I can't do it his way and now I'm ashamed to do it my way.
December 17, 2015 9:39 AM Subscribe

I enjoy watching Mr. Brown. He's clever, he's informed and I'm sure he's generally right about the "right" way to do things. I'm also sure that I will never in my life have a kitchen as well-stocked as his or that I will have nine hours to spend making a blintz. Why I Don't Cook

Mark Evanier's reaction to Alton Brown explaining why that grilled cheese sandwich you made will will never ever be good enough.

posted by Flexagon (219 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite

The only person who has to like my grilled cheese sandwiches is my daughter, and she does. So I'm all set.

I like Alton Brown. I get lots of neat ideas from him that I fit into my cooking if I have the time and materials, and that I ignore if I don't. But Alton Brown isn't in my kitchen judging me, it wouldn't matter much if he were, and so I keep cooking.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:46 AM on December 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

Huh? We're going after Alton Brown in our crank pieces now? His recipes (and Good Eats) always seemed tilted towards the idea of "good food in easy mode".
posted by selfnoise at 9:47 AM on December 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

The criticisms are absolutely on point, especially the part about how spices can be unitaskers. However, I think this comic said most of this as well as it can be said already.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:48 AM on December 17, 2015 [26 favorites]

~~explaining why that grilled cheese sandwich you made will will never ever be good enough~~

Uh, you mean, 'making an original recipe based on ironic pedantry'?
posted by Sys Rq at 9:49 AM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Huh? We're going after Alton Brown in our crank pieces now? His recipes (and Good Eats) always seemed tilted towards the idea of "good food in easy mode".

I would quibble that it's always seemed like "good food in science mode" which is easy if that's how your brain works, and laughably nonsense if it isn't.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:50 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Look, the secret of perfect grilled cheese sandwiches is a thin layer of mayonnaise on the outside of the bread. Can we just make that clear before getting into anything else?
posted by overeducated_alligator at 9:51 AM on December 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

Everyone knows the secret ingredients to a perfect grilled cheese are butter, love and tomato soup for dippin'.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:52 AM on December 17, 2015 [34 favorites]

I missed my chance to say how wrong Alton Brown was about uni-taskers. Both the apple peeler/corer/skinner thing and the bear claws both do the job very well and are huge time and effort savers, well worth the cost and space they take up

This rant is in line with others about the min/maxing of everything. Gotta get an aeropress if you want real coffee and it better be shade grown, artisinal beans you use too, etc etc.

(I swear there was a better term for this phenomenon. I thought it was food porn, but not quite, doesn't cover the disdain for the pedestrian, but my mind can't remember what the term was, it's in some ways rehashing perfect is the enemy of good)
posted by k5.user at 9:53 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Who are these people who can afford not to cook? We had another post on the Blue about this recently.
posted by mkuhnell at 9:56 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

The perfect grilled cheese sandwich is the one somebody else makes for you. This is true of all sandwiches.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:56 AM on December 17, 2015 [83 favorites]

Everyone should know how to cook. If you use what someone else says as an excuse to stay out of the kitchen then you're a bigger idiot than whatever that person said (or something like that).

I've had some of these concerns. Like, "Am I really going to use enough tarragon to make buying it for this one recipe worth it?" Or, "How many kinds of cinnamon does one person need?" But at the end of the day, if one were to weigh all my positive traits against all my negative ones, the only main thing that puts me on the side of being of being a decent human being is I know how to cook.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:57 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

What I always got from Alton Brown was to think about why you're doing what you're doing, and once you know why you can start thinking about better ways to do it. I never felt like I needed to follow him exactly.

Like, when I make homemade ravioli I don't break out the ironing board but I do make sure I have a long section of counter available because you kind of need a runway for the dough. Or when I make a roast I don't cook it in a clay planter pot but I do blast it at the end rather than the beginning, for reasons.

I mean, the day that fucker put raisins in his pot roast was the day I knew not to do everything he said literally.

He's the first person who taught us why we're adding what we're adding and why we're heating something a certain way. He's not a chef, he's more like a consultant.
posted by bondcliff at 9:57 AM on December 17, 2015 [40 favorites]

For whatever reason I don't get the "ashamed to do it my way" or "[your thing] will never be good enough" feeling from Alton Brown -- or even from Cook's Illustrated, speaking of overly fussy takes on things you already know how to cook. Okay, maybe you can't make the Platonic ideal of a grilled cheese sandwich, but the trash talk is something you shrug off as humor. Nope, I'm not going to make a grilled cheese sandwich on a charcoal grill when I live in an apartment with not even a square inch of outdoor space; but if I have some mustard I can put it on there, and if I have some paprika I can put it on there, and spices mostly aren't unitaskers because whenever you're cooking you say, "Hmm, maybe I should put some more flavor in here," and you put in some paprika whether or not the recipe says so.

And there are days you only have enough energy to put a Kraft Single between two slices of sandwich bread and cook it in a pan for a minute, and there are days when you think, "Oooh, I'm gonna make a really delicious grilled cheese" because it's November and it's wet and you buy a great loaf of bread and some fancy cheese and you put some fancy mustard on it and it's that much better because you put in some time to give yourself a little bit of luxury. And that's why I do cook. Occasionally.
posted by Jeanne at 9:58 AM on December 17, 2015 [29 favorites]

Also, this will probably get deleted by the pro-grill cheese moderators, but I think grilled cheese is overrated so the best grilled cheese is a BLT.
posted by bondcliff at 10:02 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

This seems ... really cranky. Like, uh ... Worcestershire sauce has a shelf life of 3-4 years, post-opening. Mustard powder can last around 2 years. Neither are expensive, both can be bought in small quantities. Both are useful in a lot of recipes.

The way this article is written, you'd think Brown was demanding the viewer use black truffles or something.
posted by tocts at 10:02 AM on December 17, 2015 [22 favorites]

Who are these people who can afford not to cook? We had another post on the Blue about this recently.

We have these threads like 17 times per year. And every time, the cookers are like "who are these people?" and every time, us non-cookers tell the cookers "hi, I'm that guy, it's called eating things that don't require cooking, like yogurt/salad/cheese/popcorn/PBJ/whatever," and every time, someone calls us "idiots" and sub-"decent" humans, and thus shall it be unto eternity because of the original sin of the Food Network, amen.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:02 AM on December 17, 2015 [73 favorites]

bondcliff, let's not say anything we can't take back.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:05 AM on December 17, 2015 [54 favorites]

The ability of Brown to drain the fun out of something is unparalleled. He's like a fun vampire.
posted by The Whelk at 10:06 AM on December 17, 2015 [15 favorites]

I don't really understand the idea of "Buying a spice for one recipe, and then the rest has to be thrown away." We're in the age of Google...if you have dry mustard, you can search, "recipes with dry mustard," and you can find new ways of using it AND can find some new, yummy things to eat!
posted by xingcat at 10:07 AM on December 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

Mark Evanier is great but as has been pointed out, taking shots at Alton Brown for doing the thing Alton Brown does is kind of like asking what the deal is with airline food.
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:07 AM on December 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

Huh? We're going after Alton Brown in our crank pieces now?

Well, I'm just going to be a little bit passive aggressive and just say, don't google anything remotely political about Alton Brown. It'll ruin him forever.
posted by FJT at 10:07 AM on December 17, 2015 [14 favorites]

I would never make a 'griddled sandwich containing melted cheese'! I always broil my grilled cheese sandwiches.
posted by Garm at 10:08 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

What about just putting cheese on a grill?
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:10 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

The ability of Brown to drain the fun out of something is unparalleled.

I'm finding that with Neil deGrasse Tyson. As much as I admire and respect the man I kind of feel like he'd ruin any dinner party you invited him to.
posted by bondcliff at 10:10 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Both the apple peeler/corer/skinner thing and the bear claws both do the job very well and are huge time and effort savers, well worth the cost and space they take up

Completely depends on how often you peel apples or shred BBQ. What's bad is having a whole drawer or two in your kitchen filled up with stuff that you only use a couple of times a year. I mean, we have a potato masher in our kitchen drawer, and we make mashed potatoes once a year at Thanksgiving. If we didn't have the masher, we would probably figure out how to mash them.
posted by smackfu at 10:11 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Can't a person (in this case, Mr. Brown) have enthusiasm about a new way of doing something without being read as criticising the old/normal way? Yes, he playfully made fun of the phrase "grilled" vs. "griddle", but I doubt he'd really have issues with it. Just because he's promoting his version doesn't mean he's a snob about your version, and I doubt he'd really say you're doing it wrong (in any serious tone of voice) if you like your way.

I see this kind of thinking all the time - Person A promotes method N, so everyone who only wants to use method O feels judged and says Person A has no right to judge them. I agree that Person A could be more sensitive in his phrasing, but Person A usually only has five seconds for a sound byte...
posted by amtho at 10:12 AM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

While I'll admit that I learned a couple of positive things about making a good grilled cheese from watching this video, i believe he's going way overboard on the method. All you really need to make one of those wonderful fat fancy-pants grilled cheese sandwiches is a cast iron pan and an oven. Toast the bread in the pan. Put the ingredients on (cheese SLICES, spices, bacon, whatever) open-faced, broil until they start to get all melty, and you're good. assemble and serve.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 10:12 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I was a single parent who liked good food but had a small budget so I had no choice but to learn to cook.

While I never considered Alton Brown to be the Last Word, I enjoyed watching Good Eats. It was entertaining, often thought-provoking, and I learned something useful from almost every episode.

But when I wanted cooking inspiration, nothing beat Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. I could never watch that show without drooling, and about halfway through I usually had to get up and make something tasty with whatever I had on-hand.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:15 AM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Don't depend on your mom or significant other to feed you or you'll staaaaarve to death.

That's just natural selection at work.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:16 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I had a mixed reaction to this piece. I absolutely agree that some of Alton Brown's recipes seem needlessly overcomplicated. I was intrigued by an episode of "Good Eats" that promised to show how you could use a basic gas BBQ as a smoker when cooking ribs. Once he got to the part about disabling/removing the built-in thermometer that comes with your BBQ and replacing it with all manner of different prods, cables, external sensors, etc., it became obvious that not being a NASA scientist I was clearly out of my league trying to replicate this at home. Perhaps I am deluding myself that my much simpler method of cooking ribs yields excellent results, but regardless, I will always avoid recipes that require an advanced degree from Yale as a prerequisite.

That being said, while I do understand that different people have differing levels of comfort in a kitchen, I find this writer's standard of what constitutes an overly ambitious recipe to be startlingly low. If requiring spices beyond salt and pepper makes a recipe too difficult to follow, I would argue the problem is not with the recipe. At some point these complaints start to come off as, "How dare this recipe require that I cook!".
posted by The Gooch at 10:18 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

People ought to know how to feed themselves somehow, even if it means eating takeout or prepackaged food.

Well, some of us know how to cook. It's just that we're really terrible at scheduling and recognizing when we get hungry until it's midnight and everything is closed except Jack in the Box.
posted by FJT at 10:19 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

What about just putting cheese on a grill?

I had a grilled cheese sandwich once where the person put slices of American cheese on the grill got them melty, toasted some bread on the grilled, then scraped the melted cheese on to a piece of bread and topped with another piece of bread. It was a deli where you could see the grill so I could watch the whole thing in awe while it happened. I'll save you the trouble of experimenting and tell you that it was a very very strange and not very good sandwich.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:20 AM on December 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

Brown haters, you know there's this nice woman Rachael Ray who has a cooking show too
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:21 AM on December 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm finding that with Neil deGrasse Tyson. As much as I admire and respect the man I kind of feel like he'd ruin any dinner party you invited him to.

Quite possibly, but I'd be too curious to find out what it's like talking about stuff with him at more than a schoolkid level. All the TV he does is so accessible that rarely gets to touch on anything involving expertise. He's an expert, but we've never really seen that side of him.
I'd invite Sagan without hesitation though :) (Assuming he'd have the courtesy to show up alive).
posted by anonymisc at 10:21 AM on December 17, 2015

Well, I'm just going to be a little bit passive aggressive and just say, don't google anything remotely political about Alton Brown. It'll ruin him forever.

