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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Yep. I’m a little too deep into sushi and it’s pretty funny that people will gatekeep ingredients.

    The ingredients that Edomae chefs now use are extremely traditional. Essentially every single one was for food safety, not taste. Vinegar, wasabi, and sake in nikiri are all meant to prevent food-borne illness. The red rice vinegar used at high end restaurants was originally used because it was cheap. Fish is obviously readily available. Edomae chefs now use them because they prefer the taste— which I’ll agree with, I make it the same way— not because it’s sacrilege not to. Every one of the top chefs can tell you the history of sushi as a stall food meant to be accessible.

    Even crotchety Jiro, who might chastise you for using soy sauce, deviates from tradition by using exclusively white vinegar and adding sugar. Yet the same gatekeepers love that guy (until you reach the super gatekeepers who are too cool for him because he got famous).

    Sushi superiority is truly insane to me. I wonder if some assholes back then looked down on the “peasants” for trying to extend the shelf life of their food.

    Sorry this comment is so long, I’m way too deep into this. It’s funny, two chefs I know are top five in Japan (thus, some would say, the world), respected beyond belief, and on my first visits they stayed well after close to talk to the dumb foreigner who wanted to improve his at home sushi. One doesn’t speak English and has one of his apprentices translate between us. I guess when you get far enough into sushi, you feel the need to ramble about it.



  • Real wasabi paste sounds like a poor value, wasabi doesn’t age too gracefully when grated and you’d presumably pay a markup for the packaging and grating

    For those who live in areas with good Japanese grocery stores, I highly recommend looking for some rhizomes and grating it at home. Super easy, less than $10 for several servings, and lasts a couple weeks. If anyone is interested but doesn’t wanna Google it, feel free to reply or DM me and I can send my grater/process.

    There are a lot of foods that aren’t quite as good out of their home country, but American grown wasabi is excellent. I’ve had someone tried to gatekeep me but like, I coincidentally am very into sushi and am reasonably friendly with a couple ***/Tabelog gold sushi chefs that I visit when in town, some of the best in the world with access to the highest quality ingredients. I’m not eating the wasabi directly but I can’t tell a difference between theirs and the American one from half moon bay. It’s definitely worth trying if it’s available in your area, you aren’t missing anything by doing it yourself and it takes minutes.




  • where the prequels are an elaborate ad to sell more Starwars toys

    This is clearly not true, Lucas cared a lot about his story and universe. I say this hoping it helps effectively communicate points later: statements like that detract from your premise because they’re obviously false to an audience that knows and cares. It would be better (from a rhetorical standing) to double down on the poor storytelling allegations by acknowledging it as true instead, then going on to say that they were cinematic incoherence regardless.

    I haven’t seen a single one of the prequels in over a decade except RotS (which I thought was an interesting story but a poorly made film), but my dislike of the prequels is because they’re not good movies. My dislike of the sequels is that they were not good and were made to maximize profits.

    THe orginals do hold up, because Starwars was about classic adventure story. The character of Luke Skywalker… It’s the sort of timless story, just with a spin on it beeing a sci-fi world… The prequels and sequels completley missed that aspect of basic stoytelling.

    This is where I completely disagree. Movies should not be aiming to do only the classic adventure story over and over again, and the prequels weren’t bad because of the story. They actually had a pretty classic story too: an evil being corrupts a well-meaning but slow-to-react institution filled with self serving or incompetent representatives by manufacturing conflict to seize power. All the while the forces of good are distracted and unfocused by the chaos— and too sure that their institutions will not bend to tyranny— until it is too late. With a solid director, the prequels could have been excellent, and also perhaps a prophetic warning about complacent democracies.




  • Yeah same. I first remember hearing it when Apple was planning that amazingly invasive local scanning of user images. Now it seems to be everywhere.

    I’m not against it though. CP could’ve described multiple things and this one is a lot less mistakable when you know. CP wasn’t particularly intuitive either— no easier to decipher, merely that with years of use many people knew it— so it’s an upgrade overall I think.

    Another benefit is that it includes “abuse” in the name. That’s important and ensures the people who seek that stuff out won’t borrow the term like they did CP.


  • Sorry for late response! I think it’s mostly commonly noticeable as a finishing salt but it’s a pretty good salt in general.

