Even fine restaurants serve coffee made with capsules
aeon.co
aeon.co
The absolute worst case scenario is that the culinary world becomes like the visual arts or fashion worlds; the materials and general skills are broadly available, but there shall ever be an upper end of the art from which to sneer down at the plebians, even if it only in style and fashions, and by that I mean raw styles and fashions. The clothing fashion world shows this most clearly, in that creating knockoffs of today's fashions isn't even that technically challenging, and yet there is still a "high class" fashion world for those who care to participate in.
The instinctive human drive to differentiate is what creates that, the upper class attitude is what creates that, the incidental details of how one particular field happens to signal is hardly relevant, the actual details are themselves nearly infinitely malleable.
The programming world is so many levels deep into automation of automation of automation that we've nearly forgotten the promises that one day we'd be automated out of existence. But the promises were made, and they failed, because we merely upped our expectations and advanced to the next level. Perhaps someday there won't be a "next level" for us to rise to, but that is a world so different from ours we can no longer predict what it is like.
The culinary world will adapt. There will be much moaning, must wringing of hands, and a hell of a lot of signaling words flying around about how wonderful hand crafted artisan food is (even if for some reason, every day, fewer people act to consume it), even as there is ever and always still an elite, which will probably consist of mostly the same people anyhow.
When a musician creates music, they can record and share it with anyone who cares. Writers print books, actors make movies, coders make apps.
With cooking, we're still stuck in the live performance era. In a restaurant you can eat what the chef prepares and enjoy their art. But if you can't get to the restaurant or can't afford it you miss out. Famous chefs release cookbooks and film cooking shows where they let you watch them and you can try to recreate their craft for yourself, but that's not really sharing the food.
The problem is there is no food media. An actual dish can't be recorded, transmitted, and reproduced, and so we rely on storytelling about the food using other methods. Food is the subject but not the substance.
We've been here before, and we've moved beyond this before. The mass media of writing started with monks transcribing text, but then was improved by the printing press. Writing let us describe music on sheets that you could reproduce by hand at home, but the media of music really started with the wax cylinder, then the phonograph and radio. I think food will become the next major art to become a medium.
Sure there is. There are likely plenty of copies of various dishes in the freezer section of your local grocery mart. Some are, objectively, pretty good; others are likely just much better than you could do yourself.
Huh. See? I am a /terrible/ cook. Like one out of three times I try to cook something it is objectively inedible.
However... frozen foods? seriously?
Please link me to some that are "pretty good" - I mean, I want to believe you, but I have tried many, and so far have been quite disappointed, both by the cheap and the expensive.
Edit: When I say "frozen foods" I mean TV-dinner style fully-cooked food. I practically live off of frozen chicken... the uncooked kind that you throw in the oven.
That said it's not difficult to prepare decent food at home; if you're unable to, maybe fundamentally it's just not something you care to do. Fine, nothing wrong with that, eat out or buy prepared food. If you don't like what's in the freezer, I find that the deli section of most supermarkets has a variety of prepared dishes that are ready to reheat and eat.
You can create a great roast chicken at home. Very few dishes require a specialized oven or more than 450 degrees F.
The key difference between a home kitchen and a commercial kitchen is that in a commercial kitchen, you have more space, stocked ingredients, and more tools. And a bunch of apprentices to do stuff for you. You can cook everything at home that you can in a commercial kitchen, just less efficiently.
(I say this as a former professional chef...)
I'd suggest people that say they can't cook, try to cook roast chicken from recipe. Make sure to use a timer and you really can't go wrong.
I don't believe you.
I've eaten some absolutely mind-blowing meals made at home on mid to high-end consumer-grade equipment. Obviously, I wasn't the cook, and I'm no expert, but the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as it were. I don't think restaurants can consistently match the better cooks in my family until they approach the $50/head range.
I am absolutely convinced that it's primarily skill and not equipment. I do think it is something I could get better at if I was willing to put a lot of effort into it. But it is a whole lot of effort, and it's not just the effort of learning, it's the effort of doing it every night. (In fact, putting the effort into /learning/ is on my to-do list. but even if I can, if I can pay $10 and avoid an hour of work, even if I can do that work well, I will.)
But if I could buy prepared frozen food (that took minimal effort on my part to prepare and clean up from) that was even just acceptable? I'd pay. It doesn't need to be mind-blowing, just 'good enough'
I mean, part of the problem is that it's a process; you have to plan what you want, then go pick out fresh food, then cook it, etc, etc. Which reminds me, I should set up the safeway delivery again. that was pretty cool.
>If you don't like what's in the freezer, I find that the deli section of most supermarkets has a variety of prepared dishes that are ready to reheat and eat.
