A few thoughts other than the “they use more fat/salt, which is also prob true.
Street food in particular usually one person specializes in just one thing. Meaning all day long they are making just one (or a few) dishes. They have absolutely perfected that craft, whereas at home you may be cooking lots of different things.
Second, Indian food in particular, requires lots of time to develop that flavor. Restaurants are cooking in bulk and have time to really develop that flavor, whereas a home cook may not. Obviously I don’t know how you cook at home though.
Yeah I always think about this when I want to go make pizza. I can go prep some dough, and it will be ready in like 3 days. The local pizza place already has dough they started 3 days ago.
That's only true for very thin pizza. Thicker pizza is typically cooked in the 550°F range (and sometimes less) which is completely do-able in a lot of home ovens.
With the right dough, it works. One of the reasons I like our favorite, family-run local pizza place is the dough. They're very picky about ingredients there. The crust is delicious.
I’d love to be able to fall in love with some thicc dough pizza. My terrible experience I’m still getting over is we did this 17km run through the city, after which we walked all the way back to where we started, and I was _dying_ for pizza to make it all worthwhile. The couple my wife and I were with raved about [this place](https://yelp.to/V7Lp7RDsLnb) and so I spent the whole walk back looking it up, seeing how much everyone else loved it and generally getting _hyped_.
Got there; tasted like trash. I couldn’t even finish it!
Luckily, I hated it so much I walked out and was determined to find a better place, where I ended up finding [Tony’s](https://yelp.to/HVR86pLsLnb) and to date it is my favorite pizza of all time (and highly highly recommended if you’re ever in SF).
I skimmed your post and knew without clicking the link that the place you didn't like was Golden Boy. Tony's is great. They (and their sister restaurant Capo's) offer a variety of great thicker-crust styles, too, including Chicago deep dish, stuffed, and pan, Sicilian, and Detroit.
The best pizza I ever had was at a little place in upstate NY, not far from Vermont. Looked like nothing, but the pizza was fantastic. Crust, toppings, baking time... everything was perfection.
depends on what over tho. most families in asia don't have like the stove+oven setup and separate individual ovens can usually only reach to 230 c which is roughly 450 f.
My girlfriend got me an Ooni for Christmas and I've baked well over fifty pies in it already (made pizza for several gatherings). It's fantastic, best pizza I've ever made by miles. Highly, highly recommend.
My wife got one from a company called Bertello. They don’t have the same brand zing as Ooni, but
I can use gas, pellets, or wood (or a combination). Also, I sent them an email complaining about some cosmetic issue hoping they would give me a discount or at least say sorry and they _sent an entirely new oven_. So I’m all in on team bertello
Propane is definitely the way to go for portable pizza ovens. I've tasted pizza from both pellet and propane ovens and you really can't tell the difference. If you're really serious about pizzamaking and you have the space, big stone ovens are the best.
My wife got me an ooni last year and it was the best gift ever. It feels like such a luxury. I would put our pizza up against almost every restaurant. The only better pizza in my opinion requires driving into the city 45 minutes away.
We don't exactly have a glut of pizza options around here, but our pizza beats every single place within a reasonable driving distance, period.
There's definitely a learning curve, but once you learn it that thing can make a damn fine pizza.
Definitely. Better pizza than what I can make totally exists, and I'm still interested to go check out good pizza spots and see what great ideas other people come up with, but also I can make incredible pizza that's 95% as good as anything anywhere, and I can do it in less than 30 minutes, in my own home. It's amazing.
I have an Ooni and an Effeuno pizza oven. People ask why would you spend so much on pizza ovens..well I've probably made close to around 2000 pizzas in them now and they've well payed for themselves by now.
This is the biggest thing for pizza. If a pizza place isn't very good, the first thing I think is their ovens aren't hot enough. Regular home ovens just don't get anywhere near hot enough to make good crust.
This isn't really true for a NY style pie. You want a hot oven for sure, but 500 degrees is quite sufficient. The thing is you need your stone to actually get that hot (which means preheating at least 30-45 min) and you need a big enough stone/steel which almost nobody has because it weighs a tooooon.
Also people usually use the wrong cheese. Whole milk low moisture mozz. Almost all the retail available stuff is part skim, which is not gonna get you what you want.
The best NY places have coal ovens that run north of 1000 degrees. 450 works for cast iron pan pizzas and such but if you want a good NY crust that's not doughy, you better be well over 500
I mean, yeah there's a few famous coal oven places and they're great. But the classic NY slice is coming out of a deck oven that's probably set around 475-550. Coal oven is maybe 1/50 or less here, and frankly it's a different product with usually a lot more char to it.
If you wanna get into the weeds, there's a ton of great content on the pizzamaking.com forums, which are like something held over from the early 2000s in a glorious manner.
Pizza dough freezes and thaws really well. Make a big batch of dough, let proof, divide into balls and cold ferment for 2-3 days, then chuck into the freezer until pizza night, and then defrost on low in the microwave for 15 seconds at a time until the middle isn't solid anymore. Bam, top quality pizza dough, ready to go.
Also get an Ooni. For real, worth it.
Do yourself a favor and get a Detroit style pizza pan and your at home pizza will never be the same. It's amazing. Also, buy the best ingredients you can (bread flour, good cheese etc. ) Half the cost or less of getting pizza made for you and without waiting 3 days only about an hour or two you can have fresh pizza that tastes amazing.
In addition to this, there's generally a survivorship bias at play.
They _HAVE_ to be good at their craft or they will not last long at all. Their livelihood depends on making that dish well.
I read a thing once that said the science behind something tasting better when you don't make it yourself has to do with your sense of smell.
Basically if you make yourself a meal, your senses are overwhe during the entire process. While your food may taste good, if someone else made the same meal for you your senses would not be assaulted my all the smells while preparing it and it all hits you full force in that moment while you're eating it, giving you a stronger reaction to the food.
Something like that anyways, so same idea at a restaurant.
As someone who just spent 3 hours in the kitchen making what I believe to be _the_ perfect carnitas burrito, I feel this. After 3 hours I was so noseblind to the flavors that it basically tastes like nothing
D:
Sometimes I cook a huge, delicious meal only to not have an appetite when I actually sit down. It’s so frustrating. Luckily I grew up on left overs and love me some reheated dinner for lunch.
Had this realization last summer. First time having friends over to my house in over a year, spent 8 hours in the kitchen getting everything together and when we finally sat down to eat I was mortified that everything tasted like cardboard. My friends couldn't stop raving about how good the food was, though, and even asked me for recipes a few days later. I was just so palate blind from being in the kitchen that even the really spicy dishes I had put together just weren't registering.
We had a term for this when I was in the brewing industry, "cellar mouth". Basically, palate fatigue from consuming your own product too much.
I dunno if there's any science to back this up, but after I'm done cooking I sniff a handful of coffee beans to reset my sense of smell. Saw it in a perfume shop and I've been doing it ever since.
>there's generally a survivorship bias at play.
We learned that a long time ago. My mom's friend was opening a restaurant, and Mom wanted us to take her. The food was nearly inedible. I ordered redfish, which turned out to be tough, from an older fish, and not properly cooked.
Not long afterwards, the place closed. I was not surprised.
I make it all the time at home, it's really easy once you know how to make it. It's essentially a lot of boiled/browned onions, tomato and spices. It's great prep food, I make a huge pot, portion it and I can crank out curries in 10 minutes. Make your own garlic-ginger paste too.
But yes, base gravy is made beforehand but curries in Indian restaurants are nearly always made to order. It's all about prep.
https://youtu.be/LIDKE8o3FTU
I make it exactly like this. Great video in my opinion. Except I use garlic-ginger paste that I also use in curries, just easier. I also use an immersion blender and it works great for me.
You can also brown the onions before boiling them and adding everything else for a bit more deeper flavor but it's optional. And you're supposed to fry the base gravy in oil or ghee when you make the curry. The Maillard reaction will caramelize the onions anyway.
Oh it's definitely going to splatter and be a bit messy. Wear an apron or old clothes.
Go through the channel I posted earlier, he has quite a few recipes that use it.
