An Engineer's Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides the Internet
pleated-jeans.comThe engineer's name is Michael Chu, he made a website with cooking recipes structured as tables.
Something about this site really makes me yearn for the internet of old.
The recipes are a little bit too clever i think. Turning the text on the actions saves space but it makes the instructions off-putting.
his implementation does not save space which is fine because that was not his intent. to make a programming analogy, he turned spaghetti-code into structured code.
TFA is mostly just a bunch of twitter screenshots. From people on social media who forgot that the rest of the web still exists. (Original site: https://www.cookingforengineers.com)
Also, clickbait headline: There is no dissent presented anywhere on the page that this recipe format is pretty great. It did not divide the internet even a little.
Many of the screenshots from twitter are negative.
Some of my pet peeves about regular cookbooks are:
- Steps that actually include many different steps.
- Steps that don't repeat the quantities, making me scroll back and forth between the step and the quantity list.
The diagrams in this post very cleanly solve both.
Another pet peeve (which this doesn't solve): Recipes that include "marinate overnight" or some such in the middle (which can be easy to miss), instead of telling you up front that you have to start the day before.
You're supposed to read through the recipe before you start. Also, most modern recipe books and websites put prep/cook/total times at the very top, so if you have to marinate overnight it'll say "total: 13h" or something like that.
Definitely.
But I might not read it super carefully when recipe planning at the start of the week, which can result in scheduling mistakes.
Yeah except they often don’t.
My favorite is the ‘30 minute recipes’ that involve overnight marinating, carmelizing onions, etc.
You can caramelize onions in 10 minutes https://youtu.be/yt_0e72fs9M
And you can take a shower in one minute, but it won't be a good one. Proper onion caramelization takes up to 45 minutes, if you want its deep flavors and aromas. Anything faster means cutting corners, and some chefs will even save time bypassing the caramelization by adding sugar.
I've heard that adding sugar kick starts the caramelization.
Of the sugar you've just added. Onion caramelization is a complex process, a prime example of the Maillard reaction. It involves several chains of chemical transformations, while the added sugar is only a step away from caramel.
J. Kenji López-Alt
> An earlier version of this recipe suggested using sugar and baking soda for even faster results.
https://www.seriouseats.com/quick-caramelized-onions-recipe
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> help things along with a little bit of sugar. In science speak, caramelization is the oxidation of sugars. Here, those sugars are the natural sugars in the onions, but the addition of a small amount of white sugar adds an extra caramelization boost.
Whew, good thing i have 20 minutes left over to do everything else!
(That is great gaslighting in that vid, lol)
You can multitask.
Not sure what you meant about the gaslighting.
that was not even close to proper carmelization. they did sautee however.
Not sure what you mean by proper. There are other videos on YouTube showing a similar process. He's a chef, I'm not sure if you are.
I don't know about "chefs", but line cooks who haven't been to culinary school are generally trained to call this kind of faux-sweetened sweated onions "caramelized." Because, when a recipe calls for "caramelized onions" (and isn't an all-day background task like making a pot of onion-soup stock... which isn't generally something they'll be tasked with anyway), the onions as shown in the video are precisely what they'll be told to make. (Because it's fast. And because, for many recipes, it kinda-sorta works.)
That being said.
Caramelized onions should be a dark (nearly black) and warm brown color, not a neutral clay-soil brown. (Picture brown-sugar boba pearls.) They should have no water content, and should be visibly syrupy in texture. They should smell buttery + nutty + toasty; and should be extremely sweet, in that complex caramel way, with no trace of the original onion flavor remaining.
The onions in the video are none of those things.
These properties are all corollaries of what caramelization is, when it comes to onions: you're not only breaking down starches inside the onion into sugars, but then also fragmenting some of the resulting sugars into volatiles (diacetyl, furfural, etc), while polymerizing more of the resulting sugars into various caramel compounds.
The onions in the video have merely finished the first step: sweating. The cells of the onion have broken down, releasing simple sugars and water; but despite a few minutes' pan frying after breakdown, they're still wet and gloopy (and have quite a bit more cooking to go before they stop being so), because onions contain rather a lot of water, and rather a lot of sugar, and simple sugars are hygroscopic, i.e. they really want to hold onto nearby water.
The goal of caramelization is the same in an onion as it is in candy-making: you need to heat the sugar up until it melts and begins to react with things around it, both building up (polymerizing) and breaking down (fragmenting.)
Sugar melts well above the boiling point of water. So you can't caramelize anything until all the water is gone.
And that's why caramelizing onions takes around 40 minutes. 10 minutes on high heat to sweat the onions (as in the video); 20 minutes on med-high to drive off all the water; and a final ~10 minutes with careful watch-and-adjust temp control to actually caramelize the sugars, without burning them.