    So! I’m not an expert and here’s just my thinking. Salts have different flavors and the worldwide distribution of Maldon makes it easy to reach for when you need a flavoring salt for cooking. It has good flavor and will always suffice as a sea salt in recipes.

    I have a lot of recipes I personally got from chefs. Super easy, you need only ask and they’re always willing to share the exact recipe. But unless they’re real specific, you get ingredients and not the exact brand of salt. And because it’s basically impossible to track down which [potentially local] salt they use, you’ll have to use what’s on hand and hope for the best— and that’s unlikely to go wrong with Maldon or diamond crystal.

    They’re the standards for a reason, and I’m pretty that reason is consistency and availability. I’ve seen online that people will use a random granulated salt and it will either be too salty or taste off. I’ve also had chefs specifically note that they use Maldon for said recipe, so it’s a safe bet. Even when I know they used some difficult to acquire local salt, Maldon is good enough.




  • Interesting, I’ll see if I can find Arabian Sea salt here. Sometimes I think I can tell the difference between regional sea salts but it might also just be placebo. The Himalayan one too because it’s pink.

    I’m pretty sure color why they use the Hawaiian black salt but it does taste different. I’m quite fond of it. Looks like ours are similar in that they (probably?) derive their color from charcoal. Wikipedia says Indian black salt has a sulfurous taste and smell— that’s definitely new to me and explains the egg flavor. Sulfur isn’t hugely loved here but some traditionally “unwanted” flavors can make for great dishes, and some people online indicated they like it for acidic or Indian foods. Can’t lie, this is extremely interesting, I hope a store nearby has some. If not I’ll order online.

    This will probably be the neatest thing I learn about today. Damn I love salt, now I do want to get into recreational salt tasting


  • Potentially unpopular but I don’t think it matters for pasta water.

    I’m not that deep into salts but I keep a few on hand. The standard diamond crystal/maldon for cooking, as well as an unrefined sea salt for the same purpose. The standards are standard for a reason and they’re more than enough for my non-chef preferences, these and a random sea salt for the grinder are what I use 90% of the time.

    I like fleur de sel or flor de sal for finishing, though I can’t tell the difference between the two (I believe it is region, but my palate is far from capable of differentiating much). I have a sel gris that came with a salt set that is meant to be used as a finisher, but fleur de sel is more popular and thus easier to restock. I use black Hawaiian salt as a finisher for Hawaiian dishes. The black salt, unrefined, and fleur de sel are good for eating the salt alone which is a guilty pleasure.

    I’m actually pretty surprised to hear that some prefer saltier salt. The chefs I have asked like lower sodium and higher mineral contents because they have more flavor. That said both tabelog gold/*** sushi chefs I’ve asked heat the salt to remove moisture, which then increases saltiness by volume, so I guess I’m not that surprised. I do this for sushi rice for authenticity but like I said, my palate is solidly mid and I can’t tell.

    What do you like those salts for? I’m not really a salt enthusiast and just use what has been suggested by the chefs I like. Don’t think I’ve heard of Arabian Sea salt and I’ve never used Himalayan myself, but I’m very much interested!



  • I’m not cool like everyone else here who got bargains or things that went up in value but for things that are more expensive than they seem to rational people, I have $6k headphones and up to $9k pens. Got them for a little under msrp (for the headphones, the cost of the pens went up).

    Rational people don’t generally expect the prices of things like that to get so high, but they actually get a lot higher, I’m also not cool like the people who have those. There’s likely other things like this I can’t think of rn, but pens and headphones easily get the biggest “what’s wrong with you?” probably because they’re handheld non-jewelry




  • Well shit, thanks. I used to do this (being long comments) on Reddit but long comments naturally filter out some readers. Which I get, cause sometimes I’m not looking to read a whole thing too, so it never offended me.

    People on Lemmy seem to have longer attention spans though, shouldn’t be too surprised. This site has me returning to older habits of thinking through comments and spending almost 20 minutes typing haha, back on the other site I just stopped commenting in the years before the API changes since I’ve never been the type for quippy one liners. So yeah weirdly thanks, odd how it kind of feels nice to have these read again. I obv can’t text monologue irl (cause it’s not text) and I’m one for brevity with text messages