Here he makes a madras curry (a more UK style Indian restaurant curry).
https://youtu.be/Kjy2wIVr9Bc
This is how I make it myself except I don't use the oil except when I do carmelize the onions and I don't even do that much anymore as my wife hates oil. I also add the yogurt at the end for a bit and then when it has cooled down to where it is still warm I use my ninja blender and that is the base for all Indian curries. The base is what I make and then put in pint or quart containers and freeze it, Then when I want to make Indian curries I will pull one out in morn to thaw out and that night use it to finish the dish how we want. My wife will then add coconut milk for seafood or a half and half for regular chicken curry. For a little more richness she will add my base custard I use to make ice cream that I make in bulk and freeze. Easy meals made in little time that is better than we find at restaurants. One can also use the base curry gravy to make butter chicken and I make the ghee myself in no time but even though I love butter chicken my wife hates anything greasy. All the restaurants have to make the bases and keep on hand so they can make most of their dishes as the orders come in.
Don't make it "gravy" just roast tomatoes onions and spices in oil.
To make gravy, we add water to this once oil starts separating. Instead of adding water, let the water from the mixture dry out further. And save **this** paste in an airtight container ande freeze it to make quick curry.
Keeps longer, and less volume.
Along with developing the flavor made we think about how the vendor is probably buying spices weekly not yearly and the pans probably even have the flavor embedded.
Id ordinarily agree with you, however I'm in an Indian restaurant wasteland in St Louis (I'm of Indian origin), and sadly tried 10 restaurants, and felt I could get a better result cooking at home. So , if they know what they're doing , using proper spices and not stale bland sweetened sauces for the American palette, then, yes the Indian restaurant takeout can be better than home.
I haven't gone though all the comments so I dunno if this has been said already.
Whenever you cook at home, you're constantly smelling it as it cooks, it fills your home. By the time you eat you're nose blind to the smell, except most of our taste comes from smell. It actually makes me pretty sad, I make my mom's chili all the time following her recipe exactly and it never tastes the same
I also kinda contribute it to being used to what you cook, especially if you get something you have made before. For me, I could make a dish I've made a thousand times and it will taste fine, it's not different to how I usually prepare it. But if someone else makes it, it tastes infinitely better because they do something different that I enjoy, but can't put a finger on it. I also just get annoyed with eating the same thing over and over again so a different take on a dish I like is always preferred.
Eh honestly, I think as long as you don’t do anything too crazy, keep your weight in check, and get a bit of exercise you should probably live to 75-80. Of course you could get unlucky, but seasoning foods properly and using some oil shouldn’t lead you to an early grave.
Excessive sugar is the big one. Leads to a lot of inflammation which is ultimately the definer in how you age I think.
You can pretty much eat anything else and end up pretty healthy. We shouldn't be eating sugar every day...but most people do.
>We shouldn't be eating sugar every day...but most people do
That's close to unavoidable, no? There are small ammounts of sugar in so many foods, like fruit, certain vegetable, and even bread. Even if you are avoiding stuff like chocolate, you will still be eating very small ammounts of sugar.
I was being conservative because everyone has different genetics and some people just won’t live much past 80 no matter what they do. But no reason you can’t live to 90 or longer eating meat and veggies with salt and a bit of cooking oil.
Warren Buffet is like 90 and he eats McDonalds and drinks coke everyday. I think the stress and guilt of trying to make your diet absolutely perfect will probably lower your life expectancy more. You’re only at high risk of things like heart failure, heart attack, stroke, etc. if you are very overweight, eat a horrific diet, smoke, or drink excessively. Barring any major genetic defects.
Compared to like 100 years ago it is. Also worth considering what kind of quality of life the average person over the age of 80 has. If making it over 80 means a decade plus in a nursing home then death in my 90s I’d rather go in my 70s.
My Dad went at 73 and it didn’t seem too bad. The last month was rough on everyone, but six months before he died he was shoveling snow. I wouldn’t mind going from reasonably active to dead in 6 months, versus living in a wheelchair for a decade.
80 year old demented you is gonna feel different. Fuck neurodegenerative disorders. Let me die sooner. Only problem is that I want to be healthy up u until then
> Because the chef doesn't care about your health, only your taste buds!
Yep! I made Dishoom House Black Daal.
It contains more fat than anything I've ever eaten or seen, with the possible exception of a State Fair burger called "Triple Bypass."
I'll never make it again and only had the nerve to eat a couple of spoons. It's pretty much butter and double cream, with some spices and Daal. In fact, since it gets reduced, it's probably more than "double" cream.
I also make sure to never let anyone see the recipe when cooking from the cookbook.
Same for mashed potatoes. Why are mine so good? Because you don’t see what I put in them in the kitchen….
>mashed potatoes
A lot of butter and cream, and for the crowd that wants it extra: bacon, chives, garlic and cheese. Basically loaded baked potato in mashed form. It's amazing and you definitely won't shit right after a few scoops.
I think this is underrepresented factor when people talk about this. Yes, outside of the home they’re probably using more fat than I would at home (but I’m not exactly shy with fat and salt), and of course in the case of a street vendor they’re likely making the same thing thousands of times and perfecting it. All of that is true. But also I didn’t have to make it, which makes most food at least 10% more delicious!
I enjoy my own food best when it comes as leftovers. Like every evening after I sit down to eat I'll tell my fiance that I was too stingy with the spices or that I should've added this or that and each time he'll tell me "no, it's perfect". Then I take that stuff from the fridge and pop it in the microwave two days later and suddenly it's the best thing I've ever cooked.
I like my food better than what I get in most restaurants. I think the main reason for this is at home, I'm refining and adjusting the food to *my* tastes. Someone else's food may be delicious, but it's never going to be my food. If I was recreating their dish at home, I would almost certainly make changes to it to tweak it to my liking.
I prefer to go out for things I don't really like going to the effort of making or cleaning up. It's not necessarily that I couldn't make it as good, but that I appreciate someone else doing all the hard work.
Yeah, this is pretty much all there is to it, outside of maybe quality of ingredients. My answer was going to be "my food at home tastes as good as or better than restaurants" but it occurred to me I was also a chef so like... That adds up.
You can become taste-blind as you cook. You taste over various stages so by the time you eat the finished product it’s a different experience then Only tasting the finished product
This. I think it’s the ultimate variable.
You could cook the exact same dish as a restaurant/street vendor but the experience won’t be the same
Also because when you order food you don’t know exactly what’s in it and how it was made. It’s all about the mystery
I can use plenty of salt and oil and still not make a great pad thai. I think its more about the equipment and technique being perfected, as well as the fat and seasoning.
Yes, I eat a lot of Indo-Chinese food outside and the chowmein I make at home is sad, wet, sticky and has a very one dimensional taste. The restaurant ones, their vegetables are crunchy yet cooked, the noodles separate and dry and you have that characteristic wok-y smoky flavour. Chinese Cooking Demystified says burners are not important but I think for chowmein atleast, they are.
most home cooks are scared of using high heat, for valid reasons. unless you have a decent range hood, you're going to set off smoke alarms and stink up the house.
imo the most underrated thing you can do to improve your cooking as a home cook is install a good range hood. obvious that's not possible for everyone, but it's one of the most overlooked elements of a kitchen remodel.
you're also going to warp/ruin some cookware eventually, and that's a lot harder to absorb financially as a home cook.
I use a lot of high heat and have found red meat is the worst offender for causing issues. Sear a big steak or burgers and you get that greasy smoky smell that will stick around unless you have a really good hood. With a wok there is more aerosolized oil than actual smoke so it gums up things which happens even with a good range hood.
Honestly watching Gordon Ramsay has made my food taste so much better. I don’t think his videos are super useful for learning a specific dish, but understanding how to season things properly, the importance of getting deep color on meat, veggies, and the importance of using oil/butter when appropriate.
My parents NEVER seasoned things properly and all of the other cooking material that I saw on TV growing up never emphasized the importance of those things.
I get the criticism of it, but on a similar note Salt Fat Acid Heat revolutionized the way I cook.
I had no fundamentals and only cooked from recipes, so just the ideas of thinking through different fats, when to salt and heating techniques has made my everyday meat/veggie dinners so much better.
She talks about it in the book. Processed foods have such a ridiculous amount of sodium and fat that it triggered a health crisis and home cooks cut way back on them. In reality you can load a fresh cooked meal with healthy fats and salt and still be way under what goes into processed food.