That's true of pretty much anybody.
posted by blucevalo at 10:21 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

"What about just putting cheese on a grill?"

You need that chese than actually be grilled to do that (like halloumi) otherwise it's just gonna be a mess. (maybe if you freeze it first?.... hummm....I need to try that or at least google it).
posted by coust at 10:21 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Telling me what a lazy helpless garbage human I am for not cooking will definitely help resolve my cooking anxiety - thanks folks! (This piece spoke to me.)
posted by naoko at 10:22 AM on December 17, 2015 [15 favorites]

This seems ... really cranky. Like, uh ... Worcestershire sauce has a shelf life of 3-4 years, post-opening. Mustard powder can last around 2 years. Neither are expensive, both can be bought in small quantities. Both are useful in a lot of recipes.

This was not a thing I could do in my previous, small apartment. Storage space is also a luxury. It's true that there is more than one recipe in the world with powdered mustard, but I never bought any until I moved in with roommates. Instead, my goal was to always buy the ingredients that were the most versatile, that I would use up the fastest, etc. Also, spices and things are expensive in an all-at-once, cash up front kind of way, even if they do last forever, so I tried to buy fewer of them back when I was paying 75% of my take home pay in rent since the amount of cash I had actually available at any given time was low.
posted by capricorn at 10:22 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm finding that with Neil deGrasse Tyson. As much as I admire and respect the man I kind of feel like he'd ruin any dinner party you invited him to.

Nope.
posted by maxsparber at 10:23 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Watching the video, I suppose Alton would object that my cheese was actually griddled. I like him, but not enough to correct that.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:23 AM on December 17, 2015

I mean, we have a potato masher in our kitchen drawer, and we make mashed potatoes once a year at Thanksgiving.

I have never seen a clearer case of the solution to a problem being right there in the statement of the problem itself.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:23 AM on December 17, 2015 [18 favorites]

is the solution to have mashed potatoes every day because i support that.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:25 AM on December 17, 2015 [54 favorites]

Oh and I own and have used that meat claws and find them actually way harder to use than forks. My fingers get in burned in the hot meat, they're too big to use in a bowl easily, I'm not used to the motion, and it's all kind of a mess.

You can't use forks to make yourself look like a bear or Wolverine or something, though, so I keep the claws.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:26 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Evanier seems grumpy.

My 7yo's are obsessed with cooking shows, and they are deeply obsessed with Good Eats. We've been recording the show off the Cooking Channel for months. They love it. Doesn't matter what the topic is or if we cook the food being focused on in our house, they'll watch.

Brown's goofy, teaches them about techniques, science and above all makes cooking look fun and that's all that matters. I keep waiting for a channel to re-run Dining on Asphalt.

My kids love Ace of Cakes. We get running commentaries. "Daddy, we're watching Duff make a Knight Rider cake!" They love Iron Chef: "Today's secret ingredient is Yogurt! Iron Chef Chen looks upset!" and Chopped: "Oh, that's gonna taste DISGUSTING." The shows all have one thing in common: they foster a love of cooking (and learning about cooking) and creativity. Fantastic viewing for kids.

Thanks for the link to the grilled cheese video. I'll add it to their playlist. :)
posted by zarq at 10:27 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

You need that chese than actually be grilled to do that (like halloumi)

I did mean halloumi! The link is to a google image search for halloumi. It's my favorite cheese.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:28 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Man, I feel like Mark really needs to spend some more time in the kitchen. When I started cooking I realized pretty quickly that I needed to throw away the idea of perfection if I was going to retain my sanity. Alton Brown shoots for that perfection, sure, but if all you take away from the show is "I'm going to try adding these spices next time" or "I'm going to try a different way of applying heat" that's something I think Brown would be perfectly happy to hear. Throwing your hands up in defeat is a really terrible response to someone trying to share his excitement about food.
posted by ReadEvalPost at 10:28 AM on December 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

Perhaps we should change this site's motto to "overthinking a cheese sandwich".
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:29 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Is this something I'd need to own a block of surplus government cheese to understand?
posted by hal9k at 10:30 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh and I own and have used that meat claws

They're called "hands."
posted by maxsparber at 10:30 AM on December 17, 2015 [15 favorites]

About the dry mustard: Beer Cheese Soup
posted by zarq at 10:30 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I do a lot of cooking and I feel like Alton makes every recipe into an algebra problem, and you had better be using the right brand of pencil to solve it! I feel he's the opposite of Julia Child, who certainly knows the right way to do things, but also knows intuition, creativity, spontaneity, joy and wine are cooking essentials.
I don't do Alton. Come by and I'll cook you anything, fuck the recipe, we'll have a great time and eat really really well.
posted by littlewater at 10:32 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

I used to like grilled cheese sandwiches and then I had grilled brie and pear sandwiches and now everything else just seems so pauper.
posted by maxsparber at 10:34 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

don't google anything remotely political about Alton Brown. It'll ruin him forever.

Yep, he's absolutely ruined for me after reading accounts of some of his live appearances.
posted by palegirl at 10:37 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Shredded cheddar with some american to keep it contained and a slice of apple makes a pretty good grilled cheese too, if you don't happen to have brie on hand. (I've never been a pear fan. I'd probably just use a little jam instead with brie.)
posted by Karmakaze at 10:39 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

When Brown (and Cooks' Kimble) came onto the scene, cooking shows were generally awful, either demos of fairly impractical things like Cordon Bleu by fancy french chefs, things you could never accomplish in twenty minutes after work, or the utterly terrible "suggestions" by Kraft to slather velveeta/miracle whip/cream cheese/cool whip on everything (often at the same time). Our parents had the Joy of Cooking and Julia Child through the 70s. The late 80s/early 90s, however, had little for new cooks who wanted to learn the basics that wasn't 30 years old. So Brown, before the ego, was a huge breath of fresh air.

Cooks' Illustrated was likewise so much better than the gendered wasteland of homemaker and lifestyle magazines. While some of these were real jewels, with great recipes, they were "ladies's magazines" in the worst and laziest marketing senses. By the early nineties too, many of those once great ships were "revamped" to become more about maximizing the ad pages than concerning themselves with good food.

Today, Brown has bought his own bullshit and, while still informative, has gone full-on bombastic hedgehog. Kimble has "retired". They're both past their prime, but I'll never forget that without them, we'd have the ordinary, Rachel Ray and Guy Fieri, pandering to the low end, while the high-end increasingly went towards incomprehensible wizardry. Brown and Kimble both, (along with a few others), did a lot to bring idea that everyday cooking could be great food, that the old recipes could be thought about and improved, and that understanding and even basic science had a real place in the kitchen.

But what they started continues, does continue even past their personal faults. Cooks is still a good magazine and a good place to start learning how to cook. Brown is doing a touring comedy show now with is more about laughs than cooking, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, a rebel from Kimble's empire, is doing today what he was doing in the early 90s.

It's a real shame when our heroes get old poorly.
posted by bonehead at 10:40 AM on December 17, 2015 [17 favorites]

I was reading this thread with only mild interest. I've never seen Alton Brown and didn't watch the video in the article, though I did skim the article. I don't have an opinion on cooking. Sometimes I cook. Sometimes I order. Sometimes I eat things that don't require cooking. Whatever.

Then I came to this.

Brown haters, you know there's this nice woman Rachael Ray who has a cooking show too

How can you call her a nice woman? I hate her. She's a liar. I made one of her 30 minute meals once. It took 3 hours and another 3 to clean the kitchen.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:41 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Mustard powder is also good with chicken. I found out (from Bourdain's show, btw) that roasting a chicken is actually pretty straightforward. I roast a chicken nearly every week*, I like to make a mix of salt, pepper, mustard powder, garlic powder, and thyme and spread it around the entire bird UNDER the skin (so it actually gets down into and flavors the meat, instead of sort of going to waste on the outside of that impermeable membrane).

I've also been fortunate to live in a couple cities where the grocery stores offer bulk spices. I can get enough mustard powder to last for many chickens for maybe 50 cents.

* because (a) cheap tasty protein, and (b) OMG golden crusty crunchy delicious skin drool drool
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:42 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I do a lot of cooking and I feel like Alton makes every recipe into an algebra problem, and you had better be using the right brand of pencil to solve it!

I guess maybe this is a mindset issue, because this is literally the exact opposite of how Brown has always come off to me. Because while yes, he goes into a lot of detail, that detail involves often explaining why he's doing something, and thus provides information about what you could do if you don't want to follow his recipe exactly. He's also no stranger to little asides where he outright tells the audience that they can skip a step or do something else, and it'll still be good (even if not the platonic ideal that he's making).

I've made a lot of his recipes over the years. Frequently, I (or my wife) will look at one and say, "uh, Alton, you're out of your mind", and just ... change something. The end result is still very good (and much better than it would've been without the basis he gave in his recipe). If anything, watching tons of Good Eats (from when it started) gave me the confidence and skills to take what he's doing, and do with it what I will, and for that I will be forever grateful.
posted by tocts at 10:43 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

"Don't cook your grilled cheese on a griddle! Instead, use foil to make a spatula into a tiny griddle, and put that on the grill."

Um. Sure. Sorry Alton, going to stick with olive oil + bread + whatever cheese I have on hand (sliced, not shredded, because why bother shredding it only to melt it next? It'll melt as a slice) - on a griddle. Where I also make PANCAKES and don't call them "griddle cakes"

Besides, this is America, based on the lingo I keep hearing, that's a "barbecue" not a grill, I thought anything on a grill was being "barbecued", so actually he made a barbecued cheese sandwich

(I don't even know any more, I call the goddamned thing a grill because I don't live in Texas)
posted by caution live frogs at 10:43 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

How can you call her a nice woman? I hate her. She's a liar. I made one of her 30 minute meals once. It took 3 hours and another 3 to clean the kitchen.

How could you mess up cheeseburger salad that badly?

Real talk? I love cheeseburger salad! And I didn't even have to watch her show to learn how to make it, I just heard of the concept of Rachael Ray's Cheeseburger Salad and that was more than enough for me to intuit how to make it on my own. That's efficient cooking instruction.

Also, when I want to make a quality version of something basic, I google the Alton Brown recipe, eliminate about 40% of the steps/ingredients, and it usually comes out just fine.
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:46 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

a barbecued cheese sandwich

Hmmm. HMMMMMMM.
*rubs chin thoughtfully*
*fires up the smoker*
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:46 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

On the other hand, Alton's method for making a dark rue in an iron skillet in the oven (so you don't have to stand over the stove whisking for 45 minutes), has improved my life. Measurably, in 45 minute increments. So there's that.
posted by This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things at 10:48 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wait... hold on a second... back up.... spices have shelf lives?

I'm pretty sure we have some spice jars kicking around that don't even have bar codes on them.
posted by bondcliff at 10:50 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

The ability of Brown to drain the fun out of something is unparalleled. He's like a fun vampire.

And to me, he made cooking so fun that I went from never cooking to cooking every night and enjoying it. He's like a fun-injecting supernatural creature, whatever that would be.

No judgement on people who don't like to cook, though, it's all good.
posted by Huck500 at 10:51 AM on December 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

This article is like saying watching Top Gear has only confirmed your conviction that you cannot drive a car, that driving a car is just way too hard for everyday ordinary non-expert to be expected to do. Alton Brown is not responsible for your crippling insecurities. If you don't enjoy cooking, that is fine. Not everyone has to like everything. Like any other human activity, it has its pleasurable bits and its tiresome ones, if that latter outweigh the former for you, no prob. Just this whining that cooking is this obviously crazy hard thing only specialists are capable of is so tiresome. Humanity has managed to do it for about 50,000 years or so before anybody herd of dry mustard or smoked paprika. You don't have to like it. Just own your dislike.
posted by Diablevert at 10:54 AM on December 17, 2015 [37 favorites]

Wait... hold on a second... back up.... spices have shelf lives?

