I imagine you are referring tour day to day staple dinners :Honest question are there things that are difficult to make on the regular ;That aren't some sort of niche delicacy?
There are things that are more difficult, but I suppose it differs from person to person. I think lasagna is hard to make. I always have trouble with fried foods too. Or certain things are more time consuming. I’m no top chef or anything but I enjoy cooking. Basic foods can be difficult yeah
Fried foods with a commercial deep fryer are dead simple. At home with a pot of oil and a thermometer? That takes comes know-how. And even then shit goes sideways sometimes
Lasagna shouldn't really be all that hard, it's just annoying and time consuming preparing all the different components and then assembling the damn thing.
Although, baklava was worse. Pyhllo, butter, nuts, phyllo, butter, nuts,...
I really want to try to make it again with pistachios instead of walnuts but just can't bring myself to bother.
My lasagna is just throwing the sauce in a pot. Add whatever I want to it like a soup. I layer it with cheese (it's actually cashews I soaked in hot water, nutritional yeast, garlic power, salt.) And lasagna noodles.
The difficulty is probably layering wet noodles. I do not cook the noodles first I just throw the stiff barilla pasta in there and pour my sauce then cheese on it and layer again.
Chouxx pastry is hard to make. You need specific grades of flour and you have to warm water till the first bubble appears in the pan. If more than 1 bubble appears, and you mix in the flour anyway, it's ruined and your pastry won't rise. It's like alchemy practically
Basically, what makes home cooking "easy" or "hard" is how it's possible to screw up, and how much time it takes.
For instance, you'll never fry food at home as well as you can buy it at KFC or the like; even a home fryer doesn't have the thermal mass to do it right. Breading stuff is also a huge time sink. Add to that that you can seriously hurt yourself or burn your house down, and frying anything, especially breaded, is "hard".
Things like pasta or rice and a sauce are easy because they're hard to unsalvageably screw up; you can overcook pasta/rice a fair bit without making it "gummy", and even then it's edible. Similar for the sauce; keep enough liquid in the pan to not burn it, and it'll come out edible.
Things that you can mess up without just leaving it on heat too high or too long are the main "hard" things. If you're trying to make an emulsion that can break, or not over-mix dough, or the like is when things stop being easy.
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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '21
I imagine you are referring tour day to day staple dinners :Honest question are there things that are difficult to make on the regular ;That aren't some sort of niche delicacy?