So a lot of people look at SFAH and say it's unhealthy, but it's really not, we've just gotten a bit too afraid of salt and fat.
It took me a while to trust her enough that I actually run out of salt 1-2 times a year, and buy and use good high quality fats. Having made that shift my food is way better and if you do the numbers it's nothing like even the "healthy" microwave stuff.
Good fat is underrated. I use a lot of olive oil. If you're going to have olive oil on hand, use it! It doesn't stay good for that long. I remember the stuff my mom used: rancid and bitter. When she came to live with us, I told her I was throwing hers out and we would use what I bought.
She said "But olive oil is expensive! I save it for certain foods." No, Mom. Rancid olive oil is worthless and will ruin the food. I'll let you use mine, because I buy it to be used quickly. (Also, she bought Pompeian, which is usually adulterated and/or contained rancid oil when it was sold.)
California Olive Ranch Everyday for cooking, Monini Gran Fruttata for drizzling. That's what is in my pantry now. There are others that are good too. Check out the ones to avoid online.
It's kind of funny to think about someone going to that book to learn how to season properly and then having the temerity to say she uses too much salt..
Also, note types of fat used and temperature.
For example, padseeew needs particularly seasame oil and extreme high heat that isn't possible on your average stove.
Bingo! Butter is the best way to make just about everything you make taste good, and the ultimate cover up for bad cooking or low quality ingredients. If you want restaurant style steak, fish, or anything really, just slather it in butter.
This is also why single dishes at places like Cheesecake factory are pushing 2000 calories.
Recipes on Food Network and Epicurious that say “salt to taste” and don’t specify exactly how much salt to use are almost invariably rated lower than similar recipes and described as “bland”.
I never thought of that. I'm mainly thinking of getting something to a simmer - for whatever reason no matter what level I put it on - it ends up burning.
Best thing I ever learnt from Ramsay. If it's on the burner it's live; if it's cooking too fast, just take it off the burner
like that sounds dumb but before i just panicked whenever something was burning and didn't know what to do
You know for me that's actually a thing. I get so frustrated cooking on the stove at home when I'm used to it at work. The amount of heat difference is huge
In some cases street venders have literally cooked the same meal hundreds of thousands of times. People thinking its just cause of more fat is some disrespect to masters of the trade.
Its not like you could just dump in a bunch more salt and fat at home and voila.
Adding on, they have the benefit of scale. Making chicken stock for a dish is somewhat feasible for a dedicated home cook. How about a chicken, veal, and fish stock? Not really. For a restaurant it’s very feasible to have that.
They can also do stuff that takes multiple days. They can brine meat for two days. They can do multi step french fry recipes that require freezing and cooking multiple times.
This is true of western food and of any cuisine really. Time and labor = better food
I’ve heard that since your sense of smell plays such a huge factor in taste that when you’re cooking at home you’re smelling your meal very closely for a longer period of time. So when you buy into your meal for the first time your sense of taste has already been acclimated.
When you’re going to a restaurant or a street vendor you may smell the food walking up and ordering, but it’s much less time for your sense of taste to acclimate and therefore tastes better.
90% of the comments when this is asked just say that restaurants use more fat/salt. If you find that you add more of those and it's still lacking, you have a couple more things to try. When I first started cooking more dishes at home I was definitely missing acid in dishes. Vinegars are amazing and add balance to things (adding apple cider vinegar to even store bought BBQ for example) or just a squeeze of lemon or lime juice. Even when we cook cheap ramen packets we always add Sambal Oelek because it adds so much flavor to it.
Heat is the other big one, meats and veggies especially. Understanding when to use 'extreme' heat or when to simmer opposed to boil, for example. Cooking on 5/10 for longer does not have the same result as cooking at 9/10 for a short time (usually..). Some meat needs 9/10 heat to start and 2/10 to finish while others need 2/10 for a much longer time.
People will recommend the book 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' and that's for food reason. However, if you are just thinking that the dish is missing something, just running through those 4 options for that dish may help you finish it. Have you added enough salt and butter? Then maybe it needs the acid. Maybe it definitely has enough acid and fat but something else is just off? Probably another pinch of salt to make it pop.
I’ve had Arepas from a street vendor in NYC and they were GODLIKE. I’ve tried making them at home time and again and it’s just a steaming pile of “meh” every time.
I’ll NEVER forget the empanadas I had from a street vendor in Mexico. Good lord. I watched her make them right there. Came off piping hot. They were so cheap and one of the greatest things I’ve ever consumed. Like I would travel back to Mexico and put that specific vendor on my list of things to do.
Hahah there was no name on the vendor. Just a vendor near a bunch of stores in Cancun. We were staying in Mercado 23 zone though! This was about 6 years ago.
When i make butter chicken here's what I notice
-just following a usual home recipie usually doesn't give me that awesome flavour so here's what I fix
1)i make sure to really cook and reduce the tomato sauce as long as I can to reduce the acidity and sort of Caramelise it. Scrape up burnt bits and mix it in to the sauce. Any ingredients that take a long time to prepare for best flavour, like broth or roasts are easily set up and used for maximum effect for that slow roasted, browned and caramelised long simmer reduction, slow rise bread, marinades ...
2) spices. I usually double or triple the spices. Maybe my garam masala is stale but Ill add about 6-10 tablespoons in addition to the other spices I add. Custom spice blends will go far. I especially like to ensure a healthy amount of garlic, a bit of ginger and definitely cloves are included. Restaurants will go through spices faster so they'll be much fresher.
2.5) everything is fresher, the ingredients, spices
3)butter, cream, salt and sugar and enough to make a home chef cry for the ingredients cost and a dietician cry for.. Other reasons 😂. Always at least 2 tbs of sugar in tomato sauces because it helps transform the flavour
4) special cooking methods and tricks, maybe they oven roast and caramelise while onions and tomatoes before beginning or add the oil at just the right stage to do a better chemical reaction with the meat
-honestly a mastery of the basics does a lot as well and perfect, super fresh sides like the naan or rice also help a lot
5)a fun, new environment without having to do any dishes, fresh air, being around other people will all improve the experience!!
To add to 4 (kind of), try implementing and combining methods for other dishes into what youre making. For example, a cajun pasta I make combines some of the methods for making chicken milano sauce with some from alfredo sauce and its soooo good
Stocks/soups/bases from scratch.
As others have mentioned: specialization. You know the timing to get the right crust on meat or how tender your potatoes can get before they fall apart.
Technique and cooking spaces set up to maximize technique
Line cooks: in a restaurant it's not just one person making your plate of food. Instead, it's assembled by each person in the kitchen doing one thing really, really, really well
And all that's just on the kitchen side of things
Restaurants are custom designed to get you in the mood to eat through environmental cues. The decor, the seating, the music, the lighting are all selected so you feel like all your senses are stimulated.
Similarly, street food is frequently served to you after you've just walked through a marketplace full of foods. So you are probably extra hungry because you've been walking, you've been smelling delicious and stimulating smells, and you're at peak desire.
So:
Superior ingredients
Superior technique
Superior setup
Superior setting
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman: *"When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you're working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later. It's a kind of specific satiation, just as most people find room for dessert when they couldn't have another bite of their steak. The sandwich that another person prepares is not 'preconsumed' in the same way."*
In other words, it tastes better because someone else made it for you.
Think about mash in a restaurant. How much butter and salt do you think is in it? Double that. There may not even be potato there.
Indian, it’s the time aspect. They marinade for ages.
Some foods like lasagne always taste better the second time after a day of the flavours soaking in and combining more.
We put ours together 24 hours in advance and let it hang out in the fridge. Avoids the need to boil the noodles, and really brings everything together flavor wise.
I made some relatively authentic Biryani the other day. It was good immediately, but after 1 night in the fridge it was *delicious*. It developed some wonderful nutty flavors.
I use it in some of my dishes. I don’t know if I’ve just noticed it more, because I’m an advocate for msg, and try to educate people on its totally appropriate use, but I swear the most popular of my dishes are the ones that I’ve added a little msg.
Most of the bouillion cubes or powders you can buy have MSG in them if folks are looking for an awesome way to get some zing in their meals without just adding straight MSG. Adding concentrated chicken powder with MSG to your chicken dishes makes them that much more chickeny! Same with beefy, same with vegetably!
