Cooking

I guess this is going to turn into a cooking blog. I have consumed a lot of cooking media over the years and one thing that I have come to realise is that professional chefs are so often terrible teachers of home cooks. Whether it’s Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, or Marco Pierre White to name a few, in their books, TV shows, and youtube videos they instruct you as if you were a young chef coming to work in one of their kitchens, or maybe just that you have ambitions of cooking professionally period. And I think it’s fair to say that most of their audience will be home cooks who just want to get a few tips on how to roast a chicken from Jamie Oliver because they assume he’s probably roasted his fair share of chickens in his time. But what you often get is how chickens must be roasted in his kitchen in an incredibly clinical, precise, specific fashion in order to satisfy their quality control. So many key considerations to home chefs like availability of ingredients, time, or equipment; the experience of the individual cooking; and even the amount of cleaning up you will be left with don’t even cross the minds of these chefs because their cooking motives and goals are completely different to that of most home cooks. And it seems to apply to most chefs that I am aware of, particularly of a certain generation, who started in the intense, demanding atmosphere of a professional kitchen before transitioning more and more into media. And some people might not think this is a big deal, and in the grand scheme of things there are obviously much bigger issues in the world than chefs making cooking less approachable and accessible, but I think it is – ironically – something that pushes a significant number of people away from home cooking. If you don’t have the exact ingredient, pan, oven etc that the recipe calls for and no alternative is provided, it can be an incredibly frustrating experience. The idea of improvising seems daunting when you don’t have much experience and the consequence is potentially money out of your pocket, time wasted, and a longer wait for your meal (and the reality is it is actually really difficult to make something actually inedible but that worry is very prevalent, and the likelihood is often exaggerated by the way that these instructions are often presented). It’s a massive shame most of these chefs don’t seem to use their massive voice and reach as positively as they could, by presenting cooking in a more approachable way, but it’s not surprising given every hobby, industry, niche seems to have its own gatekeepers. Fortunately, there are more and more people – whether they’re professional chefs who went to culinary school or avid home cooks – who are producing really approachable, accessible written content and video content tailored towards home cooks. So now it is just about supporting those individuals so that their reach surpasses that of the chefs who insist you have to be able to perfectly chop and onion into 5mm cubes in 20 seconds and make perfect hollandaise. I bet if more people were told that they can chop their onions however they like, because 99% of people genuinely will not be able to tell the difference when they’re eating it, then maybe more people would cook.

I want to talk about cooking. I did a lot of cooking before coming to Penn, but I obviously couldn’t keep that up while living in the Quad last year and I sorely missed it. However, one of the few silver linings of this pandemic has been that I’ve been able to cook every day, and I still enjoy it as much as I used to, but I’m enjoying it for different reasons. When I first started cooking in high-school I used to try to test myself by attempting technically difficult or complex dishes and I found that process really satisfying and exciting. When I started cooking again once classes went online last semester, for a variety of different reasons, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to devote that much time to cooking. So, when I was cooking, I was cooking purely to provide a meal in the fastest and most efficient way possible for myself and whoever else was hungry. And that was the majority of the cooking I was doing in high-school as well, but then it was at a much lower volume and it was interspersed with exciting projects to look forward to. I enjoyed it then too, but I preferred the challenges to the everyday stuff. That completely flipped during quarantine – I was cooking pasta dishes one after the other until I could whip them up in 12 minutes flat from opening the cupboard to having the dishes washed and food on the table. And I was getting just as much satisfaction out of making these marginal gains with simple dishes through cooking them over and over again, as I used to from baking a decent batch of profiteroles. And I think if anyone has somehow made it this far without exceeding their pretentious cooking chat threshold, “profiteroles” has almost certainly finished off the job so I think I’ll leave it there.

-John