7 ms·

Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff. Above a certain threshold one cannot tell the dif

by xchip 7y ago

Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff. Above a certain threshold one cannot tell the difference between good and very good. Wine tasters know it and it has been very well documented. When it comes to flavours, as long as it doesn't harm you, your judgement is as good as anybody else.

subpixel 7y ago
Just as importantly, don’t fall for fetishism. Neapolitan pizza is a very specific style of pizza that, while “authentic” and photogenic, is by no means a superior style of pizza. Especially made poorly, at home, in an oven that is 200 degrees colder than necessary!
- tomcooks 7y ago
  While I agree on your fetishism point, which is in my opinion a byproduct of both post-colonialist "exoticism" and capital-driven standardization of products: using a refractory stone allows your kitchen oven to reach the right temperatures. And it IS a superior style of pizza /s
  - ReptileMan 7y ago
    Sorry - refractory stone is not enough for neapolitan pizza in home oven. You need something like the baking steel. And if you manage to get the infrared heater on during bake - you can get into the holy 2 minutes of bake time.
- eagsalazar2 7y ago
  Neapolitan Pizza is the poster child for fetishism, hipster cargo cult, worshiping a style that has only been deemed by the community as superior, not experienced individually to be so. At its absolute best it is significantly inferior to top American examples.
  - tomcooks 7y ago
    Yea that's why Italians have mustaches, they are all hipsters. Please please please go to Italy and show them who's boss, make sure you film.
  - arcturus17 7y ago
    Saying that the best American examples are better is exactly the same kind of fetishism... Me personally, I think Italian (non-Neapolitan) thin crust pizza is the best I’ve ever tried but they’re all just different styles.
    - pen2l 7y ago
      I had this fetishism about neopolitan pizzas for a while despite having never actually tried one. Mostly due to reading a lot of what Kenji-Lopez and others wrote on the web. There's an annual pizza festival in the summer i nBoston, which brings a lot of Italians with their stone ovens making neopolitan pies. So I went there and finally got to try neopolitan pies which according to pizza aficionados are supposedly really good. Man, I was in for a ride. Just not my taste. I'll admit that I may be a charlatan or have a pedestrian palate, but I can say now I'll prefer a slice of NY pie over an authentic neopolitan pie any day of the week.
    - KozmoNau7 7y ago
      Pizza tonde is my favorite kind of pizza, I much prefer it over Neapolitan, plus it's much easier to make at home. I also adhere to the Roman style in that there are no rules for toppings. Anything goes.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  You're right about oven temperature. Household ovens can barely hit 500F, that's not quite enough for proper pizza. There are some workarounds that will make very good pizza at home. My favorite is to use an outdoor grill instead of an oven. A hot grill with a pre-heated pizza stone is totally capable of reaching proper temperature. This can actually make neopolitan style pizza crust and works perfectly for other styles too. If you can't do a grill, starting the pizza in a large preheated cast iron pan on the stove top will help. Finish it off in the oven. Not Neopolitan, but very good. If you are using the recommended "00-flour" (finely milled high gluten bread flour), and you're not reaching pizza oven temperatures because you're using a household oven, add diastatic malt (powder) to the dough mix. This boosts yeast activity and also helps with coloration of the dough at lower temperatures. Otherwise, the pizza will be "done" before the crust has a chance to color properly.
  - gruez 7y ago
    >Household ovens can barely hit 500F There's a hack you can do where you use your oven's self clean function to reach high temperatures. Most ovens have a physical interlock preventing you from opening the door during a self clean cycle though, so to work around that you'll have to void your warranty and saw off the lock.
    - oftenwrong 7y ago
      I have done it at my old (rented) apartment without physically destroying the latch. If I remember correctly (this was ~10 years ago), I was able to remove the latch assembly entirely, and then jump the wires for the sensor that detects the latch being engaged. That said, cooking pizza on the clean cycle is difficult, and not necessarily worth it. Timing and vertical positioning in the oven is crucial, or you will end up with a burnt bottom or toppings. Make sure you have a long peel, and keep your face away from the heat when you open the door.