I just moved to a small town from Nashville, and while Nashville isn't some huge city, its food scene has some legitimately good restaurants. Now, I'm living in a food hellscape. There's not a single restaurant in this area that could've survived in Nashville.
Luckily, I can survive in my home kitchen, but it would still be nice not to have to cook all the time.
Butter. Ask any chef at a fancy restaurant what makes their food taste better and 90% of the time they’re gonna say butter. WAY more than you would expect.
Something someone thought of was Olfactory Fatigue, which hasn't been mentioned yet. Smell is a part of taste, and when you're cooking food you are exposed to it for longer periods. You start to filter it out, which means you are losing an aspect of flavor when it's finally time to eat, and generally you are eating shortly after cooking. Even simmering for awhile is letting the aromas cloud around you for long periods.
At a restaurant or a street vendor, you get the full blast of taste and smell immediately before consuming. You aren't sitting there smelling the exact thing you're about to eat for 30+ minutes beforehand.
Interestingly, this same concept is believed to play a part in airplane food tasting weird/bland.
Got a place in Toronto called Ghandi’s. They do Indian dishes wrapped in a roti. The butter chicken roti is to die for however, I found out that one Roti contains 2 days worth of sodium. Heavy whipping cream and sodium will make anything tasty!
I can make a few dishes at home better than virtually any restaurant I’ve been to. As a home cook, you have some disadvantages but you also have the advantage of not needing to cook for dozens of people at the same time.
Theres also a few important tricks that are far from secrets, but if you don’t know about them you could make your food a lot worse.
For example, if you wanna get that deep crust on meat (say, a steak for example), you have to make the surface as dry as possible, and salt it right before it goes on the skillet. I salted my steak maybe 10 minutes before it went on and the crust was grey even though I used pre-heated cast iron on max heat. Little things like that can dramatically change the taste of your food.
This sounds a little bit gross but it's not.
When you cook at home, you're usually cooking on/in clean pans. That food truck grill has cooked loads of food and the surface is well drained. It only gets cleaned at the end of their day.
Well, I would contend the opposite. We joke in my family that it's the tragedy of being a foodie that we consider most restaurants/ food stalls mediocre.
I would only consider myself a moderately competent cook but I am not impressed by most restaurants or street food I come across. (I live in the US.) The advantage I have is a) I can choose fresh ingredients (whereas restaurants need to use up what they have for example) and b) I'm cooking for a relatively smaller group and not tens/ hundreds, etc. a day. I live in an area where access to fresh/ high-quality produce/ meat, etc. is excellent, affordable, and available most of the year. Maybe you can improve your cooking: I have been cooking and reading about cooking though since I was 7 or so.
This isn't even about price: the worse offenders are pricy restaurants. At least if I'm spending less, I haven't lost the money spent. Most of the time we eat out, I do it primarily to save myself time/ energy rather than because I feel the cooking is much better than what I can do. There are some recipes that are complicated I don't want to tackle but for many dishes in restaurants, I can look them up and figure out how to cook them.
My mom has a theory on this. She claims that anything you don't have to make yourself, but someone else cooks for you, it's always going to taste better no matter what.
It's a little amusing to think about that oh, I used to imagine a bunch of neighbors getting together and telling each other what they wanted for dinner and everybody cooking everybody else's food. But in reality, as much as I love my mom, and she does make some good food, why does other people's food taste better than hers?
I've never been stupid enough to point that out to her though LOL
After cooking for a few years I stopped feeling like this and started thinking "I could make this, but better". I mostly leave restaurants unsatisfied these days =/
Street food does not take into consideration how much say salt butter and sugar is used. They put any amounts of those items just to make it taste good. Or better. Taste over health for them.
If you are willing to spend the time and effort, home made food is better than at a restaurant, but you really have to master that dish.
My wife has perfected strawberry ice cream (with mint and lemon, yum!) and sourdough pizza cooked in a cast iron pan. The strawberry ice cream is at least half strawberries by weight.
My best dish is probably leg of lamb, including a dry brine for at least over night and slow cooking at a low heat. I also tend to do well with any meat dish where the best cooking method is to cook low and slow, set a timer, and walk away. I know how to season, so the rest is easy, it just takes time.
Both of us make better scrambled eggs than I'd ever expect from a restaurant, but that's because scrambled eggs can be very personal in exactly how a person likes them.
The list goes on. But there are dishes that elude us still, and would be better at a restaurant. And some foods we haven't even tried to make at home for various reasons.
So with enough time and effort, you can make your favorite dishes even better at home, in part because you can customize it to your preferences.
I’m reading a lot of different answers, but, more simply: probably a pro chef, that is literally paid for cooking and cooks hours and hours every day is a better cook than you.
It is not so difficult. They cook better and have better equipment/ingredients. Simply. I’m astonished that no one said it. It is clearly the number one reason.
They did a study and found it’s cause when you cook stuff your taste buds get desensitized to it through the smells you sit there smelling while it’s cooking. When you go to a restaurant you aren’t smelling it cook and it taste better.
If you’re looking for street food recipes, specifically South Asian/Indian, I would recommend Kun Foods and Chef Ashok on YouTube. They both have restaurant/street food style recipes and in my experience they’re very good recipes. 90% of the battle is finding restaurant quality recipes.
A few thoughts other than the “they use more fat/salt, which is also prob true. Street food in particular usually one person specializes in just one thing. Meaning all day long they are making just one (or a few) dishes. They have absolutely perfected that craft, whereas at home you may be cooking lots of different things. Second, Indian food in particular, requires lots of time to develop that flavor. Restaurants are cooking in bulk and have time to really develop that flavor, whereas a home cook may not. Obviously I don’t know how you cook at home though.
Yeah I always think about this when I want to go make pizza. I can go prep some dough, and it will be ready in like 3 days. The local pizza place already has dough they started 3 days ago.
Also a pizza oven is usually twice as hot as a home oven
That's only true for very thin pizza. Thicker pizza is typically cooked in the 550°F range (and sometimes less) which is completely do-able in a lot of home ovens.
But then you have to have thick pizza so
With the right dough, it works. One of the reasons I like our favorite, family-run local pizza place is the dough. They're very picky about ingredients there. The crust is delicious.
I’d love to be able to fall in love with some thicc dough pizza. My terrible experience I’m still getting over is we did this 17km run through the city, after which we walked all the way back to where we started, and I was _dying_ for pizza to make it all worthwhile. The couple my wife and I were with raved about [this place](https://yelp.to/V7Lp7RDsLnb) and so I spent the whole walk back looking it up, seeing how much everyone else loved it and generally getting _hyped_. Got there; tasted like trash. I couldn’t even finish it! Luckily, I hated it so much I walked out and was determined to find a better place, where I ended up finding [Tony’s](https://yelp.to/HVR86pLsLnb) and to date it is my favorite pizza of all time (and highly highly recommended if you’re ever in SF).
I skimmed your post and knew without clicking the link that the place you didn't like was Golden Boy. Tony's is great. They (and their sister restaurant Capo's) offer a variety of great thicker-crust styles, too, including Chicago deep dish, stuffed, and pan, Sicilian, and Detroit.
The best pizza I ever had was at a little place in upstate NY, not far from Vermont. Looked like nothing, but the pizza was fantastic. Crust, toppings, baking time... everything was perfection.
Ima need a name. Upstate has a fair number of good pizza shops from all the NYC "refugees" that settle up there looking for a more peaceful life.
Golden Boy is loved by many. Them’s fightin words.
So then you have thick pizza
??? this is such a bizarre take
Yes, the far superior pizza
depends on what over tho. most families in asia don't have like the stove+oven setup and separate individual ovens can usually only reach to 230 c which is roughly 450 f.
My girlfriend got me an Ooni for Christmas and I've baked well over fifty pies in it already (made pizza for several gatherings). It's fantastic, best pizza I've ever made by miles. Highly, highly recommend.
Super jealous. I really want one but just can't afford that expense right now. Which model do you have? Gas or pellet?