Heh. I mean, in terms of, will spices ever go bad in a way that can make you sick? Not really. They can, however, lose a lot of their flavor over time. The same is true of Worcestershire sauce -- it's not really clear if it can go bad in the sense of food poisoning, but apparently after 3-4 years it may ... "change" in taste/consistency (dunno how to interpret that, exactly).
posted by tocts at 10:54 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, AB will always have a special place in my heart for baked roux (which, by the way, does not require an iron skillet - I make two batches of roux IN the two pots I will use to make two batches of gumbo), and I always found that even if I rarely make things exactly the way he makes them, I do understand better how the thing is made and that helps me when I make it.

Luckily, it's not mandatory to watch.

I have also moved on to Kenji Lopez-Alt, who does not seem to hate fun (though is lacking in puppets) or fat people. I make very few of his actual recipes either, at least not the ones that take 4 days to make a meatloaf or 7 hours to make perfect vegan nacho cheese sauce, but I use a lot of his best practices.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:55 AM on December 17, 2015

Videos like Brown's are a good litmus test for "does your brain process irony and hyperbole well". If you think he's literally saying your grilled cheese is bullshit if you don't use his super-fussy grill method, then probably you're not good at processing irony or hyperbole. Which is okay, brains differ. It reminds me of when that Jesse Thorn "1000% guaranteed success at creative work" essay got posted here awhile back and a huge number of people took literally a title that could not have been more clearly intended to be ironic.

Some recipes exist to make things easier. Some exist to make the "best" version of whatever, which means more work. Others, like this one, exist because they're absurd and result in something tasty and will therefore appeal to people who love to cook. That doesn't make the recipe's author History's Greatest Monster.

I don't disagree with a lot of the criticism about Brown or the huge startup costs related to cooking. Personally I think Brown got a lot less fun and a lot more judge-y/"edgy" (ugh) after he lost the weight, and the kinda-bigoted stuff and the fat hate is firmly in go-fuck-yourself territory, of course.

As for the startup costs, yeah, it sucks starting out. I remember how that was, being broke with an unstocked kitchen, looking at recipes and thinking "I have to buy three jars of spices to make this, holy SHIT". But once I had those spices, I had those spices and could go looking for other things to make with them. What else can I make with cumin? Roughly a billion things, turns out.

Now our kitchen's well stocked enough with staples that I can decide I want to make, say, chicken jalfrezi, and I gotta go get chicken thighs and a red bell pepper and I'm done. That situation only resolves like that, though, if you've made up your mind that you want to cook regularly. Those high up-front costs only get stretched out over dozens of dishes if you're going to stick with it. But if you hate cooking, or you're on the fence, or you barely have the time or resources to make that investment, that's not a minor hill to get over. It looks more like a cliff you have to scale.

And this is a huge shame. There's not really enough done in the celeb cooking world to address how to tackle this problem in a way that won't break you. There's not enough focus on things like menu planning, which is a critical skill to cook on a budget and, if done really well, can even turn leftovers into ingredients and therefore three meals into five.
posted by middleclasstool at 10:55 AM on December 17, 2015 [14 favorites]

But what they started continues, does continue even past their personal faults.

And let's not forget the Internet. More folks are cable cutting and so aren't getting Food Network or Cooking Channel, and there are even a few Youtube celebrity cooks now. The Food Wishes Channel, by Chef John, has 7 times as many subscribers as Alton Brown's official channel. And it's also interesting since Chef John keeps all his videos online, so you see how he's both improved his production value and refined his "Youtube voice" over a period of 8 years.

And here's Food Wishes recipe for Grilled Cheese.
posted by FJT at 10:58 AM on December 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Look, the secret of perfect grilled cheese sandwiches is a thin layer of mayonnaise on the outside of the bread.

...

You just changed my life.
posted by saul wright at 10:58 AM on December 17, 2015

Shredded cheddar with some american to keep it contained and a slice of apple makes a pretty good grilled cheese too, if you don't happen to have brie on hand.

grilled ham & cheese & apple butter though
posted by poffin boffin at 10:58 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I keep meaning to try the mayo on the bread thing for grilled cheese, but my wife hates mayo outside of a few specific contexts and I'm not sure sneaking that in there is a great idea for family harmony. I suppose I could try to sell it to her by telling her it's probably why the patty melts she likes at diners taste so good, but then again, she may not appreciate that info ...
posted by tocts at 11:00 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

The secret to grilled cheese is Vegemite.
posted by deadwax at 11:02 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Tell her the bread is coated in a wash of oil and egg yolk before frying. You're technically not lying.
posted by middleclasstool at 11:02 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Oh FFS, grow a spine. Cook whatever way you want to. Do you whine about everyone who disagrees with you on the internet? Do you let them change the way you live? What a sad life.
posted by maryr at 11:02 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I started a fight in a supermarket checkout line by bringing up grilled-cheese-with-mayo-versus-butter. It's an immensely polarizing subject.
posted by mikurski at 11:03 AM on December 17, 2015

This piece is like the anti-lifehack! post and it makes me angry. Now I am an angry person. I AM NOT MAKING YOU A SANDWICH.
posted by maryr at 11:04 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Alton and I parted ways the day I watched him demonstrate, in all of his patented "if you vary my directions by a single degree, all hell will break loose and the streets will run with blood" seriousness, the correct angle to hold your arm when tamping-down your espresso.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:04 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

This article is like saying watching Top Gear has only confirmed your conviction that you cannot drive a car

Yeah, exactly. I feel like a big part of Good Eats was the reductio ad absurdum of cooking - here's the technique we're discussing this episode, let's take it to its logical conclusion. And this article is sort of the same thing, but in the opposite direction - I cannot/will not do this kind of cooking, therefore cooking is a terrible thing and I will never cook again.
posted by backseatpilot at 11:05 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

the best grilled cheese is a BLT.

But there's not even any cheese! or grilling! That's not fair!

The secret to grilled cheese is Vegemite.

i wish I could say this isn't true because ew, Vegemite, but I've tried this and somehow it actually works. I mean, I'm not going to do it myself because hell no Vegemite is not welcome in my house, but someone made me one once and it was pretty tasty.
posted by Hoopo at 11:05 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

This piece is like the anti-lifehack! post and it makes me angry. Now I am an angry person.

Relax! Calm down! Here, I made you a grilled cheese. It has bacon, lettuce and tomato on it. And mayonnaise. And it's toasted instead of grilled. Also there's no cheese on it because that would ruin it.

It is the best grilled cheese you'll ever eat. The best.
posted by bondcliff at 11:07 AM on December 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

We have these threads like 17 times per year. And every time, the cookers are like "who are these people?" and every time, us non-cookers tell the cookers "hi, I'm that guy, it's called eating things that don't require cooking, like yogurt/salad/cheese/popcorn/PBJ/whatever," and every time, someone calls us "idiots" and sub-"decent" humans, and thus shall it be unto eternity because of the original sin of the Food Network, amen.

BTW, I want to clarify, I am not angry at the non-cookers. Cook, don't cook, it's your life and your time and your wallet. But don't blame it on someone else being better at it than you are. That is life, for fuck's sake.
posted by maryr at 11:08 AM on December 17, 2015

...I love BLTs.
posted by maryr at 11:08 AM on December 17, 2015

maybe if you freeze it first?

For the love of God, people, do not EVER freeze your cheese.
posted by monospace at 11:09 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

My failure to cook stems from my inability to plan. I can plan a 10 day vacation or a multimillion dollar project at work, but I cannot put together a menu plan + shopping list to save my life. That part of my brain is broken. Last night I ate a banana, some crackers, and beer for dinner.
posted by desjardins at 11:09 AM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

...I love BLTs.

Next year's menu is planned!

Are private jokes allowed here?
posted by bondcliff at 11:12 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Last night I ate a banana, some crackers, and beer for dinner.

Sure, banana beer bread. Nothing to be ashamed of there. Just tell people you make it deconstructed.
posted by maxsparber at 11:13 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Every time I hear Brown droning on and on about food in his fussy, nasally fashion I think of Lyle reacting to Ray's Sanitaco scheme: 'Here's your taco. The doctors did everything they could. I'm... I'm sorry.
posted by codacorolla at 11:13 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

You don't make grilled cheese sandwiches with grated cheese, ALTON.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 11:15 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

As for the startup costs, yeah, it sucks starting out. I remember how that was, being broke with an unstocked kitchen, looking at recipes and thinking "I have to buy three jars of spices to make this, holy SHIT". But once I had those spices, I had those spices and could go looking for other things to make with them. What else can I make with cumin? Roughly a billion things, turns out.

Also, this a hundred times. The costs suck at first. But then you can make so much shit for so long! Also: yes spices have an expiry date but ... I STILL USE THEM AND FEEL NO SHAME. And the food still tastes good. I've made 2 batches of the best fucking gingerbread cookies this year using a giant bag of long-expired powdered ginger and everyone loves them. A couple blends I made in the last 6 months, a ras hanout and a chickpea curry spice blend, also have a whole bunch of expired spices in them and it's still delicious, dammit. This is all within reason, of course. If something seems off about it, use your judgement, but with dried spices I use expired regularly if that's all I got available.
posted by Hoopo at 11:16 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

cheeseburger salad

This is most American dish I've ever heard of. AFAICT it's a cheeseburger chopped up in a pile, and that makes it a "salad"?
posted by EndsOfInvention at 11:16 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Can't be any more terrifying than the things the Germans label as salad.
posted by tocts at 11:18 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

My "fancy" grilled cheese these days is cheddar and a crumbly blue stilton and apple slices on some nice bread. But that's a rare thing. Usually it's buttered white bread and cheddar. And there's nothing wrong with that, Alton, it's pretty good and you know it.
posted by Hoopo at 11:20 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

"I did mean halloumi! The link is to a google image search for halloumi. It's my favorite cheese."

Sorry I thought you'd just googled "grilled cheese" and came upon those images, need to learn to read better I guess ; )
posted by coust at 11:21 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Reminder that Mark Evanier is an older comic book creative-type, with all the assorted baggage, krankery, and kookery that may (or may not) bring.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:21 AM on December 17, 2015

I STILL USE THEM AND FEEL NO SHAME

Why am I supposed to feel shame for using spices? They make things taste good. We have a giant shelf in a cabinet full of only spices, and they all get used all the time. Am I bad person for that?

I reject this notion that I should somehow feel bad because I enjoy making things in the kitchen.
posted by backseatpilot at 11:23 AM on December 17, 2015

Who are these people who can afford not to cook? We had another post on the Blue about this recently.

I don't know if it this is sarcastic, but taking it on face value, lots of people cannot afford to cook. I know how to cook and did it all the time. I am a fairly efficient person. We recently had a kid. There is a lot to do in the evenings now. So, the most ambitious cooking I do on weekdays is maybe a burger or a stir-fry had from frozen stuff. A lot of times that's too much, and we eat something microwaved. (And quite often, our son rejects the "main" meal after a few bites, and we break out the yogurt, cereal, fruits, and lunch meats for him.)

I am not even a single parent.
posted by ignignokt at 11:23 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

A salad is basically anything mixed with anything else. That's why meat suspended in gelatin can be a salad. Here are some of my favorite salads:

Green salad.
Snickers salad
Ambrosia salad (Alton Brown's!)
Dressed herring salad
posted by maxsparber at 11:23 AM on December 17, 2015

Oh FFS, grow a spine. Cook whatever way you want to. Do you whine about everyone who disagrees with you on the internet? Do you let them change the way you live? What a sad life.

This comment kind of hurt my feelings because I spent a long time being intimidated because there's almost no material out there for someone who wants to learn how to cook. I think the post was using grilled cheese as an example to make a larger point.
posted by zixyer at 11:23 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Cheeseburger salad is AFAIK a cheeseburger sans bun cut up over a salad. Also known as "what you eat at fast food places when you're on Atkins." I love cheeseburger salad, especially with those little grape tomatoes.