  - subpixel 7y ago
    > Not Neopolitan, but very good. I take issue with Neapolitan being a standard of quality. It's just a style.
- mtrovo 7y ago
  I feel that learning the classics on cooking is a good way to see how engineering mindset is close to cooking and food preparation mindset. Talking about Italian food in specific, they're very opinionated about what's the best way to work each ingredient, how to work dough, how long to leave pasta resting, and what's the best blend of herbs and the best species for each recipe. On engineering we call it standardization not fetishism. That's what DOP, DOC and DOCG is about, and that's what the Neapolitan on Neapolitan pizza is about, you know that if you eat a Neapolitan pizza that follow the official process you will have a predicted flavor on your pizza, like it or not. By reading the classics and asking yourself why they cook that way you will start to understand that you can use shortcuts where the output could be the same or close enough. For instance stone is a very bad heat conductor, that's why you need a very hot oven to deliver the right amount of heat to cook your pizza. But if you use a better conductor you could deliver the same amount of energy on a much lower temperature. On the "Modernist Cuisine at Home"[0] book they research this topic and arrive on the conclusion that a thick baking steel sheet arrives on much better results, they even sell their official baking steel [1]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvold/dp/0982761015 https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvol... [1] https://modernistcuisine.com/shop/baking-steel/ https://modernistcuisine.com/shop/baking-steel/
  - notechback 7y ago
    DOP, DOC, etc are not about preference, they are designations for regionally protected products names with some production standards. Just like champagne is only champagne if it was made in champagne region from the right grapes in the right methodology. These assure on the other hand normally a good quality standard as the regional producers' associations have every incentive to keep quality good.
    - subpixel 7y ago
      Exactly - they are not for standardization, they are for marketing.
    - basch 7y ago
      and in America, its VPN. https://americas.pizzanapoletana.org/en/members https://americas.pizzanapoletana.org/en/members
stevievee 7y ago
Definitely not necessary to buy ingredients "certified" by the "Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana" but following the traditional methods yields some really tasty pizza.
hinoki 7y ago
You can train yourself to detect most of these differences, but you do need to try many different “good” versions of something to develop your taste. But beware, once you have a sophisticated taste for something you can no longer enjoy all the “bad” ones.
technothrasher 7y ago
I agree with you that your own judgement is what matters on things like flavors, as long as you don't close yourself off to certain foods that may take a few tries to appreciate. But I think you've dialed down a very complicated issue too far when you say "one cannot tell the difference between good and very good". A better characterization would be that many factors go into the perception of taste, and it's not always straightforward to identify "good". Here's a decent article on wine tasting that explores the idea much more honestly than, "Haha, experts can't tell!": https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-professional-wine-connoisseurs-really-not-tell-the-difference-between-expensive-wines-and-cheap-wines/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...
namelosw 7y ago
Oh, I struggled this for so many years, and I still couldn't convince myself wine is tastier than grape juice. Maybe it's one of those 'street credit' things?
- tomcooks 7y ago
  Maybe it's more about finding your own taste and let "experts" believe you can confine nature and culture (food/language/skintones) into imaginary boxes drawn on a map.
keiferski 7y ago