Yeah... I usually get a rotisserie chicken once a week or so. Cheap and good. Most of the other stuff... well, maybe my standards are too high? but it's pretty hit and miss, and mostly miss.
Also, I'm not sure if that counts as 'fully cooked' - I mean, it's not much easier than the aforementioned chicken thighs; also, the part of cooking I screw up most often? spacing out over the alarm and burning it. Really, some sort of convection oven that would automatically shut off (and somehow stop the food from overcooking?) would go a long ways towards solving that problem.
The /idea/ of fully-cooked food that you pop into the microwave for a specified period of time is pretty great for me; usually the cook time isn't long enough for me to get distracted and if I do, it's just cold, the fire alarm doesn't go off. But the reality comes up short. the only food I've been able to stomach like that is the "steam bags" of chicken alfredo.
Interestingly, I was a fan of Newman's Own (the aforementioned steam bags) for a while, and then the quality of what I was getting seemed to drop, so I stopped buying them. I haven't done frozen pastas for months now.
Jack Daniels sells some stuff that looks nice; the frozen ribs turned out remarkably well for 5 minutes in the microwave. As meat, it's not great, but they've just done the herbs and spices in a way I find appealing. Put some garlic bread or instant mashed potatoes with it and it's pretty good.
Really, though, it sounds like we have significant differences in taste, so maybe you should take my suggestions as things to avoid. :D
There's no such thing as "objectively, pretty good". Its an inherently subjective descriptor.
I can tell you that food can indeed be "recorded, transmitted, and reproduced" -- we do it by doing the cooking ourselves, learning from recipes and our imagination. Why should food be so hard? That it's considered an extraordinary feat to cook a wonderful dinner? Why should it be on par with painting a painting or writing a book? I assure you that if you ask any honest cook or chef, they will tell you that cooking isn't difficult. Their job is fucking hard, but the cooking itself? As simple as arts can go.
The upper limit of cooking has, admittedly, increased. This is a recent phenomenon. In the future, this may become easier as certain technologies become democratised, and the avant-garde again becomes the status quo. We saw this with Escoffier, Bocuse. We will see it again with Adria. A competent home cook will not miss out on the food of any great restaurant (bar the cutting edge, maybe?) as long as he/she is willing to learn a few tricks (with the restaurant book craze, there are no more secrets) and pay a bit more for groceries (thanks, globalisation).
I hope I don't sound too hostile. I didn't downvote you either (hah, don't even have the choice to). I just think that you're looking at food from too academic a viewpoint -- too high up. That's not to say that food cannot reach greater heights. But not in the way you predict or wish it to.
Of course, I do hope you visit more great restaurants. Having worked in the back of house of said restaurants, I do want your business! The experience of a restaurant transcends its food, and the unique whole package is of course, not replicable anywhere but in that restaurant. Would there be "restaurant media"? I don't know -- restaurant documentaries don't cut it, maybe the VR headsets we were promised a decade ago would be the solution?
Somehow I think that actually going to the restaurant is, in the end, the only way to do it.
(Whether or not the concept of restaurant will survive into the far future is another debate)
I fail to see the difference.
Nutrition is a solved problem. Just drink soylent.
So we are left to talk about the art side of food - taste, smell, feel, touch, look. Artistic composition of ingredients to create a pleasurable meal.
> A competent home cook will not miss out on the food of any great restaurant (bar the cutting edge, maybe?) as long as he/she is willing to learn a few tricks (with the restaurant book craze, there are no more secrets) and pay a bit more for groceries (thanks, globalisation).
But it's hard to reproduce food from recipe. We need:
- better frozen/packaged foods
- detailed recipes
- food 3d printers?
The difference is that food, by and large, is not even an art. And I'm saying that as someone who cooks professionally and looks up to the greatest chefs of all time. If you are not developing new dishes or pushing the edge of your cuisine, what you're doing is not really an art. People have to stop perpetuating the myth that food is this black box that just happens. It only serves to make some chefs richer and dumbs down the rest of us.
> Nutrition is a solved problem. Just drink soylent.
You're trolling right? Nutrition is not a solved problem. That's like saying medicine or human biology is a solved problem. We still don't know a lot of things -- what we need, what we want, what we should avoid. And I'm sorry to break it to you but Soylent is not a solution. Might be in the future, but drink it full-time in its current state? Not exactly nutritious.
> But it's hard to reproduce food from recipe.
I realise that not everyone is a good cook. But to be honest, practice goes a long way. You might think those few hours of your time are wasted, but I really think otherwise. We spend orders of magnitude more time reading, IMing, working. Spend one whole weekend cooking. I guarantee you'll be a much better cook. And it's a skill that will last you forever. It's also tasty.
> - better frozen/packaged foods
What's wrong with fresh food? (Not living in the USA, but fresh food is plentiful where I live). Even then, what's wrong with your frozen chicken breast? Cook it well, and it will beat out the offerings of most average restaurants.
