This is one of the things that has baffled me a bit. I’ve really gotten into cooking lately and learned a lot about the techniques of Michelin starred chefs. Things like cooking vegetables sous vide in aromatic court bouillon followed by searing over binchotan. Or A/B testing the optimal number of days to grill a beet over low heat. Or even starch retrograding potatoes at a precise temperature in their skins followed by passing the final result through a lab grade #60 sieve for ultra smooth pomme purée.
I watched the Masterclass snippet for Thomas Keller and nothing like that is in the video. Instead, it’s “add herbs to the water and brine the chicken”. I can find this anywhere on the internet. I want the real stuff. Surely Thomas Keller doesn’t want people to think his life’s work is so easy that it can be learned overnight. It’s the same with Gordon Ramsay. Almost all of his popular videos for how to cook are different than what his restaurants actually do. He even has two YouTube videos with conflicting instructions on how to cook a steak.
I’m not sure if it’s just specific to cooking, but it seems like the experts massively tone down what they are best at for the masses, and it’s a bit disappointing because I want to learn how they actually do it in practice. My best attempt to learn is to instead dig through archive.org for old blog posts from some of these world renowned chefs before they became famous; you can often find some insight into how they actually think about cooking.
Serious Eats, Cooks Illustrated, and Chefsteps are also good resources, but I’m not sure they go quite to the obsessive level of world class cooking (Chefsteps used to, but their recent work seems scaled back a bit for some reason.)