I really wish this wine meme would die. Essentially every test done to ‘prove’ that there’s no difference between cheap and expensive wines has had two massive flaws: 1. The label of ‘wine expert’ is left undefined. True sommeliers have spent thousands of hours studying wine and are not the same thing as a guy that takes a weekend wine-tasting course and gets a certificate. Yet most ‘studies’ fail to mention this. Just as importantly here, what literally every single source we could find not only leaves out when reporting this story, but in the vast majority of cases falsely states, is the actual qualifications of those being tested by Brochet. It turns out, the people he was using as taste testers were not experts at all, simply undergraduate students studying oenology (wine and wine making). While certainly probably more knowledgeable than your average person on the street, nobody would call an undergraduate mathematics major just learning the ropes a “math expert”, nor would their skills be indicative of what their professors who have vastly more experience and are actual experts are capable of doing. 2. The ‘experiments’ are done in a totally unscientific arbitrary way, with massive amounts of suggestion and psychological influence. If this were any other scientific study, it would be laughed out of the room for its total lack of rigor. As the Master Sommeliers demonstrate by passing the taste test they are subjected to in the first place, with enough time and study, there are actually people who are exceptionally good at identifying and judging attributes of wines in the right circumstances. But overwhelm there sense with 100 wines or change their expectations about what they are tasting and their perceptions will change significantly, seemingly, making them little better than a random person off the street at telling anything definitive about the wine. https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-professional-wine-connoisseurs-really-not-tell-the-difference-between-expensive-wines-and-cheap-wines/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  A simple flaw in your reasoning - none of the target audience of this comparison is actually a sommelier expert. The whole argument is about an average joe sampling say a wine costing say 15 euros in france and one costing 500. And the same average joe benefiting very little if at all from paying too much. Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town. I personally, by no means an expert in any way, can attest the difference is minimal and mostly comes down to one's own preferences / pairing of wine with food in given situation. Its often one of those markets where you buy your own emotions with higher price rather than actual, measurable subjective added value. But yes, if you use a wine costing 2-3 euros, quality of taste in many aspects will be incomparable even to that average joe.
eagsalazar2 7y ago
That threshold is very different for different people. I'm not a wine drinker so I won't comment but different people definitely have or have developed a much more refined sense of "what is good". In general of course a person can eat whatever crap they want and it doesn't affect me except when that person is cooking or picking out food for me.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
I think your argumentation lacks evidence. Where is the evidence for your very strong claims?
rv-de 7y ago
Technically you're right. But food is for many people more than the taste. It's a form of escapism, a little show that distracts you from the chore. For that to work you need this fantasy of the master chef and authenticity that allows you to enter a different culture mentally. It's kind of live action role play.
yomly 7y ago
I mulled on this comment for a day - your comment saddens me. That said, your ultimate takeaway is sound - do whatever makes you happy, don't rely on others to validate what you should or shouldn't enjoy. >Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff. But if this isn't cynicism for effect and is your true outlook on life I would encourage you to spend some time with any master of something and have them describe in detail to you the things they are seeing in a fellow master doing the same thing. This <thing> could be anything - sports, music, art, acting, chess, video games... What you will probably see is the master picking up on all sorts of imperceptible details that seem so subtle that they seem like bullshit. Then try going deep on that same thing, learn it for yourself. Eventually you will reach a stage where you will suddenly discover firsthand how little you know about that skill and how big the world above you is in skill and detail. Then eventually you will appreciate that this is true for almost every other disciplines and there myriad worlds of hidden detail that you never noticed or appreciated that creators have slaved over. Things that you only notice but can't put your finger on when you compare a pro to an amateur. Is Monet just dabs on a canvas? Federer just hitting a ball? Is Daigo just a lucky guesser at Street Fighter? Is Mitsuko Uchida just more stuffy and pretentious than your street busker? Granted, there's a lot of snake oil in food and wine because there's money to be made but don't let that theatre close you off categorically to the world of food (and wine).