For mayo haters or the egg-allergic, Just Mayo (which is actually "just" emulsified oil and they just today resolved a little fuss with the FDA about that, but anyway butter is also sort of just emulsified oil) is actually kind of brilliant to have around for cooking purposes. I also highly recommend it for toasting hamburger buns.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:27 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, spices that are past their "expiration" date generally won't make you sick or anything like that, it's just that they get less potent/flavorful with time and exposure to air. You can use them, you just may have to increase the amount a little.

I've been reading Mark Evanier's blog for more than a decade, and the tone of this piece is one he hits from time to time that may be misunderstood - it's mock-curmudgeonly, but there's also some self-deprecation involved. By his own admission, he's not a "handy" sort of person or skilled at any of the domestic arts. But he's pretty much a live-and-let-live sort of guy, unless the subject is coleslaw or candy corn, so I hope no one here gets too mad about this.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 11:30 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I generally found Good Eats reasonably fun to watch, and any show that has an episode about how to use instant ramen in recipes can't be said to be *too* fussbudget. But the unitasker thing got a little old, especially when he whined about rice cookers. I like rice cookers because I can put in rice and water in a $10 machine and walk away for minutes or hours and return to perfect rice every time. And I use a lot of rice. I use my rice cooker a hell of a lot more than my theoretically multi-tasking food processor.
posted by tavella at 11:30 AM on December 17, 2015

Also, apart from the costs of building a pantry and set of tools, the process of learning to cook is also expensive. Like anything, you're probably going to have some failures. Wasting ~$15 dollars of ingredients that was supposed to feed you for 3 days is like a gut punch when you don't have money. At that point taking the same money and getting two take-out meals you know will taste good starts to seem like a better option. When I first left home I thought I was a bad cook precisely because of watching shows on the Food Network that didn't impart any real skills, and made stuff seem easy that wasn't. It wasn't until I started using YouTube for reference, and building up a basic stable of skills that I actually began to make stuff that wasn't just 'x number of necessary calories', but that I actually looked forward to eating.
posted by codacorolla at 11:31 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I didn't really have a beef with Alton Brown himself when Good Eats was on*, but man, did his fans make my butt itch.

It's great that that show inspired a new audience to get into cooking. That's really cool, and I am all for trying different approaches to get people interested in various topics. But holy cats, his audience was soooo smug. I don't know if it was because he attracted a naturally smug audience, or because he conveyed the smugness to them, but these goobers would show up all over the internet telling people that they were doing things wrong.

And said goobers were overwhelmingly inexperienced. They'd just been introduced to cooking themselves, but they'd barge in and start telling experienced cooks about all the things they were doing wrong. It was kind of the mansplaining dynamic, and in many cases, it took the form of mansplaining.

I mean, his approach is one approach. It appeals to the types of people who think you can 'science' everything, and that is great. If they enjoy it, they should continue enjoying it. But there are other ways to go about things, and his approach is not always useful for people who need to do regular sustenance cooking. Such as, for example, people who know that grilled cheese sandwiches are what you make when you need to make some food quickly and don't feel like expending too much effort.

There are other beginner cooking shows that appeal to different audiences. Rachael Ray's approach seems to work well for her audience, and Julia Child was and remains unparalleled at what she did. Some people like those. Some people really really don't want to cook at all.

There was just something about Good Eats that inspired a really annoying kind of evangelism that I haven't seen with other approaches to cooking.

* I do now. Those cooking game shows that are all about extreme food ruining are atrocious and disrespectful, and the "Food" Network should achieve sapience so it can be ashamed of itself.
posted by ernielundquist at 11:33 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

maryr: "Oh FFS, grow a spine. Cook whatever way you want to."

This is why I make my grilled cheeses like god intended to: on the toilet.
posted by boo_radley at 11:35 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

This is most American dish I've ever heard of. AFAICT it's a cheeseburger chopped up in a pile, and that makes it a "salad"?

Cheeseburger salad is AFAIK a cheeseburger sans bun cut up over a salad.

Dear god, you savages, no. You don't chop up a cheeseburger. You make little tiny individual cheeseburglets and add them to a regular green salad.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:39 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

There was just something about Good Eats that inspired a really annoying kind of evangelism that I haven't seen with other approaches to cooking.

Foodies and Geeks. If there are two groups who take their interests and obsessions to further extremes, I am not aware of them.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:41 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Food Wishes Channel, by Chef John, has 7 times as many subscribers as Alton Brown's official channel. And it's also interesting since Chef John keeps all his videos online, so you see how he's both improved his production value and refined his "Youtube voice" over a period of 8 years.

I generally can't stand Youtube voices, but I'll watch Food Wishes videos for things I would never consider cooking myself just for Chef John's voice. It's hypnotic.
posted by downtohisturtles at 11:41 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I don't understand the idea that start up costs are a barrier to learning how to cook.

You don't have to start with sous vide, All-Clad, and filet mignon. A used cast iron pan, a few eggs and some veggies and you're leaning how to cook. The same pan with some sliced chicken breasts and some more veggies and now you're learning to cook dinner.

Yes, there is a bit of a time investment but you don't have to cook every night. Even if you're breaking out the pan every couple of weeks you're still doing it. You're still learning. Start with the basics. Don't be fancy. Learn to make some proper eggs or pasta. Learn how to brown meat. Bingo, you're cooking with a $20.00 pan and $10 worth of ingredients. You're learning. Keep doing it, now you're perfecting it. Then maybe branch out a bit.

Cost should not be an excuse for a lot of people.

That said, there's certainly nothing wrong with not learning how to cook. I don't know how to paint and ain't nobody giving me shit for it. Do what you enjoy, don't do what you won't enjoy. Maybe try new things now and then though, just to see if you will or won't enjoy it.

But fuck anyone who makes you feel bad for the way you do it.
posted by bondcliff at 11:41 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I source my spines personally, and only use local, organic stock. But even with the advent of personal 3-D printers, growing your own spine is for highly trained connoisseurs, only.
posted by This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things at 11:41 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Good Eats was just hitting its stride right when I graduated college and was forced to learn to cook for myself (I had literally never cooked before). It was pretty easy to figure out which bits of Alton's schtick could be ignored and which were important, and I'm a pretty decent, low-fuss cook these days. I do most of the cooking in the ozzy household. I'm just saying that it's possible to have started from zero and taken the useful bits of Good Eats to heart without feeling smothered by the minutiae.

Ambrosia salad

I fucking love ambrosia. I brought it to a summer party this year where everybody told me ahead of time that they didn't like it and that it sounded gross. Everybody ate and enjoyed it. I made a shockingly large amount (oops) and got a photo the next morning of one of the hosts sitting on the patio eating the leftovers for breakfast. So suck it, ambrosia-haters.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:42 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

need to learn to read better I guess ; )

Oh, it's fine! I should have used a more straightforward link. :)
posted by everybody had matching towels at 11:44 AM on December 17, 2015

Why am I supposed to feel shame for using spices?

i intended to imply they were expired, but I failed
posted by Hoopo at 11:44 AM on December 17, 2015

This comment kind of hurt my feelings because I spent a long time being intimidated because there's almost no material out there for someone who wants to learn how to cook. I think the post was using grilled cheese as an example to make a larger point.

Well, 1) he knows how to make grilled cheese and has STOPPED doing it because someone else makes it differently. 2) The internet is full of material for people who want to learn to cook. I'm not saying this is awesome but boom, here is how to make grilled cheese. It's simple, it's straight forward. If you find Alton Brown intimidating, try Rachel Ray. Ask a friend. Ask your dad. Ask MeFi.

No one starts as Alton Brown. Alton Brown went to culinary school to become Alton Brown. Alton Brown spent a lot of time experimenting in the kitchen and learning about techniques and ingredients before be became Alton Brown.

If the post is trying to make a larger point, I'm even angrier because of COURSE we shouldn't stop cooking because Alton Brown says we're doing it wrong. We shouldn't stop driving because Top Gear says we're doing it wrong. We shouldn't stop programming or dancing or knitting or playing the guitar or brushing our teeth or sleeping because someone is better than us, because someone says they have a better technique, because we are corrected. Don't stop painting because Bob Ross makes it look easy. Don't stop running because you can't finish a marathon.

I'm not trying to pick on you, zixyer, sorry, your comment just set me off a bit. I do understand what you are saying. On the other hand..

This is why I make my grilled cheeses like god intended to: on the toilet.

boo radley, I shudder to think how you are melting that cheese.
posted by maryr at 11:47 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've been reading MetaFilter too long. Grilled cheese sandwiches always makes me think of this post.

I liked Good Eats because it appealed to the science side of me, the why and how of a particular technique. Some of his improvisations were inspiring (smoking salmon in a cardboard box with woodchips in an electric fryer) in the "only two numbers, one and infinity" sort of way: I don't need to use a store-bought dedicated smoker, but I also don't have to do it Alton's way.

Whatever bread, whatever cheese, cast iron skillet, and a blackening spice mix works for me, but YMMV, and that's a good thing. Let's swap recipes.
posted by a person of few words at 11:48 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I’ve said before that the world would be so much more civil if a certain amount of people didn’t imagine that everyone was talking down to them and take it to heart. And if people would actually quit talking down to other people. Surprisingly, or not, these are often the same people.

Unless I’m in a cooking contest I can’t imagine why I’d be intimidated comparing my food to someone else’s.
posted by bongo_x at 11:53 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love all of you people that don't cook.
I cook a lot and I often have too much.
I'm bringing dumplings/roast pork/squash soup etc to my neighbors all the time.
I also need lovely and witty people to talk with me as I stir that roux for 45 minutes, and then have a seat at my giant dinner party table.
I need you, you non-cookers, you give my hobby direction and support.
posted by littlewater at 11:55 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Why I do cook. Wine, wine, wine, wine.
posted by Drinky Die at 11:55 AM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Everyone should know how to cook. If you use what someone else says as an excuse to stay out of the kitchen then you're a bigger idiot than whatever that person said (or something like that).

I literally left MetaFilter for half a year once because of a comment like this, about another subject. Funnily enough, cjorgensen, you left that other comment too.

Recently, I graduated from cooking by following recipes to cooking by putting ingredients together that I know work. It's genuinely thrilling. It's also severely limited my recipes' palettes, because the list of ingredients I know well enough to mix 'em together is basically just meats, vegetables, and a couple odds and ends here and there. But it means that, for the first time, I can cook on my own schedule, make something no matter how little time I've got, and know that it'll be something I want to eat when I'm hungry later on (versus delicious meals that I'm not familiar with to go to when I'm starving or else that don't meet my dietary needs at a given point during the day).

I started cooking when I was 19, and it's taken me more than half a decade to get to the point where I really feel like I'm cooking on my own.

My recipes these days are crude, of course. I wouldn't dare serve them to anybody else. I'll still follow other people's recipes from time to time, and risk that occasionally I blow money on a meal that I just literally won't touch. I've got the time and money to waste on things like that. I'm also an unmarried guy in his midtwenties who owes virtually nothing to anybody, and can spend a weekend futzing in the kitchen without a care or a worry in the world.

Some days, I'll run to the corner store, buy Velveeta or Chef Boyardee or Pop Tarts or whatever else, and chow down. Those are the days where I don't have it in me, emotionally, to make something as basic as a spinach salad (and where nothing I can quickly prepare would satiate me the way that pre-made meals can—unless you count a huge plate of pasta, which isn't actually any better for me when I'm in those moods). I'm so damn proud of myself for getting to the point in my life where those days happen less frequently than once per week. I've gotten there by a mixture of extraordinary luck in my personal life, enough so that my emotional reserves have expanded massively, and by having enough time and enough resources to have juuuuuust broad enough of a palette, after 6-and-change years, to know how to keep myself away from those troughs.

Not knowing how to do a thing doesn't make you an idiot. I'm a pretty smart guy, and I'd call myself pretty cultured too. I just grew up in a household where my dad cooked and that was that, and where, if I was home alone and hungry, I'd just make a pot of Kraft or eat a carrot or something. When I got to college and met people who could cook—including some fellow MeFites—I felt extraordinarily insecure about myself. I still do. I'm prickly when people try to offer me cooking advice because it makes me feel like an idiot. Even without them telling me that I'm a "big idiot", like you just did.

