I’m not entirely sure what makes this hacker news?
It’s just a very long recipe for Phở (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho)
Is the hack that it’s supposedly doable in under 30 minutes?
It’s just a very long recipe for Phở (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho)
Is the hack that it’s supposedly doable in under 30 minutes?
He piggy-backed on the work of real food scientists and revealed things to the public that have been common in professional kitchens for decades, but then where he adds his own methods the evidence is often "trust me bro".
As someone who grew up in the household of two chefs one classically trained the other a development chef I see James Lopez as little more than a loud-mouthed amateur, have you tried his no-knead pizza dough, it's absolutely shocking, I think he later tried to distance himself from it claiming it came from another chef.
Kenji Lopez-Alt (weird that you intentionally chose to write his name in a way that he doesn’t) is by definition not an amateur (he worked professionally in kitchens), but more importantly, he is a really good communicator. His work is about explaining the why of cooking instead of the how to people who did not have the benefit of being raised by professional chefs. He may not have pushed food science forward, but he has pushed understanding of food science forward. His writing is for people that have no clue that adding pasta water to a sauce is a thing, let alone why. Of course professional chefs know to do this, and some of them even know why.
Has he had some dud recipes? Sure. That’s a good thing though, it means that he is willing to both try new things, as well as make mistakes.
He's got several excellent cookbooks (like the Food Lab and Wok) and is a regular contributor to serious eats and has youtube etc...
I am interested in many things, most of them are not what I want to see on Hacker News.
I would also be upset if the feed was 99% about LLMs. Not too far in the past it was crypto and before then it was blockchain and before that it was Big Data. Use the downvote button profusely, or perhaps dang and the gang can implement stricter rules/filtering.
Cheers
He hacks food in other words.
Someone doing a technical write up about a new technique in their discipline is pretty hacker news to me.
Also, authenticity about recipes is the “but does it scale” of app discussions. It’s ok to just let people enjoy stuff. Not everything is a purity test.
Pho bo (beef pho) typically takes at least 8 hours and is better simmered overnight, so cutting it down to 30 minutes and still having a good result is very useful.
I'm less certain the same transfer function always returns the gas pressure at the top of the sealed bowl "no matter what altitude you're at" considering that at the starting point, when first sealed, ambient room atmospheric pressure varies with altitude: for the same initial food mass to be cooked the standardised gas volume included will vary with altitude.
(Alternatively, no matter the altitude, there's always a constant volume to fill with atmospheric gas .. and the mass of that gas will vary with altitude)
He used to own a restaurant in downtown San Mateo called Wursthall. It has since closed. He lives up in Seattle now but I am not aware of him being involved in any new restaurants.