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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

Americas test kitchen also says you can't make crispy pork belly without frying it, I don't know why people put so much trust in a group that can get something so easy, wrong.

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ATK/CI, Kenji, etc - they all have said that many times they're talking about best results. It's often possible to cut corners from what they say and get perfectly reasonable results, just not as ideal as one could.

Also FWIW, my recollection of the pork belly episode was the same, that they said you'll never get as good of a crispy crust without frying. That's not the same as it's not possible to make it happen at all. I remember thinking "well, I'm not gonna bother with that".

Here is the video, right at the point where they make their absolutely ridiculous fucking claim:

> We tried to get that skin crisp in a hot oven and under the broiler, and it just didn't work. The only way to get it crisp was using hot oil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ucXLDX_xrE&t=390s

You seem to have a very negative opinion about America’s Test Kitchen based on one claim they made in one video (6:30). Yet you offer no insight into why you feel they are wrong. If a company in the business of testing recipes, with 30+ year track record (Cooks Illustrated), tells me that they did multiple experiments on pork belly, found oven results were leathery, frying was crispy, explains why, and then demonstrates it, well yes, I am going to trust them over a guy on the internet who implies he is some master of pork bellies but demonstrates nothing.

If someone claiming to be an "expert" says that something cannot be done, but you yourself have done it countless times at home, it tends to give the impression that the "expert" has no fucking idea what they're doing.

When the internet is full of examples of other people doing said thing, it kind of cements the idea that they have no fucking idea.

But hey, believe what you want.

Yes. And as I said sometimes these people are making claims against a bar higher than what a normal person would apply. You can’t always take their statements literally

There”s crispy and there’s crispy.

If they can't manage to convey that "we couldn't make it crispy to the utmost degree that we consider acceptable" without saying "it just didn't work" and implying that it's impossible to make it crispy at all without their method, I would argue that they're equally as shit at communicating in English as they are at cooking.

I can believe that the current ATC doesn't know how to cook it, but there's definitely at least one recipe from Cook's Illustrated or Cook's Country going back around a decade that advises using a cold, dry pan for crispy pork belly, which I'll still do today.

I also recall that all the talent left to join Chris for Milk Street, which is who would have published that technique.

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