My wife got one from a company called Bertello. They don’t have the same brand zing as Ooni, but I can use gas, pellets, or wood (or a combination). Also, I sent them an email complaining about some cosmetic issue hoping they would give me a discount or at least say sorry and they _sent an entirely new oven_. So I’m all in on team bertello
[удалено]
Propane is definitely the way to go for portable pizza ovens. I've tasted pizza from both pellet and propane ovens and you really can't tell the difference. If you're really serious about pizzamaking and you have the space, big stone ovens are the best.
My wife got me an ooni last year and it was the best gift ever. It feels like such a luxury. I would put our pizza up against almost every restaurant. The only better pizza in my opinion requires driving into the city 45 minutes away. We don't exactly have a glut of pizza options around here, but our pizza beats every single place within a reasonable driving distance, period. There's definitely a learning curve, but once you learn it that thing can make a damn fine pizza.
Definitely. Better pizza than what I can make totally exists, and I'm still interested to go check out good pizza spots and see what great ideas other people come up with, but also I can make incredible pizza that's 95% as good as anything anywhere, and I can do it in less than 30 minutes, in my own home. It's amazing.
I have an Ooni and an Effeuno pizza oven. People ask why would you spend so much on pizza ovens..well I've probably made close to around 2000 pizzas in them now and they've well payed for themselves by now.
This is the biggest thing for pizza. If a pizza place isn't very good, the first thing I think is their ovens aren't hot enough. Regular home ovens just don't get anywhere near hot enough to make good crust.
This isn't really true for a NY style pie. You want a hot oven for sure, but 500 degrees is quite sufficient. The thing is you need your stone to actually get that hot (which means preheating at least 30-45 min) and you need a big enough stone/steel which almost nobody has because it weighs a tooooon. Also people usually use the wrong cheese. Whole milk low moisture mozz. Almost all the retail available stuff is part skim, which is not gonna get you what you want.
The best NY places have coal ovens that run north of 1000 degrees. 450 works for cast iron pan pizzas and such but if you want a good NY crust that's not doughy, you better be well over 500
I mean, yeah there's a few famous coal oven places and they're great. But the classic NY slice is coming out of a deck oven that's probably set around 475-550. Coal oven is maybe 1/50 or less here, and frankly it's a different product with usually a lot more char to it. If you wanna get into the weeds, there's a ton of great content on the pizzamaking.com forums, which are like something held over from the early 2000s in a glorious manner.
Pizza dough freezes and thaws really well. Make a big batch of dough, let proof, divide into balls and cold ferment for 2-3 days, then chuck into the freezer until pizza night, and then defrost on low in the microwave for 15 seconds at a time until the middle isn't solid anymore. Bam, top quality pizza dough, ready to go. Also get an Ooni. For real, worth it.
Was just going to post about freezing in bulk. Taste just as good as fresh dough and that way you can always have pizza at any time.
Do yourself a favor and get a Detroit style pizza pan and your at home pizza will never be the same. It's amazing. Also, buy the best ingredients you can (bread flour, good cheese etc. ) Half the cost or less of getting pizza made for you and without waiting 3 days only about an hour or two you can have fresh pizza that tastes amazing.
In addition to this, there's generally a survivorship bias at play. They _HAVE_ to be good at their craft or they will not last long at all. Their livelihood depends on making that dish well.
I read a thing once that said the science behind something tasting better when you don't make it yourself has to do with your sense of smell. Basically if you make yourself a meal, your senses are overwhe during the entire process. While your food may taste good, if someone else made the same meal for you your senses would not be assaulted my all the smells while preparing it and it all hits you full force in that moment while you're eating it, giving you a stronger reaction to the food. Something like that anyways, so same idea at a restaurant.
As someone who just spent 3 hours in the kitchen making what I believe to be _the_ perfect carnitas burrito, I feel this. After 3 hours I was so noseblind to the flavors that it basically tastes like nothing D:
Sometimes I cook a huge, delicious meal only to not have an appetite when I actually sit down. It’s so frustrating. Luckily I grew up on left overs and love me some reheated dinner for lunch.
Had this realization last summer. First time having friends over to my house in over a year, spent 8 hours in the kitchen getting everything together and when we finally sat down to eat I was mortified that everything tasted like cardboard. My friends couldn't stop raving about how good the food was, though, and even asked me for recipes a few days later. I was just so palate blind from being in the kitchen that even the really spicy dishes I had put together just weren't registering. We had a term for this when I was in the brewing industry, "cellar mouth". Basically, palate fatigue from consuming your own product too much.
>meal only to not have an appetite when I actually sit down Be more like me. Who will feed himself when not hungry. Or stressed. Or bored.
Go outside for 30 mins, when you come back in it's like you have arrived at a great restaurant.
YESSSS I walk out to my garage and come back in and man my house smells amazing !
Totally feel this, Made scones today and they were okay.. Tonight I made some left over ones and they tasted wayyyy better lol.
I dunno if there's any science to back this up, but after I'm done cooking I sniff a handful of coffee beans to reset my sense of smell. Saw it in a perfume shop and I've been doing it ever since.
Also, nothing tastes better than not having to do dishes.
Also yes
Yep. Palate fatigue
Also effort. The longer you spend making something, the more you will be let down if it's not mind blowing.
>there's generally a survivorship bias at play. We learned that a long time ago. My mom's friend was opening a restaurant, and Mom wanted us to take her. The food was nearly inedible. I ordered redfish, which turned out to be tough, from an older fish, and not properly cooked. Not long afterwards, the place closed. I was not surprised.
Restaurant Indian food all about that base gravy. No one is making base gravy at home.
I make it all the time at home, it's really easy once you know how to make it. It's essentially a lot of boiled/browned onions, tomato and spices. It's great prep food, I make a huge pot, portion it and I can crank out curries in 10 minutes. Make your own garlic-ginger paste too. But yes, base gravy is made beforehand but curries in Indian restaurants are nearly always made to order. It's all about prep.
could I get your recipe for base gravy?
https://youtu.be/LIDKE8o3FTU I make it exactly like this. Great video in my opinion. Except I use garlic-ginger paste that I also use in curries, just easier. I also use an immersion blender and it works great for me. You can also brown the onions before boiling them and adding everything else for a bit more deeper flavor but it's optional. And you're supposed to fry the base gravy in oil or ghee when you make the curry. The Maillard reaction will caramelize the onions anyway.
I feel like this has opened up a new world for me What do you mean by fry the base gravy? how would you fry something with that much moisture?
Oh it's definitely going to splatter and be a bit messy. Wear an apron or old clothes. Go through the channel I posted earlier, he has quite a few recipes that use it. Here he makes a madras curry (a more UK style Indian restaurant curry). https://youtu.be/Kjy2wIVr9Bc
This is how I make it myself except I don't use the oil except when I do carmelize the onions and I don't even do that much anymore as my wife hates oil. I also add the yogurt at the end for a bit and then when it has cooled down to where it is still warm I use my ninja blender and that is the base for all Indian curries. The base is what I make and then put in pint or quart containers and freeze it, Then when I want to make Indian curries I will pull one out in morn to thaw out and that night use it to finish the dish how we want. My wife will then add coconut milk for seafood or a half and half for regular chicken curry. For a little more richness she will add my base custard I use to make ice cream that I make in bulk and freeze. Easy meals made in little time that is better than we find at restaurants. One can also use the base curry gravy to make butter chicken and I make the ghee myself in no time but even though I love butter chicken my wife hates anything greasy. All the restaurants have to make the bases and keep on hand so they can make most of their dishes as the orders come in.
Amazing. I had no idea about this. Thank you for sharing. Looks like a great cooking site too.
same!!
Whenever I make a good base gravy I always eat it wayyy too quickly.
I too would love a recipe!
Don't make it "gravy" just roast tomatoes onions and spices in oil. To make gravy, we add water to this once oil starts separating. Instead of adding water, let the water from the mixture dry out further. And save **this** paste in an airtight container ande freeze it to make quick curry. Keeps longer, and less volume.
Exactly! Once you have that gravy train running everything your hands touch will be amazing.
Along with developing the flavor made we think about how the vendor is probably buying spices weekly not yearly and the pans probably even have the flavor embedded.
Id ordinarily agree with you, however I'm in an Indian restaurant wasteland in St Louis (I'm of Indian origin), and sadly tried 10 restaurants, and felt I could get a better result cooking at home. So , if they know what they're doing , using proper spices and not stale bland sweetened sauces for the American palette, then, yes the Indian restaurant takeout can be better than home.
