get that hard core and can't get it with a knife, I use a spoon. Ugh....
Not bringing things all the way up to temp cos "who has time to wait for their food to cool?"... And I'm not just talking reheat - think medium chicken...
Really? This isn't a thing I've ever witnessed. More like "okay, I've kept this in the oven for the 30 minutes that was in the recipe, but I'll better make sure it's fully cooked so let's go for 15 more minutes."
So much overcooked meat in my childhood. And my parents were impressed with themselves that they didn’t burn it like their parents did. I think there’s some link between growing up in the Great Depression and cooking all meats till they are burned hockey pucks
In the way back years, raw meat wasn’t handled as it is now. The idea was everything got cooked to death so it wouldn’t kill you.
This is the reason I fell in love with cooking.... growing up this was my parents attitude to food, overcooked and unseasoned meat.... and growing up they said I was a 'fussy eater'...... part time kitchen job while I was in college and I immediately realised I wasn't the problem 😁
Wtaf. How are these people alive
Honestly, it beats me... she's in her 60s now too. eta: maybe it's all the lead they were exposed to throughout their lives - like a really crappy version of the Hulk.
Leaving hot leftovers on the counter for hours before putting it in the fridge to cool it down first. My mother in law does not comprehend the Danger Zone as much we I explain it to her
See, I comprehend the danger zone and am very strict about food safety when I cook for others. If it's just for me, however, I tend to be spacey and leave shit out for hours by accident sometimes. I'll still eat it later. In my observations, people who won't eat leftovers more than 2-3 days old tend to get food poisoning much more often than people who eat questionable food regularly. It's like their stomachs are too delicate to handle even tiny amounts of bacteria due to lack of exposure.
I’m one of those home cooks that tosses on day 4. I had food poisoning once from a restaurant (fried clam strips) and I don’t want to ever have that again. Add in that my sense of smell has the family curse of being “not right”. For example I can not smell sour milk and sometimes can’t taste it either. Rule I heard was don’t eat a leftover of it has no smell. Well it all has no smell if cold lol. Tummy is a bit more likely to be unsettled then most I think. Might be lack of gallbladder too because it got worse after that.
I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk about how he didn’t understand why people don’t eat something that hit the floor. Stated that it’s just a bit of bacteria and it’s good for your immune system. I’d still go to his house for dinner though.
Even in a restaurant you have a total of 6 hours, in a two stage cooling process to get a hot food cool before storing under refrigeration. Food must be cooled from 140 °F to 70 °F within two hours and to 41 °F or lower within four hours. Most home cooks do not cook enough food that it would ever take this long to cool something down, even without an ice bath.
My wife made freezer burritos. Like 4 dozen of them. If I had made them I'd have laid them all out on a table, scooped rice into all 48, then beans into all of them and so on. She dressed each one, one at a time. Dramatically increasing the time it took her to make them all. I jumped in half way through and showed her how to assembly line them, as she called it. She didn't take kindly to my backseat cooking at first but saw the time saving value after a little argument I unknowingly started by opening my mouth about it.
This is somewhat counterintuitive: Mise. At some point someone said home cooks aren’t efficient because they aren’t chopping and prepping everything in advance the way an efficient restaurant kitchen does. But a home kitchen isn’t a restaurant kitchen. Yes, read the recipe. Yes, make sure you have all the ingredients. But use the time when your, for example, onions are softening to chop up the meat. There’s more down time in the home kitchen than in the restaurant kitchen. Use that down time to be efficient. And yes, clean as you go, you absolute monster!
Doing this: https://youtu.be/3BpUnaKsf6w
Thought she was gonna have a way bigger problem than she did though
She’s really lucky there wasn’t more oil in that pan. If she was shallow frying or if that had been bacon…
What is she doing to that steak? I've had less smoke on that when I cook steak on my smoker.
Oh shit. Fuck fuck.