I'm not as insecure about cooking as I am about the thing that you said that drove me away from this place for half a year, but I'm sure there are people here that are. I'd like to request that you reconsider saying things like that before you say them. They hurt people, sometimes people you know, other times people you don't, and sometimes they won't bother to tell you that you've hurt them. I think you're a smart and talented guy—didn't I make an FPP of a series of poems you wrote, once?—but these sorts of attitudes are more hurtful than you maybe know.
posted by rorgy at 11:58 AM on December 17, 2015 [13 favorites]

Grilled cheese is such an interesting thing for people to focus on perfecting. I guess because it's so simple, just bread, cheese, and some kind of fat. I've certainly had plenty of fancy ones, but I don't think they are really any better than the one I make at home with white bread and good american cheese, as long as I don't burn it. And I've certainly had fancy grilled cheeses that just didn't work, and were greasy or had an odd cheese taste or weird fillings. So I just can't get hung up on this perfection thing.
posted by smackfu at 12:00 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

One reason to grate your cheese: It's an easy way to thoroughly combine multiple cheeses with some spices. My go-to mix for omelettes, grilled cheese, or mac and cheese is half extra sharp cheddar and half smoked gouda or gruyere. Add a little pepper, a bit of oregano or parsley, the tiniest dashes of garlic, onion, and cumin powder that you can manage, some cayenne and/or chile powder, and a shake or two of paprika. (For mac and cheese, I also add some romano or parmesan.) Toss it all together and in a couple of minutes you have awesome, meltable cheese tailored to your taste and mood.
posted by WCWedin at 12:01 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Cost should not be an excuse for a lot of people.

Maybe you should read the thread for reasons people have already given. Here's a digest (heh):

> If you don't know how to cook, then you likely don't know how to buy cheap and easy ingredients / tools. You're right. Buying an effective pan and a carton of eggs is relatively inexpensive. However, depending on your upbringing you may know this, or you may not. If your exposure to food culture is a bunch of celebrity chefs hawking designer equipment and a fantasy of luxury (not saying Brown fits this bill), then you're going to have an unrealistic idea of the cost.

> Failures have not only economic costs, but motivational costs. Cooking something terrible and facing both shame and loss of money is not going to inspire you to greater heights. Once again, upbringing is going to give you basic skills / a resilience to failure. However, if your primary exposure to food culture are a bunch of celebrity chefs who intentionally make difficult recipes look easy (once again, for the benefit of the fantasy of the stage), then you won't be able to power past early failures or learn from them.

> Actually, food is pretty fucking expensive. Food prices have been skyrocketing in comparison to wages over the past few years. It's funny that you picked eggs as your example, because those are up like 20% over the past year because of disease outbreaks. Wasting food (letting ingredients go bad, inedible dishes, stuff that's filling but bland and soul crushing) adds up. Poor people aren't stupid. They know the value of something that tastes good, versus something that has the very real possibility of being depressing / dangerous to eat, or something that their kids won't touch. Also, some of us are lucky enough to live in a place with a lot of options for food (thereby driving down prices), but others aren't. If you don't have a car, then your options shrink even more. Once again, celebrity chef food culture never really says how to go to the grocery store and plan a menu! This is, perhaps, one of the most important things about cooking for yourself! Being able to cost out a meal, figure out how long you'll want to eat it for, how much each serving will cost, and if you can use ingredients in other dishes to ameliorate the cost is pretty fucking tough, and never once covered in any TV chef's show that I've seen.
posted by codacorolla at 12:01 PM on December 17, 2015 [15 favorites]

This comment kind of hurt my feelings because I spent a long time being intimidated because there's almost no material out there for someone who wants to learn how to cook.

I'm a little confused by this - what kind of material were you looking for? I taught myself how to cook from cookbooks and websites geared to college students and beginners and never really found there to be a lack of information out there.

Searching for "cookbooks for beginners" on Amazon results in over 7,000 results.

A cooking TV show host I watched a lot while teaching myself to cook is Ellie Krieger. I have no idea if she has a current show, but she made me feel like I too could cook healthy meals, and I have a few of her cookbooks.

I have enjoyed watching Alton Brown on occasion but I certainly could not care less what he thinks about my grilled cheese. I do use his recipe for Welsh Rarebit though, which is something my husband asked me to make as a comfort food for him, but which I had no experience with the first time. I have to admit, though, that this recipe is the only reason we have a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in our cupboard!
posted by Squeak Attack at 12:02 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

If the post is trying to make a larger point, I'm even angrier because of COURSE we shouldn't stop cooking because Alton Brown says we're doing it wrong.

That's not what I gathered to be the main point of the article at all. I thought that was just a humorous framing device that wasn't really intended to be taken seriously. It was actually about how, as someone who doesn't cook, most recipes you find will include several ingredients that you won't be able to use up, some of them unusual and hard to find in a grocery store. They'll use overcomplicated techniques and specialized equipment without fully explaining them that novices have no hope of being able to replicate.

Yeah, if you're an experienced cook you'll be able to tell which parts of the recipe are necessary and which parts are optional, and how to tweak it to accommodate the ingredients that you have on hand. But that doesn't really help someone who is still learning.
posted by zixyer at 12:06 PM on December 17, 2015

These threads could be automated, much like threads about coffee.

That said, the way to make cooking and cleanup pleasant(er) are: booze (pacing is important, mind) and music.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:09 PM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Who are these people who can afford not to cook? We had another post on the Blue about this recently.

In my brokest of times it was always cheaper to eat lunch and dinner off of the dollar menu at the fast food places around me than it was to buy and cook my own food.
posted by kimberussell at 12:11 PM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Cooking all the meals is often right there in the second shift along with cleaning, schedule keeping, emotional labor, etc. So there was a period of resentment against it (hence, as mentioned above, things like the I Hate To Cook Book), and also a time period when schools were getting pressure to de-gender their electives and focus more on the three R's. Home economics got dropped in a lot of schools around then, either because of the gender thing or to make room for computer classes. Fast food became more widely available and pre-prepared foods got better and easier to prepare. Add long work hours, urbanization making gardens less practical, and we got a generation or so of people where cooking dropped out of the common skill set.

A lot of the Good Eats excesses remind me of the stereotype of hipsters knitting as a hobby. It's taking something that can be both a practical life skill and treating it like recreation.
posted by Karmakaze at 12:15 PM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

i wouldn't mind being able to cook; at the very least it would likely save me some money. but my kitchen is shitty and cramped, and the only food prep surface is chest height. and more importantly i have (hopefully temporary) limited use of my left hand, so i can't do a lot of basic food prep. or i CAN, but it takes so long and i'm in so much avoidable pain afterwards that it's an immense fucking unnecessary ordeal when i could've spent $5 more to get everything pre-cut. i only have so many pain-free hours in the day and standing on a wobbly stepladder chopping vegetables is about as high on my list of "fun things to do when i'm not in hellish pain" as is "being trapped in a windowless room with 10,000 screaming gassy babies".

also fuck cast iron pans, fuck them to hell and back. fuck those stupid shitty 50 ton pieces of shit forever, i hope they all die.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:20 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

poffin boffin, you could try recipes that don't require chopping (or not much). I am being 100% serious here, AskMe would help.
posted by maryr at 12:22 PM on December 17, 2015

i know, i have an askme planned for it but right now i want to pretend that the problem is going to go away by itself
posted by poffin boffin at 12:23 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is most American dish I've ever heard of. AFAICT it's a cheeseburger chopped up in a pile, and that makes it a "salad"?

Subtract the cheese and add lime and fish sauce, and I'm pretty sure you've got an approximation of larb. Who knew that the only thing separating America from Laos was cheese and some sauce?
posted by delicious-luncheon at 12:27 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've never heard of the mayo thing. Will have to try that!

I use margarine on my grilled cheese sandwiches, though. Because it's easier to spread than butter and browns/toasts better than oil (imo, oils get too hot or something and the bread doesn't toast right). The insides are two slices of Munster and one slice of American. My "secret" is to put a lid on the pan, because that lets the cheese melt better. Imo the most important component of a good grilled cheese sandwich is the tomato soup to dip it in. Ketchup will do in the summer, though.

Alton Brown's grilled cheese grilled cheese sandwiches looked disgusting. I don't want goopy, slimy cheese within gigantic slices of rock-hard toast. But to each her own.

I think his pedantry is sort of his schtick and is meant to be taken as a dry joke. I mean, "natural chunk charcoal"? STFU :)

But to one-up his pedantry anyway -- Mr. Brown, it's a *cheese sandwich* that's grilled. Not grilled cheese in a sandwich.

Personally, I cook to eat, not as a hobby. Cooking as a hobby is cool....but I spend most of my waking hours working in a restaurant, and have an enormous appetite that means "feeding the beast" really frequently, *and* was raised in a French-Jewish household where food was a pretty constant obsession. So any time that I DON'T have to spend thinking about or preparing or eating or cleaning up food is a boon and I am not going to waste it futzing about food YET SOME MORE. For me, food is work.

The upside is that I'm completely comfortable with food and cooking. Just much more goal-oriented about it than a hobbyist would be.

I think Alton Brown seems more suited to hobbyist cooks because he's much more about the process of cooking than he is with the goal of getting people fed. That's not an insult! The process(es) of cooking can be fascinating, and tbh, I enjoy his "Mad Scientist in the Kitchen!" conceit. But not being a hobbyist and being more goal oriented when it comes to cooking/eating isn't WRONG. It's just not what Alton Brown does.
posted by rue72 at 12:28 PM on December 17, 2015

Actually, food is pretty fucking expensive.

Yes, but food is also necessary. I mean, you can't not buy food, whether you're buying eggs at the grocery store or a cheeseburger at McDonalds, you have to eat one way or another. I brought up eggs and chicken because they're common, easy-to-find ingredients. They're also forgiving. It takes a lot before cooking an egg or chicken breast makes it truly inedible. It might not be great, but it will have calories.

Certainly for most people they've had other exposure to cooking beyond The Food Network. Most people have had people cook for them, a parent, a friend. Again, I'm not talking actual fancy recipes here, I'm talking frying an egg or cooking a piece of chicken. That's still cooking.

And to cook you need a pan and an egg and nothing more. That was my point. It doesn't have to be expensive.

I guess it's kind of like making music. We all see professionals with their $10,000 guitars but that doesn't mean you can't buy a $30.00 ukulele and learn 3 chords. More people should know that.
posted by bondcliff at 12:29 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

But fuck anyone who makes you feel bad for the way you do it.

This is the most important part of encouraging people to cook. I don't much (and probably never will now--low spoons=choosing priorities & cooking isn't one of mine), but one of the reasons I got mildly traumatized by the idea was that my ex was a foodie. I made food to eat and used shortcuts; he wanted everything from scratch (e.g., no dried onion, you had to chop it fresh, was a pet peeve. Also no crushed garlic from the jar). So my food was unsatisfactory and he took over the kitchen, including my family recipes, which I was apparently DOING WRONG. Even though part of the reason I was doing them that way was, you know, being tired because of chronic illness.

And then he had to make everything in hand-wash-only Calphalon pans and dirty every one he could manage to make mac and cheese. It was delicious, but I hated it because he got mad when I did a poor job of hand-washing the pan I couldn't even lift by myself. I realize this is a very personal problem, but when Evanier talks about Alton Brown, I've lived with a guy like that, and I feel his pain in an up close and personal way.
posted by immlass at 12:33 PM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

if i invent a time machine you can borrow it to go back in time and drop one of his dumb fancy pans right on his toes
posted by poffin boffin at 12:35 PM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

But the unitasker thing got a little old, especially when he whined about rice cookers.