by xchip 7y ago

subpixel 7y ago

Just as importantly, don’t fall for fetishism. Neapolitan pizza is a very specific style of pizza that, while “authentic” and photogenic, is by no means a superior style of pizza. Especially made poorly, at home, in an oven that is 200 degrees colder than necessary!

tomcooks 7y ago
While I agree on your fetishism point, which is in my opinion a byproduct of both post-colonialist "exoticism" and capital-driven standardization of products: using a refractory stone allows your kitchen oven to reach the right temperatures. And it IS a superior style of pizza /s
- ReptileMan 7y ago
  Sorry - refractory stone is not enough for neapolitan pizza in home oven. You need something like the baking steel. And if you manage to get the infrared heater on during bake - you can get into the holy 2 minutes of bake time.
eagsalazar2 7y ago
Neapolitan Pizza is the poster child for fetishism, hipster cargo cult, worshiping a style that has only been deemed by the community as superior, not experienced individually to be so. At its absolute best it is significantly inferior to top American examples.
- tomcooks 7y ago
  Yea that's why Italians have mustaches, they are all hipsters. Please please please go to Italy and show them who's boss, make sure you film.
- arcturus17 7y ago
  Saying that the best American examples are better is exactly the same kind of fetishism... Me personally, I think Italian (non-Neapolitan) thin crust pizza is the best I’ve ever tried but they’re all just different styles.
  - pen2l 7y ago
    I had this fetishism about neopolitan pizzas for a while despite having never actually tried one. Mostly due to reading a lot of what Kenji-Lopez and others wrote on the web. There's an annual pizza festival in the summer i nBoston, which brings a lot of Italians with their stone ovens making neopolitan pies. So I went there and finally got to try neopolitan pies which according to pizza aficionados are supposedly really good. Man, I was in for a ride. Just not my taste. I'll admit that I may be a charlatan or have a pedestrian palate, but I can say now I'll prefer a slice of NY pie over an authentic neopolitan pie any day of the week.
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    Pizza tonde is my favorite kind of pizza, I much prefer it over Neapolitan, plus it's much easier to make at home. I also adhere to the Roman style in that there are no rules for toppings. Anything goes.
crispyambulance 7y ago
You're right about oven temperature. Household ovens can barely hit 500F, that's not quite enough for proper pizza. There are some workarounds that will make very good pizza at home. My favorite is to use an outdoor grill instead of an oven. A hot grill with a pre-heated pizza stone is totally capable of reaching proper temperature. This can actually make neopolitan style pizza crust and works perfectly for other styles too. If you can't do a grill, starting the pizza in a large preheated cast iron pan on the stove top will help. Finish it off in the oven. Not Neopolitan, but very good. If you are using the recommended "00-flour" (finely milled high gluten bread flour), and you're not reaching pizza oven temperatures because you're using a household oven, add diastatic malt (powder) to the dough mix. This boosts yeast activity and also helps with coloration of the dough at lower temperatures. Otherwise, the pizza will be "done" before the crust has a chance to color properly.
- gruez 7y ago
  >Household ovens can barely hit 500F There's a hack you can do where you use your oven's self clean function to reach high temperatures. Most ovens have a physical interlock preventing you from opening the door during a self clean cycle though, so to work around that you'll have to void your warranty and saw off the lock.
  - oftenwrong 7y ago
    I have done it at my old (rented) apartment without physically destroying the latch. If I remember correctly (this was ~10 years ago), I was able to remove the latch assembly entirely, and then jump the wires for the sensor that detects the latch being engaged. That said, cooking pizza on the clean cycle is difficult, and not necessarily worth it. Timing and vertical positioning in the oven is crucial, or you will end up with a burnt bottom or toppings. Make sure you have a long peel, and keep your face away from the heat when you open the door.
- subpixel 7y ago
  > Not Neopolitan, but very good. I take issue with Neapolitan being a standard of quality. It's just a style.
mtrovo 7y ago
I feel that learning the classics on cooking is a good way to see how engineering mindset is close to cooking and food preparation mindset. Talking about Italian food in specific, they're very opinionated about what's the best way to work each ingredient, how to work dough, how long to leave pasta resting, and what's the best blend of herbs and the best species for each recipe. On engineering we call it standardization not fetishism. That's what DOP, DOC and DOCG is about, and that's what the Neapolitan on Neapolitan pizza is about, you know that if you eat a Neapolitan pizza that follow the official process you will have a predicted flavor on your pizza, like it or not. By reading the classics and asking yourself why they cook that way you will start to understand that you can use shortcuts where the output could be the same or close enough. For instance stone is a very bad heat conductor, that's why you need a very hot oven to deliver the right amount of heat to cook your pizza. But if you use a better conductor you could deliver the same amount of energy on a much lower temperature. On the "Modernist Cuisine at Home"[0] book they research this topic and arrive on the conclusion that a thick baking steel sheet arrives on much better results, they even sell their official baking steel [1]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvold/dp/0982761015 https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvol... [1] https://modernistcuisine.com/shop/baking-steel/ https://modernistcuisine.com/shop/baking-steel/
- notechback 7y ago
  DOP, DOC, etc are not about preference, they are designations for regionally protected products names with some production standards. Just like champagne is only champagne if it was made in champagne region from the right grapes in the right methodology. These assure on the other hand normally a good quality standard as the regional producers' associations have every incentive to keep quality good.
  - subpixel 7y ago
    Exactly - they are not for standardization, they are for marketing.
  - basch 7y ago
    and in America, its VPN. https://americas.pizzanapoletana.org/en/members https://americas.pizzanapoletana.org/en/members

stevievee 7y ago

Definitely not necessary to buy ingredients "certified" by the "Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana" but following the traditional methods yields some really tasty pizza.

hinoki 7y ago

You can train yourself to detect most of these differences, but you do need to try many different “good” versions of something to develop your taste. But beware, once you have a sophisticated taste for something you can no longer enjoy all the “bad” ones.

technothrasher 7y ago

I agree with you that your own judgement is what matters on things like flavors, as long as you don't close yourself off to certain foods that may take a few tries to appreciate. But I think you've dialed down a very complicated issue too far when you say "one cannot tell the difference between good and very good". A better characterization would be that many factors go into the perception of taste, and it's not always straightforward to identify "good". Here's a decent article on wine tasting that explores the idea much more honestly than, "Haha, experts can't tell!": https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-professional-wine-connoisseurs-really-not-tell-the-difference-between-expensive-wines-and-cheap-wines/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...