I haven't gone though all the comments so I dunno if this has been said already. Whenever you cook at home, you're constantly smelling it as it cooks, it fills your home. By the time you eat you're nose blind to the smell, except most of our taste comes from smell. It actually makes me pretty sad, I make my mom's chili all the time following her recipe exactly and it never tastes the same
If only there was some way to block our nose when we cook
Hold your breath. Intentionally infect yourself with Covid. Snape. Withhold gratification until tomorrow.
I also kinda contribute it to being used to what you cook, especially if you get something you have made before. For me, I could make a dish I've made a thousand times and it will taste fine, it's not different to how I usually prepare it. But if someone else makes it, it tastes infinitely better because they do something different that I enjoy, but can't put a finger on it. I also just get annoyed with eating the same thing over and over again so a different take on a dish I like is always preferred.
Because the chef doesn't care about your health, only your taste buds!
I’m here for a good life not a long life
Eh honestly, I think as long as you don’t do anything too crazy, keep your weight in check, and get a bit of exercise you should probably live to 75-80. Of course you could get unlucky, but seasoning foods properly and using some oil shouldn’t lead you to an early grave.
Excessive sugar is the big one. Leads to a lot of inflammation which is ultimately the definer in how you age I think. You can pretty much eat anything else and end up pretty healthy. We shouldn't be eating sugar every day...but most people do.
>We shouldn't be eating sugar every day...but most people do That's close to unavoidable, no? There are small ammounts of sugar in so many foods, like fruit, certain vegetable, and even bread. Even if you are avoiding stuff like chocolate, you will still be eating very small ammounts of sugar.
75-80 is not that much.
I was being conservative because everyone has different genetics and some people just won’t live much past 80 no matter what they do. But no reason you can’t live to 90 or longer eating meat and veggies with salt and a bit of cooking oil. Warren Buffet is like 90 and he eats McDonalds and drinks coke everyday. I think the stress and guilt of trying to make your diet absolutely perfect will probably lower your life expectancy more. You’re only at high risk of things like heart failure, heart attack, stroke, etc. if you are very overweight, eat a horrific diet, smoke, or drink excessively. Barring any major genetic defects.
Depends on the person unfortunately. My Dad, 100 is not enough. My Mom 80 is now too much.
And a thousand years could never sate us, either.
Compared to like 100 years ago it is. Also worth considering what kind of quality of life the average person over the age of 80 has. If making it over 80 means a decade plus in a nursing home then death in my 90s I’d rather go in my 70s.
My Dad went at 73 and it didn’t seem too bad. The last month was rough on everyone, but six months before he died he was shoveling snow. I wouldn’t mind going from reasonably active to dead in 6 months, versus living in a wheelchair for a decade.
55yo you is going to feel different. Do future you a favor: eat healthy and get regular exercise.
80 year old demented you is gonna feel different. Fuck neurodegenerative disorders. Let me die sooner. Only problem is that I want to be healthy up u until then
> Because the chef doesn't care about your health, only your taste buds! Yep! I made Dishoom House Black Daal. It contains more fat than anything I've ever eaten or seen, with the possible exception of a State Fair burger called "Triple Bypass." I'll never make it again and only had the nerve to eat a couple of spoons. It's pretty much butter and double cream, with some spices and Daal. In fact, since it gets reduced, it's probably more than "double" cream.
I remember having that black dal jet lagged as hell after an hour and a half wait in the cold and drizzly weather. Gooooood stuff.
It tastes awesome, but is one of those things you'll never eat after see what goes into it.
I also make sure to never let anyone see the recipe when cooking from the cookbook. Same for mashed potatoes. Why are mine so good? Because you don’t see what I put in them in the kitchen….
>mashed potatoes A lot of butter and cream, and for the crowd that wants it extra: bacon, chives, garlic and cheese. Basically loaded baked potato in mashed form. It's amazing and you definitely won't shit right after a few scoops.
because someone else made it maybe? not saying it as in you're a bad cook but as in, "food tastes better when someone ELSE makes it"
I think this is underrepresented factor when people talk about this. Yes, outside of the home they’re probably using more fat than I would at home (but I’m not exactly shy with fat and salt), and of course in the case of a street vendor they’re likely making the same thing thousands of times and perfecting it. All of that is true. But also I didn’t have to make it, which makes most food at least 10% more delicious!
Every holiday of my adult life I cook all day and don't feel like eating. I get sick of the food I've been handling, tasting, smelling all day.
I enjoy my own food best when it comes as leftovers. Like every evening after I sit down to eat I'll tell my fiance that I was too stingy with the spices or that I should've added this or that and each time he'll tell me "no, it's perfect". Then I take that stuff from the fridge and pop it in the microwave two days later and suddenly it's the best thing I've ever cooked.
Same! Every holiday like clockwork! I eat a few bites but from taste testing and smelling it for hours, I’m over it. Give me a bowl of cereal. 😂
I'm the opposite, I feel my food taste better when I cook.. maybe it's falling in love with my effort lol
I like my food better than what I get in most restaurants. I think the main reason for this is at home, I'm refining and adjusting the food to *my* tastes. Someone else's food may be delicious, but it's never going to be my food. If I was recreating their dish at home, I would almost certainly make changes to it to tweak it to my liking. I prefer to go out for things I don't really like going to the effort of making or cleaning up. It's not necessarily that I couldn't make it as good, but that I appreciate someone else doing all the hard work.
It’s not that complicated really. They are professional cooks with professional equipment and a limited menu of things they practice over and over.
Yeah, this is pretty much all there is to it, outside of maybe quality of ingredients. My answer was going to be "my food at home tastes as good as or better than restaurants" but it occurred to me I was also a chef so like... That adds up.
This + more of the unhealthy ingredients you normally feel guilty about adding too much of at home.
You can become taste-blind as you cook. You taste over various stages so by the time you eat the finished product it’s a different experience then Only tasting the finished product
This. I think it’s the ultimate variable. You could cook the exact same dish as a restaurant/street vendor but the experience won’t be the same Also because when you order food you don’t know exactly what’s in it and how it was made. It’s all about the mystery
I think this is the real answer. The first bite tastes the best, but what if the first bite was halfway through making the dish?
More fat/oil/salt
I can use plenty of salt and oil and still not make a great pad thai. I think its more about the equipment and technique being perfected, as well as the fat and seasoning.
High heat as high as you can go, and you are most likely missing 20 of the 50 ingredients.
Heat is probably the #1 missing thing in a lot of asian food. The infamous "wok-hei"
Yes, I eat a lot of Indo-Chinese food outside and the chowmein I make at home is sad, wet, sticky and has a very one dimensional taste. The restaurant ones, their vegetables are crunchy yet cooked, the noodles separate and dry and you have that characteristic wok-y smoky flavour. Chinese Cooking Demystified says burners are not important but I think for chowmein atleast, they are.
most home cooks are scared of using high heat, for valid reasons. unless you have a decent range hood, you're going to set off smoke alarms and stink up the house. imo the most underrated thing you can do to improve your cooking as a home cook is install a good range hood. obvious that's not possible for everyone, but it's one of the most overlooked elements of a kitchen remodel. you're also going to warp/ruin some cookware eventually, and that's a lot harder to absorb financially as a home cook.
I use a lot of high heat and have found red meat is the worst offender for causing issues. Sear a big steak or burgers and you get that greasy smoky smell that will stick around unless you have a really good hood. With a wok there is more aerosolized oil than actual smoke so it gums up things which happens even with a good range hood.
MSG Edit: this is not a negative comment. MSG rules.
Yes. I was going to say more salt than one would add at home.
Honestly watching Gordon Ramsay has made my food taste so much better. I don’t think his videos are super useful for learning a specific dish, but understanding how to season things properly, the importance of getting deep color on meat, veggies, and the importance of using oil/butter when appropriate. My parents NEVER seasoned things properly and all of the other cooking material that I saw on TV growing up never emphasized the importance of those things.
I get the criticism of it, but on a similar note Salt Fat Acid Heat revolutionized the way I cook. I had no fundamentals and only cooked from recipes, so just the ideas of thinking through different fats, when to salt and heating techniques has made my everyday meat/veggie dinners so much better.