Whaaat? In what world is a rice cooker a unitasker? Is a pot of boiling water a unitasker, Mr. Brown? So if you take a pot of boiling water, and add the function of a timer, suddenly it's only good for one thing? Sounds like a failure of imagination to me. My rice cooker hardly gets used for rice, for example--it sees a lot more oatmeal and steamed vegetables.

poffin boffin, if it helps, I've seen an increasing trend for grocery stores to carry pre-chopped onions, celery, peppers, mushrooms, and the like. I've even seen premade mirepoix at Trader Joe's, probably because they could put a fancy French name on it. It's increased the amount of cooking I do by an order of magnitude at least.
posted by darksasami at 12:36 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

That was my point. It doesn't have to be expensive.

You still don't seem to be understanding, so I'll condense it to two sentences for you.

Cooking is a risk that is mediated by skill and experience, which are expensive to obtain. Unless you're fortunate to be born into an environment where these costs are mitigated by your upbringing, then obtaining them later in life can be prohibitively expensive in an emotional and financial sense, despite the obvious banal truth that frying an egg is cheap.
posted by codacorolla at 12:36 PM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

The whole point of Alton Brown's show seemed, to me at least, as reducing standard techniques to the general theory behind the technique, then showing a nonstandard alternative that, following this theory, works however unexpectedly or counterintuitively. You don't have to make your grilled cheese like he does, but you can. You can also do the same thing in a toaster oven just as legitimately. Same with his cardboard smoker, bacon making setup, clay planter oven, and so on. Unfortunately, this idea of turning theory into practice is lost on many fans, who interpret his example as the One True Way, which as far as I can tell was never his intention. His live show was hilarious with his truly over-the-top methods of making ice cream and pizza, certainly methods that nobody sane would ever try off stage, but the methods (freezing ice cream mix with a CO2 extinguisher; cooking pizza with old-fashioned stage lights) showed that the theory behind the methods worked, now matter how absurd. Mr. Evanier's commentary seems defeatist and deliberately missing this point, but I guess that's the style of his blog.
posted by Blackanvil at 12:38 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

But fuck anyone who makes you feel bad for the way you do it.

Shout it from the rooftops! And, ugh, it's not even like there's a fine line between being helpful and being a dick. I do a lot of cooking, I'm getting better at it, and I'm at a point where I feel pretty comfortable cooking for other people, many of whom are kitchen geniuses. "Do you have any [x]? I think it would be good in this" is miiiiiles from "ugh, why are you using that type of spoon?"
posted by everybody had matching towels at 12:43 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Everyone knows the secret ingredients to a perfect grilled cheese are butter, love and tomato soup for dippin'.

Not in Colorado. Butter and love, yes, but instead of dipping in tomato soup you want to smother the sandwich in some good (pork or veggie) green chile.

Or whatever makes you happy and fed.
posted by JiBB at 12:43 PM on December 17, 2015

Well, I'm not sure I totally agree with you there, codacorolla, and I'm not sure you're quite understanding what I'm saying, but since you can't seem to make your point without coming off as though you're insulting me personally, I'll just sit here and quietly enjoy my grilled cheese sandwich*.

*It's actually a BLT.
posted by bondcliff at 12:47 PM on December 17, 2015

"ugh, why are you using that type of spoon?"

If you want to have some fun, next time there's a thread about ribs, mention the best ribs you ever had and how they fell off the bone. Purists will come out of the woodwork to tell you how you couldn't possibly have enjoyed those ribs because once they fall off the bone they are ruined. RUINED! They'll throw in some science to explain their reasoning, something about melting points of connective tissue or whatever, but the thing about cooking is that if you enjoy the result then you've done it correctly, science and purists be dammed.
posted by bondcliff at 12:50 PM on December 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I admit to suspicion of people who use valuable working time to cook when they be eating Soylent instead. Honestly, cooking for yourself is as inefficient and obsolete as getting up and talking to the person in the next cubicle over when you can just text them. This with flavor and texture is as bad as the people who go visit national parks instead of watching YouTube videos of them.

The time savings in simply tossing the mix in, shaking the bottle and then getting back to work can't be understated. I mean granted, the first time I tried it I didn't fasten the lid correctly, and it took several hours to clean the Soylent off the kitchen surfaces. And the cleaner I used somehow combined with the Soylent to remove the surface of the counter. And the resulting goop clogged the drains for a week. But other than that, the efficiency in nutrition breaks is amazing.
posted by happyroach at 12:54 PM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

poffin boffin, if it helps, I've seen an increasing trend for grocery stores to carry pre-chopped onions, celery, peppers, mushrooms, and the like.

Also if you're cooking a small recipe (for one or two) and your grocery store has a pay-by-weight salad bar, you can use that for pre-chopped/sliced vegetables and only get the amount you want (like, half a cup of celery rather than half a pound of packaged chopped celery that goes bad before the next time you want to use it.)
posted by Daily Alice at 12:55 PM on December 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

If you want to have some fun, next time there's a thread about ribs, mention the best ribs you ever had and how they fell off the bone.

Yes, I’m sure I’d like my steak well done. Burned on the inside please.
Afterwards I’m going to Starbucks to have some of their completely wrong coffee.
posted by bongo_x at 1:04 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yes, but food is also necessary. I mean, you can't not buy food, whether you're buying eggs at the grocery store or a cheeseburger at McDonalds, you have to eat one way or another.

Ugh I wrote a long breakdown of why "just eggs!" is actually hella more expensive --by percentage anyway-- and less efficient than McDonalds cheeseburgers (using actual receipts from my actual life!) but my browser crashed. But anyway it's true, and if you're the sort of person who's on a tight enough cashflow the McD's is not only a sound decision but like, hands down the winner.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:05 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

if you're the sort of person who's on a tight enough cashflow the McD's is not only a sound decision but like, hands down the winner.

But once you've put it in the blender, the cheeseburger is a rather unsatisfying substitute for Soylent.
posted by happyroach at 1:14 PM on December 17, 2015

Soylent Purple is Grimace!
posted by This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things at 1:19 PM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm definitely on team "Brown helped ease my food anxiety".

I can trust engineers that they can make the plane work. But I have serious control issues with food. If it had sauce, it felt like another trick to get me to eat secret vegetables and cow tongue. So learning to cook was the primary way towards feeling comfortable with eating more dishes. And learning why you did specific techniques over other techniques helped me feel more comfortable cooking.

For me, Brown's complicated recipes gave me a better understanding of the underlying techniques. So knowing why he chose his complicated techniques actually made me feel confident enough to veer from his recipe. Other recipes tend to be so dense I need to make it three or four times before I feel comfortable tweaking it to work for my lifestyle.

It's funny because my ex and I both really enjoyed Good Eats. But he only wanted to cook if he could get the best ingredients and make a relatively complicated dish. I wanted to learn how to feed myself even if I was too depressed to leave the house or interact with delivery folks.
posted by politikitty at 1:21 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

A BM and medium fries is around 800 Calories for $6 USD, the internet tells me.

Soylent (as a dry powder) is $1.54 per 400 Calories, so around $3 USD for about the same energy content.

But wait!

A bag of dried rice from Walmart is 2.8¢/oz (USD again). 1 oz dry rice makes 2 oz cooked. An ounce of cooked rice is about 40 Calories, so 20 oz of cooked rice (800 Cal) is around 28&cent, 1/10th as much as even the Soylent.

Blah, blah nutritional goodness, blah (add some beans to the rice and you're fine). Point is M.F.K. Fisher still knows How to Feed the Wolf.
posted by bonehead at 1:23 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

It doesn't have to be expensive.

Apparently someone hasn't impulse-bought a family-size cask of Armagnac at CostCo. I am sooo over ortolan, but I still have, like, 13 litres of the stuff to work through. And it doesn't go bad!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 1:25 PM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Look, the secret of perfect grilled cheese sandwiches is a thin layer of mayonnaise on the outside of the bread.

Wait -- a thin layer of mayonnaise?

...... oh.
posted by webmutant at 1:30 PM on December 17, 2015

family-size cask of Armagnac

I've always found "family size" on booze hilarious. I noticed it in the US on large boxes of beer sometimes. It's like, what, the extra 6 pack is for the kids?
posted by Hoopo at 1:32 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yes?
posted by This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things at 1:34 PM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Hint from Abelard: Your best meat shredder is actually your KitchenAid mixer.
posted by NedKoppel at 1:44 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

P.S. Alton Brown didn't start out as such a finicky instructor. Watch episode 1, season 1 of Good Eats for some of the best, most basic cooking advice you can get. You know, I think it's safe to say John Wayne ate steak...
posted by NedKoppel at 1:52 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

A BM and medium fries is around 800 Calories for $6 USD, the internet tells me.

NO. No matter how good those fries are.
posted by ernielundquist at 1:57 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wow, this post really stirred up an illuminating food-based discussion, and I wish I could say I knew all along it would.

The comments about cooking aptitude and the cost of food reminded me of a question I asked my mom as a kid.

"Mom," I said, "since food is so expensive for a lot of people, why doesn't somebody invent a cheap food that's nutritionally complete, like animal feed? It wouldn't be anybody's first choice, but it would be better than starving."

She might have said something about how food is for more than mere sustenance, it has a social value, and having to eat People Chow would be more demeaning and oppressive than living on government peanut butter, but she didn't say that.

What she said was, "If that stuff ever really caught on, the price would just skyrocket, and the poor people it was meant for wouldn't be able to afford it any more."
posted by Flexagon at 2:16 PM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I've always found "family size" on booze hilarious.

I think what that means is - if you're having to deal with a family, you're gonna be grateful for more booze!
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:26 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

So... is this the right thread to point out that mixing powder and water was too much work for the faithful? Fortunately, those fine folks at Soylent have come out with Soylent 2.0: Delicious Soylent in convenient ready-to-drink 400 kcal. bottles.

(I'm still waiting for my free-range refried beans to finish cooking before I can put them on a plate.)
posted by fragmede at 2:30 PM on December 17, 2015

I liked the balance of warmth and precision David Rosengarten brought to his show Taste on the Food Network back in the 90s. For example, here's his variations on the BLT from 1995. Look at that spare set! The slight shakiness to some of the shots! This was probably a single take, too! (You will need to maximize the video to see it properly in all its 4:3 glory).

He's got a YouTube channel now, with much shorter videos, edited in the modern fashion, but pretty much the same old David. (Warning: that YT home page will autoplay the latest video, which I can forgive because the good man makes the case for chilling some reds). Here's his Tuna sandwich on Wonder Bread.
posted by maudlin at 2:33 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

(I'm still waiting for my free-range refried beans to finish cooking before I can put them on a plate.)

Yeeesh, get a proper bowl, or at least a beanplate.
posted by bongo_x at 2:45 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Alton Brown is a bit obnoxious in a know-it-all kind of way, but this blogpost is absurd. If you like your grilled cheese with white bread and american cheese slices on a frying pan, go for it. Alton Brown can't actually see you through the television. I cook a lot, so I have all the things he calls for (although I'm not actually going to use a charcoal grill in December), and his version of grilled cheese sounds worth trying, but I'm capable of independent thought regarding my tastes in food and would do something entirely different if asked to make a grilled cheese (hint: it would involve shallots) because my life is not at the mercy of cooking show hosts.
posted by dis_integration at 2:47 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

How to make the perfect Welsh Rarebit.
posted by clavdivs at 3:06 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

That grilled cheese recipe is gonzo. Nobody does that. These shows are like pornography for food: unreal for the vast majority of us.

I couldn't watch Late Alton because I felt sadly biased against a guy who was surviving largely on almonds at the time (and zomg, that set). His food science stuff was good but I felt he'd run clear of that about halfway through. Taking the time to demystify some of the things one does when cooking were super-helpful. The one thing he convinced me of over many seasons was that DRESSING DOES NOT BELONG IN THE BIRD (and I have a birdist family).