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In theory, you might be able to make this process happen faster... but not with any random store-bought onion, the day you buy it. You'd need to 1. freeze, and then thaw, the onion (to break down its cells), and then 2. desiccate the onion (i.e. keep it in a bone-dry environment with convective air) to pre-purge the lysed water from it. The result would be a "ready-to-caramelize" onion that would let you skip the first two phases of cooking. (The result would also now be incredibly non-shelf-stable, becoming a pile of mush after a day or two.)
Some people throughout history (who perhaps originated the idea of being able to caramelize an onion in 10 minutes) may have done both of these steps purely by accident! In fact, insofar as onions are storage vegetables often kept in a root cellar for months before consumption, and insofar as some root cellars can both get to below freezing and be very dry inside, I could see most historical people cooking onions for winter recipes having gotten this "speed hack" for free without even trying.
But an onion you buy at the store will have gone through neither of those steps. Caramelizing an onion the day you buy it will take 40 minutes, full-stop.
Not sure if you watched all the way to the end of the video. At about 2:16, he shows the result along with the stopwatch from his phone set to 10 minutes.
In the comments from the original article, which you can find on the Internet Archive, he says that these these are not exactly the same as 45 minute onions and he would only use them a certain recipes.
And again, he's not the only one. There are lots of videos and articles about it.
I mean, I wouldn't have been able to precisely describe the result as it appears in the video if I hadn't watched it, could I?
And my point—I'll state it again—is that while these 10-minute onions might be useful, they are not "caramelized onions" in any sense, because no actual caramelization has occurred. And so saying that "this is a way to make 'caramelized onions' in 10 minutes" is false.
These are, certainly, a 10-minute substitute for caramelized onions; but they can no more be used as an argument that "you can make caramelized onions in 10 minutes, actually" (as the GGP poster says) than the existence of rice pilaf is an argument that you can make risotto in 10 minutes. They're different things!
Yup, I wish they'd just be honest and say 'sautee onions for 10 minutes to a dark drown' or whatever. But if they were, I guess they'd sound less fancy?
I messed up a recent DIY construction project because I didn’t read it all the way to the end first. My chef wife comes in with “you always read the recipe to the end before starting”…
What a quaint 20th century atavism. These days we "move fast and break things". /s
> Steps that don't repeat the quantities, making me scroll back and forth between the step and the quantity list.
Julia Child's cookbook has the recipe in two columns, one for ingredients and the other for directions. As soon as I saw it I wondered why every cookbook doesn't do something similar.
Julia Child would also be in favor of doing mise en place--measuring out your ingredients before you start doing anything.
Personally, and I say this as someone who has been trained to do recipe editing, I find this tabular system to be not entirely clear. Consider the first example--the instruction to mix is applied to several ingredients at least twice. The instruction to 'fold in' seems to apply to all the ingredients at once, which makes no sense. Normally, you'd mix the dry ingredients together first. Also, in this case, you'd probably want to whisk the eggs and sugar together first so the sugar starts to dissolve. It also doesn't give you a clue as to what 'done' means.
We occasionally (maybe once a year) use a meal service for a couple of weeks, especially if it's a busy week.
The recipes sheets they provide drive me absolutely nuts working from them, to the point where I feel like I have to re-write them just to get them into a logical order. They're done entirely differently from any recipe book I've ever worked from. For example I constantly find I'm missing steps from how they're mushed together under photos, so I get later through the recipe and it talks about using something I supposedly did something with earlier and.. crap, I have to go back up through the recipe sheet trying to find what I missed the first time through. I've never experienced this with any other recipe book I've read.
Have always loved cookingforengineers. We should really just be linking to it directly instead of whatever this “having to scroll through a life story f other people’s tweets” spam is.
This is genius. Where can I buy that cookbook? Why is it flagged?
> even though the system had existed the whole time.
But it didn't. Isn't that the point of someone inventing it? If the system existed the whole time then it would most likely be much more realized.
Also people don't use this system because 99% of people don't right things down in tables. I know not many people hand write things anymore but even typing up ingredient lists on a machine I don't begin by creating a table.
Also this article format of numbered tweet responses as images is just terrible. What am I reading Buzzfeed? I had to stop reading.
Also isn't "viral" 100k or more? Not 10's of thousands? This is a clickbait article. But it brings up a bigger question: why claim that something is viral with 100,000+ views/likes/shares/responses/whatever when we know damn well Twitter is full of bots?
This is not new at all: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
Look at the site design! It went viral on Digg! That's how old this is.
Is there something like an abacus but for cooking? A simple device to keep track of the different tasks for a dish that can be used in the kitchen while cooking? I’m guessing there are apps
Looks a surprising amount like a structogram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diag...
