Thread No. 004← All threads
The substitution debate
Purism versus what is in the actual fridge.
Pancetta or guanciale. Brown butter or beurre noisette. Arborio or carnaroli. The recurring tension between what a dish should be and what a cook on a Tuesday actually has. The pros draw lines. The home cooks blur them — and sometimes invent the better dish.
View
In Carbonara →4 voices
“Pecorino Romano alone has an assertive flavor, which is why I and many others like to cut it with the sweeter, fruitier flavor of Parmigiano-Reggiano. I use equal parts of each and whisk them into the eggs and yolks in a mixing bowl, along with plenty of coarsely ground black pepper.”
Spaghetti With Carbonara Sauce Recipe — Serious Eats (2015)“Pasta is tossed with egg yolk (and sometimes albumen), pecorino cheese, guanciale and black pepper.”
A Tale of Three Carbonaras — katieparla.com (2011)“I love the buttery, eggy creaminess of the sauce, saltily-spiked with hot-cubed bacon: it's comforting, but not in a sofa-bound kind of way. It feels like proper dinner, only it takes hardly any time to cook.”
Spaghetti Carbonara (from How to Eat) — nigella.com (1998)“American bacon, as you can imagine, added a hint of smoke, which is pretty darned tasty in its own right and definitely worth considering. … If smoked bacon is all you can get, there's no reason to let authenticity stand between you and a filling bowl of carbonara.”
Spaghetti With Carbonara Sauce Recipe — Serious Eats (2015)
In Risotto →2 voices
“Lidia Bastianich's home-tradition position: a slow, patient soffritto and a stock kept at the same temperature as the rice. Cold stock shocks the grain; that is the single most common reason a home risotto refuses to release its starch.”
Lidia's Italian Table — William Morrow (1998)“Nigel Slater regularly skips the deglaze entirely or uses a splash of vermouth in place of white wine. The orthodoxy assumes you keep a bottle open; he assumes you do not, and argues that the dish loses very little.”
The Kitchen Diaries — Fourth Estate (2005)
In Scrambled Eggs →1 voice
“High-heat, fast-stir diner-style scrambled eggs — large curds, slightly browned in places, done in about a minute — are a complete and beloved style, not a failure of the soft-French method. The choice is aesthetic, not technical.”
The Food Lab — Scrambled Eggs — Serious Eats
In Pan-Seared Steak →2 voices
“Seasoning the steak with kosher salt well in advance of cooking results in better tenderness and allows the salt to penetrate and flavor the meat thoroughly.”
Pan-Seared, Butter-Basted Thick-Cut Steak — Serious Eats“Kenji's reverse-sear recipe argues the cleanest cook of a thick steak starts in a 95–135 °C oven and finishes with a 60–90 second hard sear — the opposite of the classical pan-only method, and the technique he originally developed for Cook's Illustrated in 2006.”
Reverse-Seared Steak — Serious Eats
In Roast Chicken →2 voices
“Butterflying the chicken evens out cooking, so you can skip brining and basting while still getting juicy meat and crisp skin.”
Spatchcocked (Butterflied) Roast Chicken — Serious Eats“Kenji's Food Lab position on cavity aromatics: a sprig of thyme or half a lemon shoved into the bird's cavity contributes very little to the flavour of the cooked meat. The aromatics mostly steam in place. If you want their flavour, put them under the skin or directly in the pan.”
The Food Lab — Roast Chicken — Serious Eats
In Pizza Dough →2 voices
“Doughs that are shaped and proofed after a slow, cold fermentation demonstrate noticeably better flavor and better structure.”
How Long Should I Let My Pizza Dough Cold Ferment? — The Pizza Lab — Serious Eats (2010)“Forkish's same-day fallback in The Elements of Pizza: more yeast, a warmer room, and an honest acknowledgement that the result won't be his best dough — but it will still be a real pizza. Most home cooks decide they want pizza six hours before dinner.”
Flour Water Salt Yeast — Ten Speed Press (2012)
In Bolognese →4 voices
“Cook the meat in milk before adding wine and tomatoes to protect it from the acidic bite of the latter.”
Bolognese Meat Sauce — Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking / Epicurious (1992)“Giorgio Locatelli's preference in Made in Italy: coarsely ground beef, not fine. You want the meat to read as itself in the finished sauce — distinct, textured — not to dissolve into the tomato.”
Made in Italy — Fourth Estate (2006)“Stanley Tucci's Taste: a splash of cream at the finish is a New York-Italian move, not a Bolognese one — but on a home plate it does no harm and the policing of orthodoxy has limits.”
Taste: My Life Through Food — Gallery Books (2021)“Elizabeth David's Italian Food preferred red wine over white in a meat ragu — the colour and weight match the beef, and the result is closer to the home-cook tradition she encountered in postwar Italy.”
Italian Food — Macdonald (1954)
In Hummus →3 voices
“Kenji's Serious Eats fallback for canned chickpeas: rinse thoroughly, simmer for around an hour in fresh water with aromatics and baking soda. Not as good as cooked-from-dried, but close enough that the rule is closer to a preference than a prohibition.”
The Food Lab's Science of Great Hummus — Serious Eats (2016)“Claudia Roden's Levantine framing in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food treats hummus as a chickpea dish first and a tahini one second — the proportions and the cumin lean Lebanese/Egyptian, not Israeli. The disagreement over which ingredient leads is regional, not technical.”
The New Book of Middle Eastern Food — Knopf (2000)“Ottolenghi's published technique for the smoothest possible texture — peeling each cooked chickpea, or using enough baking soda to slough the skins off in the cooking water — works, but is the sort of effort most home cooks should consider optional.”
Hummus | Ottolenghi Recipes — ottolenghi.co.uk
In Fried Rice →3 voices
“Grace Young's Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge treats day-old refrigerated rice as the foundational requirement of a real fried rice — the surface starch retrogrades overnight and the grains dry and separate. Fresh rice in a wok is wet rice that briefly gets hot.”
Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge — Simon & Schuster (2010)“Kenji's published shortcut for the impatient: if you must use freshly cooked rice, spread it on a sheet tray and chill it uncovered in the fridge for 20–30 minutes. The grains lose enough surface moisture to fry rather than steam.”
Easy Fried Rice — Serious Eats“Dunlop's pragmatic conclusion: on a domestic stove you will not produce restaurant-grade wok hei. Make peace with a cleaner, drier, less smoky fried rice and stop chasing what the burner cannot give you.”
Fire and heat — fuchsiadunlop.com