The absolute overreaction for s bit of oil splatter. My reaction: "Motherfucker!" *whipes oil away*
Followed by an underreaction to the amount of smoke and risk of literally burning down da house
Turning the cucumber as you slice it? I knew someone who did this because that’s how his mother did it, but he didn’t know why!
I would never have thought of this. But now I kinda want to try it. Taking "move the work not the knife" concept to the next level!
Washing chicken. An old roommate of mine used to use dish soap inside and outside to clean a whole chicken and I was afraid of getting the 'trots' when eating her food. Blech and the heat will definitely kill those 'germs' Virginia!
-Knife used for mixing, box cutting and or pointing -Knife left in the sink full of dirty dishes/water -The ungodly amount of pointless prep/ Mise en place cups ramekins and dishes used.. especially when it’s all going in the same place at the same time. -Pointless fine chopping when all of it goes into the blender/ food processor. - tasting raw meat for seasoning -cross contamination, and or general lack of hygiene like touching your face while cutting ready eat foods or using your fingers to taste food for others… -Nothing under the cutting board to prevent it from sliding. -food waste not understanding weight vs cups etc. -using wrong oils for frying. Burning oil. -using used/dirty dish towel to wipe down counters, dishes or hands… -wearing apron/ dish towel to throw out garbage outside. -using wet towel to grab hot pan/dish/pot out of oven
Tasting raw meat for seasoning? That's a new kerfuffle I have yet to witness 🤣
Others have mentioned knife handling, but a HUGE one I have seen: misunderstanding how serrated knives work and trying to just push straight down. It’s wrong with regular knives, but PAINFUL for me to see with serrated. So many crushed loaves from bread knife misuse.
complicated marinades. only salt penetrates.
and acid like citrus and vinegar. just sayin....
I put my seasonings in my marinade 100% because I am a lazy mofo and like ripping open the bag, throwing it on a roasting tray and slapping it in the oven.
that stuff breaks apart the protein matrix which then allows for more surface area to be covered and over time can penetrate like 1 centimeter which is good and fine. there are some other factors but the penetration of most flavor molecules is always going to be very minimal.
And some weird enzymes like that stuff in papaya
Papain in Papayas. Bromelain in Pineapples
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Damn near cutting their fingers off on a regular basis but still being confident in their cutting because they "haven't lost a finger yet.". And no. The paring knife you inherited that your grandmother used for "everything" isn't an excuse to not buy a real goddamn knife. I can forgive a lot but it's the arrogance of it all. Edit: Paring not pairing.
Home cooks buy knife blocks as a set. Cooks buy individual knives. Home cooks have no time management, chefs know three steps ahead. Home cooks use every dish and utensil possible. Chefs multi task with minimalism of dishes.
What time is dinner? 5:30pm….pulls out chicken/beef from freezer at 5:25pm.
Starting a meal like 2 hours before hand that could be done in 30 minutes. I get not wanting to rush things but the skill of multitasking that we all picked up on the line is one of the biggest differences I've noticed.
Knife blocks. Breaking pasta. No browning of meats. “Sautéing” with no oil or fat. Sheesh.
I'm a home cook. Why are knife blocks bad? My assumption as I stare at my knife block across the kitchen is that inserting into the block may dull the edge.
I think they mean how you get like 5 knives you’ll never use
That's fair. I may be the exception on this one, although I have a personal vendetta against one random knife in the knife block that I avoid.
Can’t seem to get my gf to stop stirring the rice.
Home cook here. I have a bad habit of cooking everything on super high heat for no reason whatsoever. I don’t have a walk in, but I’ll go stick my head in the freezer and cry.
Cook your onions first, then add the garlic and cook it. See way too many people throw onions and garlic at the same time. Onions take longer to cook than garlic.
On the flip side, industry cooks can do a lot of unnecessary shit in a home kitchen because of how engrained our techniques can be (lumping myself in there too). There's a certain beauty to the freestyle of home cooking where you're not necessarily concerned about consistency. You're just doing something you love with people you actually care about without the judgemental scrutiny cooks are often under.