first of all, why do I have to tell the chef how to make the steak? “medium rare”? “well done”? those are words made up by wizards or something. second of all I don’t like how they taste. they’re super expensive and they just taste so boring. chicken goated steak boring. I’m in my early 20s so I’m getting used to some “acquired taste” things slowly like wine and coffee but steak is still so bland.
I think it’s like a decadence and wealth thing, because it feels like the whole idea behind them is that the cooking is just there to bring out the innate quality of the singular ingredient and anything but the mildest and most rote additions are treated as somehow sullying it, with the implicit idea that the quality is directly tied to how expensive and luxurious it is. It’s such a boring, gross, and fundamentally backwards way of approaching cooking imo, where instead of working with methods and available ingredients to make something good you instead start from the idea that you must not disrupt the natural quality of your expensive and luxurious one allowed ingredient and that it should be savored as the blandly decadent thing that it is.
Good kofta is better than even the “finest” and most decadent steak and I will fight anyone who disagrees.
Tbf that’s not an inherently bad way of thinking about ingredients, most sushi nerds will praise “real” sushi for not drowning the fish in spicy mayo and other extras to appeal to white people, but instead focusing on enhancing the rice and fish.
I fundamentally reject any sort of cooking that’s hyper focused on needing the most perfect and super special of all ingredients to work and that’s all about how awesome and cool the ingredients are. It’s far more impressive and valuable to be able to take whatever assorted ingredients and scraps happen to be on hand and produce something wholesome and good from it than it is to “master” the “fine art” of having something “amazing” to start with and not “ruining it” by changing or controlling where it ends up.
Haute cuisine is bad no matter where its from. Cooking should be something adaptable and vulgar, not rigid and prestigious.
That’s a fair viewpoint, I mainly bring up sushi because I think most hexbears are way more forgiving of the same kind of mindset when it’s distinctly non-white.
Most of the best dishes I’ve tasted and made myself are definitely on the side of using odd stuff and throwing things together to cook for a long ass time.
That reminds me of the sort of tropey way food and cooking always seems to be talked about in anime and manga where characters will just stop to monologue about how crucial [super specific ingredient] is to some dish and wax on about how it has to be so fresh and high quality and it’s not [dish] if it doesn’t have the best ingredients, which is obviously a cartoonish caricature but it reminds me so much of how certain Americans talk about steak or some regional “specialty” like they think putting ketchup on smoked pork is some sort of trade secret or good at all.
And then I think of the more or less exact opposite: videos from a Thai chef, I forget who, talking about how to make a dish and just being like “yeah the authentic way is to use [specific local ingredient] but that’s really just used because it grows all over the place and is easy to get there but it can be hard to find in the US, so just use this or that alternative instead and it’ll be fine, and then you can use this or that general sort of thing for the main bulk of it, but really what’s most important is that you’re striking the right balance of flavors…” and being 100% correct about every part of that.
Malai kofta is better than steak
I’ve never had it but looking it up I think I can imagine what it’s like enough to agree with that.
Vegan variant of kofta. First time I had it, I did a double-take over whether it was a meatball or not. 10/10 would wreckamend.
How is it “gross” to focus on the existing flavors of a centerpiece ingredient? I don’t think it’s like the only way to cook, but you’re putting a lot of weird value judgements on what’s basically just simple cooking.
To me it doesn’t matter whether it’s pure or whatever because I finish it within 5 minutes and it all tastes the same