Whats insane to me is how many people can’t recognize that something is undersalted. I taste, think “needs salt,” theyre like “noooo dont you know sodium is bad for you nooooooooooo” and then i salt my own portion, bid them to try, and their eyes pop up like. How the hell haven’t you noticed what undersalted tastes like by your mid 20s?
i love her very very much but....my mom is like this...& even though she's a very smart woman who, if asked the question abstractly, will give the correct answer to stuff like "do solutes change the boiling and freezing point of a liquid? will a salty solution take time to diffuse through a spongy solidish matrix with liquid in it? will osmotic pressure draw water from cells?" she will always ask me to wait until the end of my cooking to add salt to a dish--although that can mess up the temperature food boils at or make things not freeze right, or can mean the meat is underbrined and everyone's salting more at the table, or that the vegetables being served are unnecessarily watery and weepy. recently she made a cucumber & onion salad that she salted at the beginning & she was like "it makes the cucumbers less weepy & the onion less sharp, & when you rinse the salted veggies before you dress them, most of the salt is just rinsed away!" i was like....you're right....you're 100% right....
This is genuinely such pleasant, useful advice. Home cooking tends to be more cost effective, healthful, but can also be pleasurable ! I have POTS so medically I need a ton of salt so I’m alwayyyssss crazy salting my food and it’s so much more satisfying than eating a bag of high sodium chips when I’m dizzy
I think this is a really really really good heuristic
My thought which isn’t really an addition. Just sort of… a side comment… is the biggest thing to learn about cooking is that once you make a few things that come out OK it shouldn’t take you long to realize:
It’s pretty hard to REALLY screw up once you can intuit it even a little
And that doesn’t take long!
I feel like people really psych themselves out
Cooking is pretty easy
Like cooking amazing is hard
But cooking well enough for basic day to day life is pretty simple tbh
While most store-bought or pick-up prepared food is pretty bad for you (let alone take-out), restaurant food can also be a problem. Heavy cream, butter and other fats are often what makes restaurant food delicious and are used in quantities that would freak you out. Of course, many, many recipes for home-cooked meals also rely on these ingredients along with carbs, salt and cheese. Someone once told me to look at food with the thought “how would that look on me.”
I’m trying to migrate to meals where the main is small but, um, “delicious” but there are lots of small healthier sides as in Japanese, Korean and some South American cuisines with fewer carbs. This can be some effort (or expensive if you buy things like prepared kimchi). Maybe this would be easier with better meal planning (i.e,, pickling, freezing prepared carb alternatives, etc.)
it's like they say - the problem isn't that we don't know enough, it's that what we know is wrong. with nutrition this is especially true. our ancestors were healthy and strong eating butter and cream and potatoes, but until the mid 19th-century when lard producers began adulterating their product with cottonseed oil, the amount of omega-six fatty acids in the food supply was small.
People often cook things at home that are far worse for you than the much-maligned mcdonald's cheeseburger.
I enjoy cooking, it helps me slow my brain down from a day of designing and coding. It also doesn't have to take a lot of time, I can whip up a stir fry in 15 minutes or less. Then again I was brought up in a household where both my parents cooked. Recently I have been trying to get an American zoomer friend in Florida to buy a grill to be more healthy, rather than pay for overpriced slop called a Baconator. He's a work in progress. I'm glad that I'm not the only one out here trying to turn the tide on the industrial slop that most call food, keep it up!
PS Make your students buy and read-
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking
I feel so called out! Everything about this post describes me. I make extremely spartan meals at home, and then eat out a lot. During the times when I can stick to not eating out, I lose tons of weight (I'm down like 110 lbs from my highest point, and I've kept it off for like twelve years), but then...I lose interest, because how many fruits and nuts do I really want to eat in a week! I'm not a bat! At some point I want to eat people food!
Whats insane to me is how many people can’t recognize that something is undersalted. I taste, think “needs salt,” theyre like “noooo dont you know sodium is bad for you nooooooooooo” and then i salt my own portion, bid them to try, and their eyes pop up like. How the hell haven’t you noticed what undersalted tastes like by your mid 20s?
i love her very very much but....my mom is like this...& even though she's a very smart woman who, if asked the question abstractly, will give the correct answer to stuff like "do solutes change the boiling and freezing point of a liquid? will a salty solution take time to diffuse through a spongy solidish matrix with liquid in it? will osmotic pressure draw water from cells?" she will always ask me to wait until the end of my cooking to add salt to a dish--although that can mess up the temperature food boils at or make things not freeze right, or can mean the meat is underbrined and everyone's salting more at the table, or that the vegetables being served are unnecessarily watery and weepy. recently she made a cucumber & onion salad that she salted at the beginning & she was like "it makes the cucumbers less weepy & the onion less sharp, & when you rinse the salted veggies before you dress them, most of the salt is just rinsed away!" i was like....you're right....you're 100% right....
This is genuinely such pleasant, useful advice. Home cooking tends to be more cost effective, healthful, but can also be pleasurable ! I have POTS so medically I need a ton of salt so I’m alwayyyssss crazy salting my food and it’s so much more satisfying than eating a bag of high sodium chips when I’m dizzy
don’t have POTS but kinda prefer how my face looks when i’m salted out of my gourd so, same
it's free fillers
I think this is a really really really good heuristic
My thought which isn’t really an addition. Just sort of… a side comment… is the biggest thing to learn about cooking is that once you make a few things that come out OK it shouldn’t take you long to realize:
It’s pretty hard to REALLY screw up once you can intuit it even a little
And that doesn’t take long!
I feel like people really psych themselves out
Cooking is pretty easy
Like cooking amazing is hard
But cooking well enough for basic day to day life is pretty simple tbh
While most store-bought or pick-up prepared food is pretty bad for you (let alone take-out), restaurant food can also be a problem. Heavy cream, butter and other fats are often what makes restaurant food delicious and are used in quantities that would freak you out. Of course, many, many recipes for home-cooked meals also rely on these ingredients along with carbs, salt and cheese. Someone once told me to look at food with the thought “how would that look on me.”
I’m trying to migrate to meals where the main is small but, um, “delicious” but there are lots of small healthier sides as in Japanese, Korean and some South American cuisines with fewer carbs. This can be some effort (or expensive if you buy things like prepared kimchi). Maybe this would be easier with better meal planning (i.e,, pickling, freezing prepared carb alternatives, etc.)
it's like they say - the problem isn't that we don't know enough, it's that what we know is wrong. with nutrition this is especially true. our ancestors were healthy and strong eating butter and cream and potatoes, but until the mid 19th-century when lard producers began adulterating their product with cottonseed oil, the amount of omega-six fatty acids in the food supply was small.
People often cook things at home that are far worse for you than the much-maligned mcdonald's cheeseburger.
I enjoy cooking, it helps me slow my brain down from a day of designing and coding. It also doesn't have to take a lot of time, I can whip up a stir fry in 15 minutes or less. Then again I was brought up in a household where both my parents cooked. Recently I have been trying to get an American zoomer friend in Florida to buy a grill to be more healthy, rather than pay for overpriced slop called a Baconator. He's a work in progress. I'm glad that I'm not the only one out here trying to turn the tide on the industrial slop that most call food, keep it up!
PS Make your students buy and read-
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking
https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/1476753830/
I feel so called out! Everything about this post describes me. I make extremely spartan meals at home, and then eat out a lot. During the times when I can stick to not eating out, I lose tons of weight (I'm down like 110 lbs from my highest point, and I've kept it off for like twelve years), but then...I lose interest, because how many fruits and nuts do I really want to eat in a week! I'm not a bat! At some point I want to eat people food!
yessss....eat people food....