COOKING IS HARD!

You speak from a core of confusion, JBF. A man just ain't a man unless he can make the Staff of Life. It's not hard, it develops serious hand strength ( improve your guitar playing ) and it makes the ladies weak in the knees when you bust out a fresh baked loaf. Trust me. Plus, it's 1/4 the cost of store bought.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against cooking and enjoying what you make. I just think there's a level of pretentiousness that comes with all this modernist cooking stuff. Sure it's flashy and interesting if you own a restaurant, but doing at home with a ton of appliances and rare ingredients is just so douchey somehow.

It's loathesome because cooking is an art, not a chemistry experiment. Sperging over the number of grams of cheese to use entirely misses the point. You never see this guy dip his finger into the mix, and say "Hey I think this needs more gouda". If you're not getting your tongue in there, you ain't cooking.

No, it's loathesome for two reasons. First, it's over-complicating a grilled-cheese sandwich or an omelette or a rum and coke, which makes the people seem completely humourless and self-absorbed. The second is that it carries with it the implication that the author is finally fixing a recipie that we all know and love.

It's the same feeling of rage when you see someone speaking like Harold Bloom talk about how awful your favourite song is.

Give me a couple slices of Wonder, butter and enough Velveeta with an old pan and I'm done.
I'm completely with your take on this JBF. Reminds me of a clip I saw about a place that makes and sells a 0 philly cheesesteak sandwich which uses Kobe beef and truffles for christ sakes. Ridiculous.

I enjoy to think I dislike CHOW and this guy's cooking equally. A sandwich is delicious because it has the elements in it you like, and it is in a quantity that you enjoy. It has nothing to do with the exact number of grams of cheese.

I would like to point out that at the end, his daughter's reaction to the sandwich was not visualized.

This is the god's honest truth.

Thirded, I only just learned this myself.

Also, who the fuck grills with Velveeta? If you aren't going to use real cheese just stop fooling yourself and use slices of American.

He is doing it all wrong, at least according to... Chow.

http://www.chow.com/food-news/55147/how-to-make-grilled-cheese -with-laura-werlin/

Recipes for grilled cheese are like designer jeans. They miss the point. That said, I'm sure this stuff would make a great fondue.

Regular butter has milk solids in it that will burn if you add it to the pan. You have to use clarified butter. At the proper temperature, the bread will fry up crisp and dry without soaking up too much clarified butter.

Buttering the bread is simply improper frying technique. It guarantees that the bread will soak up the butter and become greasy, and it will also soak up the percentage of water present in non-clarified butter when it is released as steam, causing the bread to become soggy.

When the lady in that Chow video squished the sandwich down and put a lid on her pan I couldn't believe it.

If we're going to get technical... thin white bread, American cheese, lots of butter.

Allowable substitutions:
- yellow cheddar, if the queen of England is visiting
- individually wrapped slices, if you have the means and want people to know it

I hate any sandwich made with thick shoe-leather bread like that. It's not going to give when you bite into it. It's just going to squish down and send the sandwich innards all over the place. I don't want to eat something like that if it's going to turn into a battle.

That's soup-eatin' bread.

European cookbooks are mostly in grams. I've got a little kitchen scale for dealing with them.

Based only on the term "modernist cooking technique" I was hoping for a more Joycean approach wherein all ingredients have incomprehensible names and a squinty narrator disappears from view to compulsively masterbate/flagellate as the story unfolds.

Sadly, it's just a guy who feels guilty about liking Velveeta and accidentally conflates the terms 'modernism' and 'new' (sic).

A lot of it is just introducing techniques and ingredients from the processed food industry (the sodium citrate and carageenan here) to restaurant/home kitchens.

Some of it like cooking meat sous vide (in a sealed bag in a warm water bath for very long durations, which allows much better control over the doneness/juiciness of a meat cut) are wholly impractical for processed food, but fine for home cooks who plan 24 hours ahead or restaurants that can charge accordingly.

This video has a lot of you in it.

Word. Cooking science itself is most excellent.

But thank God for those "Science Packets", am I right, because cooks never had a way to thicken things before Nathan Myhrvold came along, what with his Modernist Cooking and his patent extortion and all!!i!!

Also what jreid says below about Alton Brown, who manages to be sciencey and artsy and reasonable about food all at once, no mean feat.

I dunno... I've had Bierkase.

Screw the clarified butter, "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" spray on the pan works even better. That way you use only a very light coating of grease, which is enough to fry the outside layer of bread without soaking in. You have to watch the temperature carefully, though: without all that grease the cheese doesn't melt very readily, so getting the pan hot enough without instantly charring the bread takes some experimenting.