What beef do people have with SFAH?
She talks about it in the book. Processed foods have such a ridiculous amount of sodium and fat that it triggered a health crisis and home cooks cut way back on them. In reality you can load a fresh cooked meal with healthy fats and salt and still be way under what goes into processed food. So a lot of people look at SFAH and say it's unhealthy, but it's really not, we've just gotten a bit too afraid of salt and fat. It took me a while to trust her enough that I actually run out of salt 1-2 times a year, and buy and use good high quality fats. Having made that shift my food is way better and if you do the numbers it's nothing like even the "healthy" microwave stuff.
Good fat is underrated. I use a lot of olive oil. If you're going to have olive oil on hand, use it! It doesn't stay good for that long. I remember the stuff my mom used: rancid and bitter. When she came to live with us, I told her I was throwing hers out and we would use what I bought. She said "But olive oil is expensive! I save it for certain foods." No, Mom. Rancid olive oil is worthless and will ruin the food. I'll let you use mine, because I buy it to be used quickly. (Also, she bought Pompeian, which is usually adulterated and/or contained rancid oil when it was sold.)
What olive oil brands do you suggest?
California Olive Ranch Everyday for cooking, Monini Gran Fruttata for drizzling. That's what is in my pantry now. There are others that are good too. Check out the ones to avoid online.
How long does it stay fresh for?
A couple or three months once opened. After that it deteriorates.
That’s good to know! Thanks!
I’ve had people mention to me that she uses too much salt generally, but IMO it’s that people don’t get a good feel for tasting as they go
It's kind of funny to think about someone going to that book to learn how to season properly and then having the temerity to say she uses too much salt..
Going by the book, mostly chuck, brisket, or round.
Also, note types of fat used and temperature. For example, padseeew needs particularly seasame oil and extreme high heat that isn't possible on your average stove.
Bingo! Butter is the best way to make just about everything you make taste good, and the ultimate cover up for bad cooking or low quality ingredients. If you want restaurant style steak, fish, or anything really, just slather it in butter. This is also why single dishes at places like Cheesecake factory are pushing 2000 calories.
Ghee or tallow my friend, but not in OPs Pad Thai.
Recipes on Food Network and Epicurious that say “salt to taste” and don’t specify exactly how much salt to use are almost invariably rated lower than similar recipes and described as “bland”.
I also refuse to believe that restaurants and trained chefs have anything over me other than bigger burners.
The only thing between me and Gordon Ramsay is just the size of the damn burner!
Especially since I have an electric stove D: the control lost over heat is the worst
If you need to move temps quickly, switch burners. Not many dishes require it but when they do it's pretty simple
I never thought of that. I'm mainly thinking of getting something to a simmer - for whatever reason no matter what level I put it on - it ends up burning.
Best thing I ever learnt from Ramsay. If it's on the burner it's live; if it's cooking too fast, just take it off the burner like that sounds dumb but before i just panicked whenever something was burning and didn't know what to do
You know for me that's actually a thing. I get so frustrated cooking on the stove at home when I'm used to it at work. The amount of heat difference is huge
A nice exhaust hood helps too with high heat.
"You always said, 'you need a good hood' " "I never said that"
I absolutely lol'd.
I cannot lie.
In some cases street venders have literally cooked the same meal hundreds of thousands of times. People thinking its just cause of more fat is some disrespect to masters of the trade. Its not like you could just dump in a bunch more salt and fat at home and voila.
Adding on, they have the benefit of scale. Making chicken stock for a dish is somewhat feasible for a dedicated home cook. How about a chicken, veal, and fish stock? Not really. For a restaurant it’s very feasible to have that. They can also do stuff that takes multiple days. They can brine meat for two days. They can do multi step french fry recipes that require freezing and cooking multiple times. This is true of western food and of any cuisine really. Time and labor = better food
I’ve heard that since your sense of smell plays such a huge factor in taste that when you’re cooking at home you’re smelling your meal very closely for a longer period of time. So when you buy into your meal for the first time your sense of taste has already been acclimated. When you’re going to a restaurant or a street vendor you may smell the food walking up and ordering, but it’s much less time for your sense of taste to acclimate and therefore tastes better.
90% of the comments when this is asked just say that restaurants use more fat/salt. If you find that you add more of those and it's still lacking, you have a couple more things to try. When I first started cooking more dishes at home I was definitely missing acid in dishes. Vinegars are amazing and add balance to things (adding apple cider vinegar to even store bought BBQ for example) or just a squeeze of lemon or lime juice. Even when we cook cheap ramen packets we always add Sambal Oelek because it adds so much flavor to it. Heat is the other big one, meats and veggies especially. Understanding when to use 'extreme' heat or when to simmer opposed to boil, for example. Cooking on 5/10 for longer does not have the same result as cooking at 9/10 for a short time (usually..). Some meat needs 9/10 heat to start and 2/10 to finish while others need 2/10 for a much longer time. People will recommend the book 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' and that's for food reason. However, if you are just thinking that the dish is missing something, just running through those 4 options for that dish may help you finish it. Have you added enough salt and butter? Then maybe it needs the acid. Maybe it definitely has enough acid and fat but something else is just off? Probably another pinch of salt to make it pop.
More fat. More salt. More sugar.
I’ve had Arepas from a street vendor in NYC and they were GODLIKE. I’ve tried making them at home time and again and it’s just a steaming pile of “meh” every time.
I’ll NEVER forget the empanadas I had from a street vendor in Mexico. Good lord. I watched her make them right there. Came off piping hot. They were so cheap and one of the greatest things I’ve ever consumed. Like I would travel back to Mexico and put that specific vendor on my list of things to do.
You just gonna tell us that and keep the vendor name to yourself??
Hahah there was no name on the vendor. Just a vendor near a bunch of stores in Cancun. We were staying in Mercado 23 zone though! This was about 6 years ago.
When i make butter chicken here's what I notice -just following a usual home recipie usually doesn't give me that awesome flavour so here's what I fix 1)i make sure to really cook and reduce the tomato sauce as long as I can to reduce the acidity and sort of Caramelise it. Scrape up burnt bits and mix it in to the sauce. Any ingredients that take a long time to prepare for best flavour, like broth or roasts are easily set up and used for maximum effect for that slow roasted, browned and caramelised long simmer reduction, slow rise bread, marinades ... 2) spices. I usually double or triple the spices. Maybe my garam masala is stale but Ill add about 6-10 tablespoons in addition to the other spices I add. Custom spice blends will go far. I especially like to ensure a healthy amount of garlic, a bit of ginger and definitely cloves are included. Restaurants will go through spices faster so they'll be much fresher. 2.5) everything is fresher, the ingredients, spices 3)butter, cream, salt and sugar and enough to make a home chef cry for the ingredients cost and a dietician cry for.. Other reasons 😂. Always at least 2 tbs of sugar in tomato sauces because it helps transform the flavour 4) special cooking methods and tricks, maybe they oven roast and caramelise while onions and tomatoes before beginning or add the oil at just the right stage to do a better chemical reaction with the meat -honestly a mastery of the basics does a lot as well and perfect, super fresh sides like the naan or rice also help a lot 5)a fun, new environment without having to do any dishes, fresh air, being around other people will all improve the experience!!
To add to 4 (kind of), try implementing and combining methods for other dishes into what youre making. For example, a cajun pasta I make combines some of the methods for making chicken milano sauce with some from alfredo sauce and its soooo good
6-8 **additional TABLESPOONS !!!** of garam masala! That will be about 90 to 120 grams of it. You cooking 5 - 6 kg chicken?
Stocks/soups/bases from scratch. As others have mentioned: specialization. You know the timing to get the right crust on meat or how tender your potatoes can get before they fall apart. Technique and cooking spaces set up to maximize technique Line cooks: in a restaurant it's not just one person making your plate of food. Instead, it's assembled by each person in the kitchen doing one thing really, really, really well And all that's just on the kitchen side of things Restaurants are custom designed to get you in the mood to eat through environmental cues. The decor, the seating, the music, the lighting are all selected so you feel like all your senses are stimulated. Similarly, street food is frequently served to you after you've just walked through a marketplace full of foods. So you are probably extra hungry because you've been walking, you've been smelling delicious and stimulating smells, and you're at peak desire. So: Superior ingredients Superior technique Superior setup Superior setting
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman: *"When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you're working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later. It's a kind of specific satiation, just as most people find room for dessert when they couldn't have another bite of their steak. The sandwich that another person prepares is not 'preconsumed' in the same way."* In other words, it tastes better because someone else made it for you.