I've run hot and cold with both guys but the intersection of Anthony Bourdain, Alton Brown and a strip club was the one high-point to an otherwise largely unwatchable series for Bourdain.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 3:11 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

That's not a grilled cheese recipe so much as it's a half-assed raclette. I'm a little surprised he didn't go the whole way with it and insist on using a big hunk of pre-heated granite tile as his heat source. He missed a great opportunity for a new device here, IMO.
posted by bonehead at 3:25 PM on December 17, 2015

Alton's method for making a dark rue in an iron skillet in the oven

Everything I try to cook ends up as a dark rue in an iron skillet.
posted by MrBadExample at 3:26 PM on December 17, 2015 [13 favorites]

I use margarine on my grilled cheese sandwiches, though. Because it's easier to spread than butter and browns/toasts better than oil (imo, oils get too hot or something and the bread doesn't toast right).

I discovered the secret to using butter without destroying the bread this year: put it in the pan, not on the bread. I melt a little chunk of butter in the pan on low & spread it until the puddle is slightly larger than the bread, then place the bread on it & push it around with my finger to soak up the butter. Remove & repeat with the second slice, but instead of removing it just add your cheese and the top slice of bread. Then cover the pan with a lid to hold in the heat and help melt the cheese.

Using mayo instead of butter made the sandwich too greasy for my liking.
posted by belladonna at 3:41 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Butter in the pan is my method as well. Much better coverage.
posted by tocts at 3:43 PM on December 17, 2015

Grilled cheese with avocado, but it's honestly better with something other than American cheese. Or grilled cheese with green chile.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:50 PM on December 17, 2015

free-range refried beans

good of those bean ranchers to let the beans wander about and not be locked up in tiny cages for their whole lives.
posted by Hoopo at 3:51 PM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

don't google anything remotely political about Alton Brown. It'll ruin him forever.
...
That's true of pretty much anybody.

my hero turned out to be a jackass, a bit of a bigot, and a hypocrite
posted by Greg Nog at 10:38 AM on December 17 [6 favorites +] [!]

Oh.... my.
posted by yeolcoatl at 3:52 PM on December 17, 2015

tavella, darksasami But the unitasker thing got a little old, especially when he whined about rice cookers.

Whaaat? In what world is a rice cooker a unitasker?

<voice type="Don LaFontaine">In a world... where Roger Ebert never existed... One man... misunderstands the rice cooker.</voice>
posted by yeolcoatl at 3:58 PM on December 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

One of the most delicious, dead simple recipes is traditional pesto. But, IMO, you really can't use a cheap substitute for the Parmigiano Reggiano, nor fresh basil or garlic, and I've always stuck with pine nuts - not a fan of walnuts. It takes minutes to make in a food processor, and it gets better if you let it sit for at least a few hours before serving. I like some variations, but the traditional recipe is amazing, and anyone with a food processor can make it in no time.
posted by krinklyfig at 4:10 PM on December 17, 2015

I took it as a point of personal triumph when Mark Bittman admitted that bean canning was actually a science and that the canneries had it worked out pretty well and yes, it is OK to use canned beans in many recipes. SUCK IT, OVERNIGHT PREPARATION!

It's on topic, it's about beans and pedantry.
posted by maryr at 4:31 PM on December 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

I'm a homemaker and I love to cook. I make dinner (and lunch, and sometimes breakfast--if not cereal), and it's not easy, but it's definitely worth it.

It's tremendously rewarding to make a gourmet (or semi-gourmet) dish that tastes like it came from a restaurant.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz is my cooking go-to. She took me from beginner to apprentice, and then it was all learning curve and practice.

Alton Brown is hit or miss, but I always go back to his ginger candy recipe (which is darn simple, fwiw and delicious, not to mention a side bonus of ginger syrup for ginger beer (syrup, lemon juice, bitters, and club soda)).
posted by mrgrimm at 4:41 PM on December 17, 2015

I think there was a time - before about the mid-90's and the Food Channel paved the way for internet foodie culture - where it was acceptable to hate cooking. Remember the I Hate To Cook Book? It's still in print, which should tell you something. I think there are a lot of secret hate-to-cook people still out there.

One of the unsung heroes of the late 1980s and early 1990s is Bob Sloan, who wrote a very basic book called Dad's Own Cookbook -- sure, the premise that "men can't cook and it's terrifying when they try but this is the 1990s, so grab an apron guys!" is eye-rollingly sexist, buuuuuuut the recipes are really good for people who don't like to cook but have to for one reason or another. I have the Thanksgiving stuffing recipe memorized. His Working Stiff Cookbook -- predicated on the notion that dinner should not take a lot of time or effort after a full day at the office -- is another good choice for hate-to-cook types who still have to do it.

Bob Sloan! Hero to those of us who cook because we genuinely can't afford to go out as often as we like.
posted by sobell at 5:02 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm not a fan of Alton Brown, mostly because every time I watch his show it seems like he's licking his fingers.

I'm very open to new cooking and eating ideas but my wife sometimes calls me "potato shogun" because I once got annoyed when she was eating a spud the wrong way.

Anyway, Evanier on grilled cheese? No way.

CHEESE DIP!
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 6:38 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Can this be the part of the thread where we talk about cookbooks for non-cooks? Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen is one of my longtime favorites.
posted by MrBadExample at 9:46 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Even if you're not (yet) a fan of Achewood, Chris Onstad's Achewood Cookbook is pretty nifty. It's not what I'd call a comprehensive tome, but it's got some easy recipes written in a simple and amusing style. I learned how to make kick-ass oven fries (also why the recipe works so well) from it.

However, I cannot recommend the Vegetables Delight.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:06 PM on December 17, 2015

FJT: “Well, I'm just going to be a little bit passive aggressive and just say, don't google anything remotely political about Alton Brown. It'll ruin him forever. ”

Well, I had to look. It's not surprising. He might have been born elsewhere, but he was raised in Georgia. I do object to saying he, "grew up in a small town." Marietta is 20 miles from downtown Atlanta and the county seat of affluent Cobb County. It's also the location of a Lockheed-Martin factory and an Air Force Base. It's a hugely built-up part of the sprawl of Metro Atlanta. Even when it was founded in the 19th century it wasn't the kind of place to live 'small town' implies. It certainly never was such a thing during Brown's formative years.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:06 PM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

First off, Groo is a delight.

Second of all, everything I've seen about Alton being an absolutely terrible racist homophobe keeps pointing back to that same blog post. Not saying that it means that it's not true, it just seems a little [citation needed] to me.

Third, Alton's highest calling was to be a commentator on ICA.

Fourth, cooking should be more accessible and good food less expensive. Also food deserts and underpaid/overworked people. I'ma sort this whole food justice thing in a minute. Just let me think for a second...
posted by stet at 10:22 PM on December 17, 2015

bondcliff: “I'm pretty sure we have some spice jars kicking around that don't even have bar codes on them.”

When I was cleaning out the spice cabinet at Dad's I found a can of Ann Page mace with a 49¢ price inked onto the bottom. Given that there are no A&P grocery stores in the area and the history of my dearly departed Mother's kitchen, that can has been moved a minimum of six times into three states over a distance of more than 2,200 mi. I don't even know what Mom made that needed mace. Some kind of cookie I presume.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:03 PM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Second of all, everything I've seen about Alton being an absolutely terrible racist homophobe keeps pointing back to that same blog post. Not saying that it means that it's not true, it just seems a little [citation needed] to me

There was at least one other person in the commentary that was at the same event and heard the same things that the blog writer did (though the commenter made a point to say that they didn't think what Alton Brown said was really that racist). Other than that, there are no other recorded instances of Alton saying anything similar, but then again, it took years to find out with Paula Deen.
posted by FJT at 11:47 PM on December 17, 2015

For the best of all possible grilled cheese sandwiches, you will need:

Fluffy bread. Here in Japan, the best stuff I've found for the task has been what they call "English Bread." Two slices.

Bacon. Thick cut homemade bacon, or as nice as you can find elsewhere, once slice

Pulled pork, because we're not half-assing things here.

Smoked cheddar cheese, enough to layer over each slice of bread twice, because see pulled pork

South Carolina style mustard barbecue sauce

A big brick, wrapped in aluminum foil.

Cook the bacon, then slice it up to blend into the pulled pork. Slather the insides of the bread with mustard sauce, then grill slightly on the pan (yes, in the bacon fat), then flip the bread over to begin toasting the pristine fluffy side. Arrange a layer of smoked cheese on the fried mustard sauce having face of the bread. Mix the bacon and pulled pork, and arrange on top of the cheese slice on top of the bread in the pan. Cover the bacon and pulled pork with a layer of cheese, and the remaining slice of bread. Smash the whole thing down with the foil wrapped brick. This is important, because fluffy things taste great when crushed and fried. Turn the sandwich over when the cheese has melted and formed a secure meat holding cheese matrix. Toast the bread til medium golden brown. While the other side of the sandwich plays catchup with the toasted side, place a layer of cheese on the first side. Cover with a lid, to get the cheese a bit melty. Then, when the bottom is nice and toasty, flip the sandwich, and press down with Mr. Brick. When nice and crushed, remove brick, apply cheese, and repeat.

You should have, in order

crispy fried cheese
fried crushed fluffy bread
mustard sauce
gooey smoked cheddar cheese
pulled pork mixed with bacon
gooey cheese
mustard sauce
fried crushed fluffy bread
crispy fried cheese

The preferred dipping soup here is cream of mushroom, because seriously, you're not trying to pretend to be healthy here, we can drop the tomato sham.
posted by Ghidorah at 12:13 AM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I quite literally highlighted "political about Alton Brown" in FJT's comment and right-clicked Search Google for "political about Alton Brown." I found more than enough to convince me that, like a lot of people, his political views are not well thought out. I didn't even scroll down in the results and get to Greg Nog's link.

I will add that according to Wikipedia, “Brown said in a December 2014 interview in Time that he "could no longer abide the Southern Baptist Convention's indoctrination of children and its anti-gay stance" adding that he's now "searching for a new belief system."” I'm not a Time subscriber, so I couldn't read it for myself.
posted by ob1quixote at 12:24 AM on December 18, 2015

I'm about as good as cooking for myself as I am at watering my houseplants, which is a metaphor I thought of just now because I realized it's been like two weeks since I last watered them and I should probably get on that.
posted by teponaztli at 1:46 AM on December 18, 2015

I give no craps one way or another about Alton, but grilled good bread with Brie and apple with fig jam.
posted by syncope at 1:56 AM on December 18, 2015

I'm really surprised so many people are describing this as a "crank piece" (or an "article"). It's a blog post by a comedy writer, and one where he takes great pains to say he likes Alton Brown! Seriously, Mark Evanier is a profoundly inoffensive man. (That's not to say he's dull. His blog is often pretty interesting, and he's lived a fascinating life writing for comic books, cartoon shows, sitcoms, 1970s variety shows, you name it. When a celeb dies Evanier usually has an anecdote about working with them or at least meeting them. He spends so much time having anecdote-worthy encounters with famous people it's a wonder he ever has time to get any writing done!) This post was clearly not intended as a hatchet job. It was just some light observations from a guy who took pains to not sound like a crank but nevertheless apparently underestimated the protectiveness of Brown's fans!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:07 AM on December 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'd like subscribe to Ghidorah's sandwich, and also just repeat, "fluffy things taste great when crushed and fried." Words to live by.
posted by taz at 2:09 AM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

It was just some light observations from a guy who took pains to not sound like a crank but nevertheless apparently underestimated the protectiveness of Brown's fans!

Just to clarify, I could give two shits about Alton Brown*, personally. I found the post annoying entirely on its own merits.

*i think he did some good work on Good Eats but displays all the vices inherent to the auto-didact in cooking form.
posted by Diablevert at 3:17 AM on December 18, 2015

Just popping in to recommend BLT fans experiment with swapping out the lettuce for avocado. Changed my life.
posted by Quilford at 6:59 AM on December 18, 2015

Preparing and eating food is deeply personal. The need it satisfies is universal. We share food with the people we love. We learn how to eat from our parents, and their ideas of what is good and wholesome. It is strongly tied into cultural identity and class and even religion. We are steeped in a media culture that idolizes both extravagance and austerity, gushing over the latest diet and the latest fried pastry with equal enthusiasm. No wonder conversations about cooking can be difficult. No wonder one person sees judgement where another sees playful irony.