namelosw 7y ago

Oh, I struggled this for so many years, and I still couldn't convince myself wine is tastier than grape juice. Maybe it's one of those 'street credit' things?

tomcooks 7y ago
Maybe it's more about finding your own taste and let "experts" believe you can confine nature and culture (food/language/skintones) into imaginary boxes drawn on a map.

keiferski 7y ago

I really wish this wine meme would die. Essentially every test done to ‘prove’ that there’s no difference between cheap and expensive wines has had two massive flaws: 1. The label of ‘wine expert’ is left undefined. True sommeliers have spent thousands of hours studying wine and are not the same thing as a guy that takes a weekend wine-tasting course and gets a certificate. Yet most ‘studies’ fail to mention this. Just as importantly here, what literally every single source we could find not only leaves out when reporting this story, but in the vast majority of cases falsely states, is the actual qualifications of those being tested by Brochet. It turns out, the people he was using as taste testers were not experts at all, simply undergraduate students studying oenology (wine and wine making). While certainly probably more knowledgeable than your average person on the street, nobody would call an undergraduate mathematics major just learning the ropes a “math expert”, nor would their skills be indicative of what their professors who have vastly more experience and are actual experts are capable of doing. 2. The ‘experiments’ are done in a totally unscientific arbitrary way, with massive amounts of suggestion and psychological influence. If this were any other scientific study, it would be laughed out of the room for its total lack of rigor. As the Master Sommeliers demonstrate by passing the taste test they are subjected to in the first place, with enough time and study, there are actually people who are exceptionally good at identifying and judging attributes of wines in the right circumstances. But overwhelm there sense with 100 wines or change their expectations about what they are tasting and their perceptions will change significantly, seemingly, making them little better than a random person off the street at telling anything definitive about the wine. https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-professional-wine-connoisseurs-really-not-tell-the-difference-between-expensive-wines-and-cheap-wines/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...

saiya-jin 7y ago
A simple flaw in your reasoning - none of the target audience of this comparison is actually a sommelier expert. The whole argument is about an average joe sampling say a wine costing say 15 euros in france and one costing 500. And the same average joe benefiting very little if at all from paying too much. Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town. I personally, by no means an expert in any way, can attest the difference is minimal and mostly comes down to one's own preferences / pairing of wine with food in given situation. Its often one of those markets where you buy your own emotions with higher price rather than actual, measurable subjective added value. But yes, if you use a wine costing 2-3 euros, quality of taste in many aspects will be incomparable even to that average joe.

eagsalazar2 7y ago

That threshold is very different for different people. I'm not a wine drinker so I won't comment but different people definitely have or have developed a much more refined sense of "what is good". In general of course a person can eat whatever crap they want and it doesn't affect me except when that person is cooking or picking out food for me.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

I think your argumentation lacks evidence. Where is the evidence for your very strong claims?

rv-de 7y ago

Technically you're right. But food is for many people more than the taste. It's a form of escapism, a little show that distracts you from the chore. For that to work you need this fantasy of the master chef and authenticity that allows you to enter a different culture mentally. It's kind of live action role play.

yomly 7y ago

I mulled on this comment for a day - your comment saddens me. That said, your ultimate takeaway is sound - do whatever makes you happy, don't rely on others to validate what you should or shouldn't enjoy. >Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff. But if this isn't cynicism for effect and is your true outlook on life I would encourage you to spend some time with any master of something and have them describe in detail to you the things they are seeing in a fellow master doing the same thing. This <thing> could be anything - sports, music, art, acting, chess, video games... What you will probably see is the master picking up on all sorts of imperceptible details that seem so subtle that they seem like bullshit. Then try going deep on that same thing, learn it for yourself. Eventually you will reach a stage where you will suddenly discover firsthand how little you know about that skill and how big the world above you is in skill and detail. Then eventually you will appreciate that this is true for almost every other disciplines and there myriad worlds of hidden detail that you never noticed or appreciated that creators have slaved over. Things that you only notice but can't put your finger on when you compare a pro to an amateur. Is Monet just dabs on a canvas? Federer just hitting a ball? Is Daigo just a lucky guesser at Street Fighter? Is Mitsuko Uchida just more stuffy and pretentious than your street busker? Granted, there's a lot of snake oil in food and wine because there's money to be made but don't let that theatre close you off categorically to the world of food (and wine).