That format is great for relatively simple recipes, but there are a number of things I make regularly that could not fit into that format without making everything clear as mud.
So, I think its utility is a bit context-dependent.
one of the tweet screenshots censors the word "kosher", which I completely don't understand. Why are screenshots online so agressively censored?
Not just screenshots. Look at the modern social media trend of using "unalived" as a euphemism for "died", for example.
Did you look at the original? I assumed it was censoring "killer" which also meshes with my perception that "trigger words" get censored in certain social media circles now.
Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces, whose malevolent schemes can nevertheless be foiled by simple character substitutions.
My favorite example of this is people self-censoring “shooter” as “sh**ter”, which I can’t help myself from always parsing as “shitter”.
“The shitter in Virginia has been apprehended”, etc.
I assume it's just people mimicking/cargo culting content creators, who are indeed being oppressed by the dark forces of the algorithm and the de-mometizer.
To be fair, YouTube (and probably other platforms) used to literally block stuff like that, and the substitutions did get by it.
Facebook does this heavily. People discussing the strategy to beat a Fallout boss get sent to Facebook jail for writing "gun", "shot","kill", etc., so the self-censoring is now in the rules of most Fallout gaming groups.
IMO this boils down to big platforms being pressured to moderate, because some horrible things are shared there, and the cheapest moderation is blindly flagging words. People discussing things like games get warned/banned/shadowbanned by machines for using banned words, and everyone is getting used to self-censor because the appeal is as useful as a second navel.
TL;DR: self-censorship is so prevalent because it saves online platforms money.
> Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces,
What a ridiculous take. Many platforms and games actually prevent you from posting certain words, or flag or otherwise penalize posts if you include them. In some cases, this is completely explicit, i.e. you'll get a message saying "cant' post that."
Instead of playing a guessing game of which platform censors what, it's common just to avoid such words by censoring, euphemisms, or synonyms.
How did "kosher" become one of those words?
ok, so i misread the censored word. Maybe i'm old; the concept of "trigger words" doesn't seem to be solved by making it harder to communicate in my opinion.
It not /all/ about triggers it's partially driven by the algorithms on some social sites like TikTok or Youtube where there's some evidence and a lot of speculation that mentioning or including certain words can cause the recommendation algorithm to suppress your videos etc. That leads to a lot of homophones etc popping up like "sewer slide" or odder non mentions like unalive popping up. Because the really big channels care about maximizing reach for monetization reasons it shows up strongly in peoples feeds which drives wide adoption.
Beenaminute did an experiment about this and found it didn’t really matter. Algospeek would be caught by the same filters people try to avoid anyways.
There'd be a lag between a new algospeak abomination popping up and it getting added to the filters at least but yeah I think it's probably largely ineffective now. Probably even less so if they're using LLMs to screen for potential new substitutions but the practice already gained popularity so even if it's ineffective now it'll persist until it's supplanted or becomes outdated. It's like the persistence of some SEO optimization techniques even after Google et al adjusted the algorithm to account for them.
Definitely agree. I don't understand how "thinking harder" about what the word MIGHT be solves any problem. I might just be part of this older generation who is hard trained on reading and not skimming, I don't know. I've never found anyone who appreciates this sort of censorship to ask them to help me understand.
Nobody appreciates it. It's in the Nash Gap -- the difference between the true optimum and the reality that emerges from each involved party optimizing for their incentives.
People: complain to politicians when egregious content starts trending
Politicians: bug Platform to do something about the egregious content
Platform: quickest fix for egregious content is dumb pattern matching
Content Producers: avoid becoming a false positive by using dumb substitutions to dodge the dumb pattern matching
The most direct fix would be the platform getting smarter about censorship, but this would not be without its own tradeoffs.
Um, friend of mine in her handwritten "my favorite recipes" book has used that layout for decades, using curly braces to group things. I'm doing that too since seeing her book a long time ago. I thought it's standard to do it that way.
(former chef here) - I've been writing my personal recipes like this for 20+ years. Mostly because I can grok the steps from memory so I can skip that part (other times I just write the spec step between the curly bracers).
Not the neatest, but my 'Dad's cookbook' isn't really read by anyone except myself when asking the family what they want me to prep on the weekend for the week.
For another super condensed shorthand system for recipes, see Thermomix cookbooks (requires a Thermomix though)
Sorry, is there supposed to be an actual article somewhere hiding behind this giant collection of embedded whatever-the-hell-X-calls-posts quotes? Because there does not appear to be one. "Someone said X and then someone else said Y and then even more folks said Z" was slop long before AI existed.
Why would something like this get flagged ffs? Not enough AI or crypto?