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>If you learned face-to-face, they would teach you the proper way... 40m. When they cook the dish themselves, they do 40m onions. When they write the recipe, th

• dalbasal 5y ago
  IDK how Brother Occam cooked his onions, put the author is not arguing semantics. The Author is calling out recipe writers on succumbing to something or other... and fibbing. Occam was a man of god and would have told the truth. I don't think deducing from pure logic in a court of first principles (I am being dramatic, obviously) is the way to go here. These are some pretty established recipe families and good cooks tend to cook them the slow cooked onion way. I suppose one can always argue that art is in the eye of the beholder, that French Onion Soup, Bunny Chow or Rogan Josh are whatever we decide they are, plurality, etc. but... well... these recipes are half onion. They're not quick fried onion recipes. The onions are soft and mix gently with the gelatinous liquid parts. There's no lost in translation here. They're saying and showing pictures that imply slow cooked onions. In their restaurants (and homes), they are certainly not serving soup that's a stock with crunchy onion rings floating around! They're making french onion soup that's french onion soup. They're using slow cooked onions and lying about it! Godammit HN! Sometimes things just are as sneaky as they seem. I've had it with these onion fibbin fraudsters. They've been lying to us this whole time!
  • jasode 5y ago
    >the author is not arguing semantics. I agree that the author is not dissecting semantics and that omission is my point. It's the flaw with his essay. I'm saying the best way to explain the widespread "lie" (across books, Youtube videos, etc) is via differing language usage. And look closely again (freeze the frame) at that deep link of the onions in the Vivek Singh of Cinnamon Club video... those are not deep dark brown onions (scientific chemistry of caramelization) -- and yet he calls that 5-7 minute heating of onions ... "caramelization". >There's no lost in translation here. Those videos and this entire HN thread full of contradictory comments about "caramelization" and various posters trying to correct each other ... seems like evidence that there's plenty lost in translation. :-) The author quotes Madhur Jaffrey's cookbook for rogan josh and the Youtube video shows Madhur Jaffrey re-iterating that it's 7-10 minutes to brown the onions.
    • dalbasal 5y ago
      It's not a neutral observer kind of an examination. Some things are intuitive if you understand the subculture. It is similarly difficult to "prove" the antipattern in a web app's data consent model to a neutral observer. But, if you live in a world of Web Apps & TCS, then it's quite intuitive. Users can tick here, click there... consent. If someone has never used a computer before, it'll sound reasonable. There is more context to these "misunderstandings" than language usage. The author's point is as true if you just used the term "onions," without a descriptor. You can point to end cases... special onion cultivars, special cooking methods (the author tries one), a twist on the mainstream recipe... Any of these could "explain" the observations, if you're looking at it this way. There's no smoking gun without an author admitting that they fibbed about onion times... >>Those videos and this entire HN thread full of contradictory comments about "caramelization" Of course it they are! Semantics are Nerdbait Pro. That's why these states persist. The semantics are cover. This is a conspiracy, of sorts. ... No cooking class will teach you the 5 minute onion version of french onion soup or Rogan Josh. Only written recipes trying to look quick and easy. This is not a coincidence. I'm not claiming there is enough evidence on the table to convict anyone specific. Each one could just be wrong, or eccentric. I am saying that as someone who cooks and eats these dishes....On average, these are blatant lies! Despite the fact that people use terms like "caramelized" in multiple ways, we can usually know a lot of meaning from context. The more context we know (eg, knowing how these dishes are ordinarily made), the better we are able to distinguish meaning... and also antipatterns like habitual fibbing in a certain context. We're more likely to notice the photo effects, if we know that we're looking at a thumbnail. [disclaimer] Being melodramatic for fun. Obviously not this cranky about onion recipes.