My best friend once said she didn't like to cook with me in the kitchen, because she felt judged. I think she is an excellent cook. I love her food. And I don't think I ever criticized her technique. But even among the people we trust, is it easy to feel judged for our cooking and eating.

I don't take the post seriously, and I think that it is not meant to be taken seriously. And still it bothered me, as it did many here. Not because I feel the need to defend Alton Brown, but because I love food, and I love cooking, and I want to share that. I want to say "no, don't give up, it doesn't have to be like that."

As for Alton himself, I think it has been said already in this thread: I always felt his contribution was in the why, not the how. I don't follow his recipes very often - he likes things sweeter and blander than I do - but knowing how the muscle fibers in tuna work, and how collagen breaks down in meat, and how the bubbles in cakes form and grow - these things all affect how I go about cooking.

I admit, the more experience I have, the more complicated my preparations become. When I make stir fry, I cook things in five different batches so everything cooks at the best temperature for that particular ingredient. When I make salad dressing, it involves toasting raw sesame seeds and juicing oranges. And if I was to write one of these recipes down, it would involve a lot of ingredients many people probably don't have on hand and a lot of steps that would be unfamiliar or intimidating to many people. But that's not where I started, and I have enjoyed cooking from back when I was adding a chopped onion to a can of grocery store pasta sauce. And then I started sautéing the onion first. And then caramelizing it. And then adding a bit of garlic at the end. And then I bought a better pan. And so it goes. It's a journey. And it is one that is widely, if not universally, accessible.

I always used to hear people say that cooking is art and baking is science. In truth both are art, and both are informed by science. As you lean more about the ingredients and how they work, you have more options. As you learn more techniques, you have more options. That's all. Options.
posted by Nothing at 7:18 AM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

"fluffy things taste great when crushed and fried."

. . . thinks back to the post about fat squirrels . . .
posted by Seamus at 7:41 AM on December 18, 2015

meat holding cheese matrix

...will be the name of my next sockpuppet.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:18 AM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Smoked cheddar cheese

In Japan? You've got an expensive habit, sir
posted by Hoopo at 9:00 AM on December 18, 2015

I look at Alton Brown as a guy who optimizes recipes. That's OK and even a Good Thing. It is not bad for people to think about their food and how it could be better or easier or more user-friendly. Recipes are not written in stone and a lot of them could be better if more personally optimized. Mr. Brown gets a bit hinky about This Is The One True Way, but I think that's largely a schtick.

I optimize recipes AND realize that optimizing recipes is very personal. So, for example, my Very Best Gingersnap EVER is probably only the Very Best for me. I started with a basic gingersnap recipe, something I googled off of cooks.com or allrecipes or whatever. I made it exactly as written and tried it. It had great texture and crispiness but the flavor was kind of flat.

So, I googled and read other people's gingersnap recipes to see if they contained things that my prototype recipe did not. (Turns out some folks add cloves and other folks add some red pepper to the basic ginger + cinnamon combo.) I like cloves. I like red pepper. So, I made up another batch of cookies, this time with a plausible amount of cloves and a plausible amount of red pepper, said amounts cribbed from the other recipes.

This time, they were really good gingersnaps, like, the best I'd ever had. Since I take notes when I play with recipes, I updated my cookbook (it's the book where I keep all my recipes, the ones that I'm done playing with) with the revised, optimized gingersnap recipe and am now set on the gingersnap front. Hooray!

Recipe optimization does not happen all in one day at my house. Gingersnaps took me about two months, but I saved the prototype recipe and made some notes about what I might like better in the next go-round and stuff. (It only took three tries to achieve what I wanted and the "failure" ones were totally edible and we totally ate them.) You don't have to optimize stuff in one marathon session of baking.

Gingersnaps -- actually snap, nicely assertive. 4 1/2 dozen
Preheat oven 350, bake cookies ~10 minutes, give or take. Until they're just barely browning on the edges/bottom.

2 1/3 cup flour
1 1/2 teasp ground, dried ginger
1 teasp ground cinnamon
1/2 teasp ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper
1/2 teasp salt
2 teasp baking soda
3/4 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup molasses

Combine sugar, butter, spices, salt, soda. Cream. Add egg, molasses to creamed butter/sugar/spices. Beat until smooth. Add flour, stir by hand to combine. Drop by scant tablespoon on cookie sheet, 12 to a sheet. I use parchment paper under them so that they do not scorch or stick. They crisp as they cool, will not stay crispy in high-humidity environments.
posted by which_chick at 10:47 AM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

OK so thanks(?) to this thread I made a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch today. I used DENSE CRUSTY BROWN bread and HUMDRUM OL' CHEDDAR cheese. I did add a fat slice of baked ham and a smattering of NO-LONGER FASHIONABLE Sriracha sauce. I didn't bother with tomato soup (this time). And it was GREAT and I LOVED IT.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:50 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Putting meat in a grilled cheese sandwich is apostasy.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:54 PM on December 18, 2015

Mmmmmmm, apos-tasty....
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:31 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Roxy's (in/around Boston) makes a nice one with muenster, guacamole, and bacon, and if loving that is heretical you can start piling up the firewood.
posted by tocts at 2:14 PM on December 18, 2015

If you break faith with cheese by allowing tawdry dalliances with meats (bacon, no less!) that is between you and your own conscience.
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:25 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you break faith with cheese by allowing tawdry dalliances with meats (bacon, no less!) that is between you and your own ~~conscience~~ waistline.

FTFY
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:28 PM on December 18, 2015

In Japan? You've got an expensive habit, sir

It's less expensive if you smoke it yourself, and ignore the cost of the smoker, the smoke wood, and all that stuff.
posted by Ghidorah at 2:37 PM on December 18, 2015

Thanks to this AB recipe I will never make, I made grilled cheese last night.
But for the first time I shredded the cheese. I also tossed it with some garlic powder and some red chile powder from Dixon, NM.
Then I did the crusty cheese outside thing, because why the hell not? I had already shredded the cheese.
The bread was some crappy oat-nut stuff. Nothing great.
Garlic, red chile grilled cheese sandwiches. And the family ate and were nourished.
I'd do it again. Maybe with different flavors.

I understand people who don't cook. And I know that it might be cheaper for some people to not cook.
My family is currently living under some crushing health issues, bills, lack of income, etc., etc, blah, blah, blah. We are also people of girth, or with a tendencies towards increasing our girth.
I can't imagine how I would be able to feed my family healthful, non-fattening meals from dollar menus.
No judgment from me. We all have to stumble through life as best we can.
posted by Seamus at 3:11 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

What's confusing to me is that AB in the vid seems to be joking about his image, and indirectly telling us to not take the whole thing too literally, and then comedian guy takes it way too literally and thinks he is funny. Or am I misunderstanding this? I guess even if one understands all the words, culture can be lost in translation.

Reading the comments from young people in this thread, I realized that for me, the proces from not really being able to cook eggs and bacon to catering for parties (as a home cook, not a chef), took 20 years. I'm still learning, every day. I enjoy cookery shows, but my background for enjoying them is a life-long curiosity about food. And an important part of my original learning proces was that my first real job was in an old-fashioned grocery store of the type that doesn't exist anymore. On Saturdays, part of my pay was to take home as much produce I wanted, because my boss would discard everything (we had Sunday off) and start over Monday morning. No store or bodega would do that today.

It wasn't just me, none of my friends knew how to cook, and there was a wide tolerance for experiments. We didn't compare our home-food experiments with restaurant food, because that was not at all available to us at the time. And there was very very little competition from take-out (I'm that old). My mum was of the "I hate to cook" generation, but my Gran was a genius cook, and I got advice from her. Still, when I look back at my first cooking, it was really sad. Both my daughters cooked much better than I did at 16.

If I had grown up without my Gran as inspiration, I can't see how I could have figured out cooking. With her, I wished for, and got, a children's cookbook at 7, which I still have. (I use the recipe for Welsh Rarebit, and I "tidy up as I go"). The point is, that when the thread of knowledge and tradition is broken, it's really hard to reestablish it.

Yes, it's cheaper to cook from scratch, if you have access to real groceries. At one time in my life, when I had no car, reasonable food prices were 90 mins away with public transportation. And I had to carry everything back home on the subway. I had someone taking care of my kid for the more than 3 hours that took, but what if that hadn't been an option? And, it took a lot of meal planning and management to shop that way, again: presupposing knowledge and experience.

Right now, I live in a food paradise. I can get everything from the cheapest to the most luxurious products within a range of 15 mins on foot, and I have a car. My cost of living is half of that of my siblings who live in suburban areas. The difference is absurd. I really get why they eat take-out or semi-cooked products.

So yeah, IMO it's not fair to judge others. But should we really celebrate a culture of poverty and necessity rather than ask for improvement? Obesity and the related diseases are not to be taken lightly. Shouldn't everyone have access to good produce and good knowledge? Could TV- and youtube-shows help spread knowledge?
posted by mumimor at 4:36 PM on December 18, 2015

Look, the secret of perfect grilled cheese sandwiches is a thin layer of mayonnaise on the outside of the bread.

You... You... Magnificent bastard! I salute you!
posted by entropicamericana at 5:46 PM on December 18, 2015

If you want to get pedantic about the name, surely cheese on toast is a more accurate rendition than either the usual method or this comedy faff?

As long as we're talking about grilled cheese though: onion oil. Make deep fried onions, save the oil, use it for your fried bread sandwiches (let's be honest, that's what so called "grilled" cheese really is). Mayonnaise and butter are basically just tumescent oil anyway, you might as well drop the spreadable fig leaf.
posted by lucidium at 6:09 PM on December 18, 2015

the end-of-be-all-grilled cheese. Done!
Please move along now.
posted by shockingbluamp at 6:43 PM on December 18, 2015

I don't get the love for mayo over butter on the outside of the bread. I tried it, came away feeling very meh.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:06 PM on December 18, 2015

I don't get the love for mayo over butter

You can really stop right there. It took me years to finally surrender to the fact that some things (Tuna salad. Potato salad. Egg salad. Your salads group) actually need mayonnaise. There’s no other real use for it.
posted by bongo_x at 7:41 PM on December 18, 2015

What's confusing to me is that AB in the vid seems to be joking about his image, and indirectly telling us to not take the whole thing too literally, and then comedian guy takes it way too literally and thinks he is funny. Or am I misunderstanding this?

I don’t think the article was serious. I’m sure he’s laughing and/or feeling vaguely uncomfortable about the people who took it very seriously and agreed.
posted by bongo_x at 7:46 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

some things (Tuna salad. Potato salad. Egg salad. Your salads group) actually need mayonnaise.

Oh, that I totally agree with. I'm not knocking mayo in general. I use it with all sorts of things, including many sandwiches. I'm only referring its use in the specific context of replacing butter on grilled-cheese sandwiches, which I tried and don't consider it an improvement.

...But then, I'll happily put meat on a GCS - so I'm probably capable of just about anything.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:42 PM on December 18, 2015

I'm not knocking mayo in general.

I am. I tried for years to make tuna salad without it.
posted by bongo_x at 11:49 PM on December 18, 2015

Dude, just use olive oil. (Egg salad without mayo, however, would be a travesty.)
posted by aspo at 10:13 AM on December 20, 2015

On the other hand, sliced hard boiled eggs drizzled with olive oil and lemon is delicious (salt and pepper, oregano optional), and you can put that between two toasted bread slices and it's still delicious. Just call it a sliced hardboiled egg sandwich instead of egg salad!
posted by taz at 10:29 AM on December 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

Mayo on the inside of the grilled cheese, butter on the outside.

I didn't say it was health food.

(and make it Duke's.)
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 7:38 PM on December 20, 2015

I tried smoking cheese once, but couldn't keep it lit. badump bump.
Best grilled cheese has tomato sauce, garlic powder, and oregano in it. Pizza sandwich.
posted by DesbaratsDays at 10:26 AM on December 21, 2015

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