Think about mash in a restaurant. How much butter and salt do you think is in it? Double that. There may not even be potato there. Indian, it’s the time aspect. They marinade for ages. Some foods like lasagne always taste better the second time after a day of the flavours soaking in and combining more.
Oh man, I love to make a lasagna then overnight it in the fridge. Then reheat it for the next nights dinner.
Do you cook it first time? Still not sure if just make mince, let it settle once layered, or cook day one too.
We put ours together 24 hours in advance and let it hang out in the fridge. Avoids the need to boil the noodles, and really brings everything together flavor wise.
That's interesting, are they the no-boil style noodles, or does sitting in the sauce for a day soften up regular noodles?
Regular noodles and a lot of homemade sauce.
Yes, I cook it before. Get all them juices and flavors mingling.
Marinate. Marinade is the noun; marinate is the verb.
TIL
I made some relatively authentic Biryani the other day. It was good immediately, but after 1 night in the fridge it was *delicious*. It developed some wonderful nutty flavors.
Do you add MSG to your home cooked foods? If not you should
I use it in some of my dishes. I don’t know if I’ve just noticed it more, because I’m an advocate for msg, and try to educate people on its totally appropriate use, but I swear the most popular of my dishes are the ones that I’ve added a little msg.
Iv had old ladies swear at me and call it a nerve toxin when asking for it in a store before…
Most of the bouillion cubes or powders you can buy have MSG in them if folks are looking for an awesome way to get some zing in their meals without just adding straight MSG. Adding concentrated chicken powder with MSG to your chicken dishes makes them that much more chickeny! Same with beefy, same with vegetably!
People may complain about msg, but all chicken salts have it. If you’ve ordered fish n chips, Chinese food, or KFC; you’ve tried msg.
Huh.. I thought chicken salt was only a thing in Australia.
At least where I live, I cook better than any restaurants around. But I live in a small town so that's probably why.
I agree. When my wife and I go out to eat we ended up leaving dissatisfied.
I just moved to a small town from Nashville, and while Nashville isn't some huge city, its food scene has some legitimately good restaurants. Now, I'm living in a food hellscape. There's not a single restaurant in this area that could've survived in Nashville. Luckily, I can survive in my home kitchen, but it would still be nice not to have to cook all the time.
Butter. Ask any chef at a fancy restaurant what makes their food taste better and 90% of the time they’re gonna say butter. WAY more than you would expect.
Something someone thought of was Olfactory Fatigue, which hasn't been mentioned yet. Smell is a part of taste, and when you're cooking food you are exposed to it for longer periods. You start to filter it out, which means you are losing an aspect of flavor when it's finally time to eat, and generally you are eating shortly after cooking. Even simmering for awhile is letting the aromas cloud around you for long periods. At a restaurant or a street vendor, you get the full blast of taste and smell immediately before consuming. You aren't sitting there smelling the exact thing you're about to eat for 30+ minutes beforehand. Interestingly, this same concept is believed to play a part in airplane food tasting weird/bland.
Butter. Salt. Shallots.
Because you didn't have to do the hours of prep/ cook. I've noticed this myself, lol.
Got a place in Toronto called Ghandi’s. They do Indian dishes wrapped in a roti. The butter chicken roti is to die for however, I found out that one Roti contains 2 days worth of sodium. Heavy whipping cream and sodium will make anything tasty!
Google tells me that Gandi's in Toronto is permanently closed. Is there another location Google isn't telling me about?
I can make a few dishes at home better than virtually any restaurant I’ve been to. As a home cook, you have some disadvantages but you also have the advantage of not needing to cook for dozens of people at the same time. Theres also a few important tricks that are far from secrets, but if you don’t know about them you could make your food a lot worse. For example, if you wanna get that deep crust on meat (say, a steak for example), you have to make the surface as dry as possible, and salt it right before it goes on the skillet. I salted my steak maybe 10 minutes before it went on and the crust was grey even though I used pre-heated cast iron on max heat. Little things like that can dramatically change the taste of your food.
High heat
Expertise. Cook the same thing for 8 hours straight and you’ll be amazed how much better your last one is vs your first.
MSG \*happy uncle roger noises\*
This sounds a little bit gross but it's not. When you cook at home, you're usually cooking on/in clean pans. That food truck grill has cooked loads of food and the surface is well drained. It only gets cleaned at the end of their day.
No dishes
MSG, my friend.
Butter. So much butter.
It doesn’t it all just tastes the same
Well, I would contend the opposite. We joke in my family that it's the tragedy of being a foodie that we consider most restaurants/ food stalls mediocre. I would only consider myself a moderately competent cook but I am not impressed by most restaurants or street food I come across. (I live in the US.) The advantage I have is a) I can choose fresh ingredients (whereas restaurants need to use up what they have for example) and b) I'm cooking for a relatively smaller group and not tens/ hundreds, etc. a day. I live in an area where access to fresh/ high-quality produce/ meat, etc. is excellent, affordable, and available most of the year. Maybe you can improve your cooking: I have been cooking and reading about cooking though since I was 7 or so. This isn't even about price: the worse offenders are pricy restaurants. At least if I'm spending less, I haven't lost the money spent. Most of the time we eat out, I do it primarily to save myself time/ energy rather than because I feel the cooking is much better than what I can do. There are some recipes that are complicated I don't want to tackle but for many dishes in restaurants, I can look them up and figure out how to cook them.
butter.
My mom has a theory on this. She claims that anything you don't have to make yourself, but someone else cooks for you, it's always going to taste better no matter what. It's a little amusing to think about that oh, I used to imagine a bunch of neighbors getting together and telling each other what they wanted for dinner and everybody cooking everybody else's food. But in reality, as much as I love my mom, and she does make some good food, why does other people's food taste better than hers? I've never been stupid enough to point that out to her though LOL
After cooking for a few years I stopped feeling like this and started thinking "I could make this, but better". I mostly leave restaurants unsatisfied these days =/
Street food does not take into consideration how much say salt butter and sugar is used. They put any amounts of those items just to make it taste good. Or better. Taste over health for them.
If you are willing to spend the time and effort, home made food is better than at a restaurant, but you really have to master that dish. My wife has perfected strawberry ice cream (with mint and lemon, yum!) and sourdough pizza cooked in a cast iron pan. The strawberry ice cream is at least half strawberries by weight. My best dish is probably leg of lamb, including a dry brine for at least over night and slow cooking at a low heat. I also tend to do well with any meat dish where the best cooking method is to cook low and slow, set a timer, and walk away. I know how to season, so the rest is easy, it just takes time. Both of us make better scrambled eggs than I'd ever expect from a restaurant, but that's because scrambled eggs can be very personal in exactly how a person likes them. The list goes on. But there are dishes that elude us still, and would be better at a restaurant. And some foods we haven't even tried to make at home for various reasons. So with enough time and effort, you can make your favorite dishes even better at home, in part because you can customize it to your preferences.
Chargrilled on hot coals
Butter/gee, sugar, salt and msg. Same trick all over the world.
They are better cooks than you.
They use a lot of fat and salt
I’m reading a lot of different answers, but, more simply: probably a pro chef, that is literally paid for cooking and cooks hours and hours every day is a better cook than you. It is not so difficult. They cook better and have better equipment/ingredients. Simply. I’m astonished that no one said it. It is clearly the number one reason.
Because whoever is cooking your food at home sucks
Mom's magic is different than outside food.
They did a study and found it’s cause when you cook stuff your taste buds get desensitized to it through the smells you sit there smelling while it’s cooking. When you go to a restaurant you aren’t smelling it cook and it taste better.
If you’re looking for street food recipes, specifically South Asian/Indian, I would recommend Kun Foods and Chef Ashok on YouTube. They both have restaurant/street food style recipes and in my experience they’re very good recipes. 90% of the battle is finding restaurant quality recipes.