> - detailed recipes
How detailed do you want them? I can recommend a few books if you want. Youtube helps too.
> - food 3d printers!
I actually don't know why you want this. Like, are you trying to replicate restaurant food with them? No restaurant I've heard of uses them.
PS: Throwaway account? You seem to be familiar with how to post on HN, yet your account was created only 10 minutes ago
It really isn't. Like any physical craft, it takes practice, patience, some failure, but a competent home cook should be able to recreate most of the classics from a recipe book.
Painting a bad painting is trivial, as is writing a terrible book. (well, writing a few pages of a terrible book is trivial. writing a terrible 500 page novel still takes some stick-with-it, or at least a lot of cutting and pasting.) And cooking a not very good meal is pretty easy, too; Certainly no harder than churning out a few pages of bad fan-fiction.
Doing those things well is more difficult. And being truly great is difficult indeed.
In fact, I think music is a pretty good analogy here. It used to be that a lot more people participated in the making of music; singing was a pretty normal thing for normal people to do while working or even while making war. That just doesn't happen anymore; You could say that it is sad that the average man or woman can't sing at all, but on the other hand, we all have access to the very best musicians of our time.
See, I think we need a "player piano" - something very rudimentary and limited, but that lets people exchange recipes. Personally? I would prefer to start with heat timing and control, as that's the sort of thing I tend to screw up the most.
huh. That seems like a pretty good scenario to me. I mean, the current state of clothing is... well, it's pretty great for the poor, and for people who don't want to spend a lot on clothing. And people who want to spend a lot of money on clothing seem to be happy, and people who want to pretend like they are spending a lot of money on clothing also seem to be happy, High-quality clothing that is in good repair but that is used and out of style is nearly free. so I really don't see the problem.
My problem is that from what I've seen? when eating out, there's a very dramatic difference between what I get for $5 and what I get for $50. (or, more realistically, $20)
Personally? I'm generally pretty pleased with pants that cost less than a nice meal. I mean, the difference between a pair of "Kirkland Signature" jeans and a pair of Diesel jeans is 10x in price, and as far as I can tell, functionally, the Kirkland jeans are just fine. In many ways better than the diesel jeans. Of course, I'm wearing jeans I bought at Costco, and that says things socially, but I'm pretty okay with that. They are good jeans. In fact, I've worn my costco jeans while eating $50 dinners.
If I could walk into a McDonalds (or costco) and buy a $5 meal that was functionally equivalent (minus the social cache) to a $50 meal? I would be extremely happy, and I'd be happy to let the guy paying $50 for the same thing with nicer lighting feel superior to me.
This said, their business model is very much anti-consumer: they're doing with coffee what HP and Epson did with ink. For this reason alone, I never bought a Nespresso and I'll stick to brewing my own coffee. As the article says, it's not just about measuring, not even measuring quality: it's about the kind of world we want to build.
Though much better printers exist, the video shows the concept.
I am a coffee-snob. In some ways this is a curse - I hate nearly all the coffee available to me locally. Latte art or no, there are particular tastes I can't stand anymore, where when I first started drinking coffee I wouldn't have cared if the coffee was Nescafe or single-origin.
s/music/coffee
I'm a massive coffee snob, but I love a good flat white (like a late but smaller (160-180mL as opposed to a late which is more like 215mL, and served in a cup), especially with a double shot.
I choose the simpler method not because the coffee is better (though I'm sure it can be, and many factors are at play here), but because, in a way, it's the FOSS alternative to the bloated, proprietary capsule systems.
It all works rather well.
Now to me there are several aspects to this. One clear factor is whether the barista "cares" about the coffee they are giving me. Clay at Special X-tra is so damn good at pulling a perfect shot every single time and Chris just doesn't care and pulls a mediocre shot at best. Everywhere I go where the barista "cares" about pulling that shot the espresso is "acceptable."
I don't judge on characteristics of the beans/roast, I know some like acid, some like smooth. If the coffee is fresh, not burned, ground properly, tamped properly (an artform) and pulled properly and with care, I am going to like it most likely.
In terms of the Nespresso system, what you've done is remove the possibility of someone caring about the coffee they are serving me. I've tried espresso's from the Nespresso system and they are not even close to what I can get at Elite Audio, Special Xtra (make sure Clay does it), Vega, Blue Bottle (more of scene than I usually like), Cento, or Jackson Place. Its reliably very mediocre at best. The least acceptable espresso I've had is at Coffee Bar, where they roast a little too dark for my tastes, and even those, as long as I tell them to pull it short, are much better than a Nespresso system shot.
I think we do not even have to debate the quality of the coffee used in the tests and that the coffee the author brought from home was ground 4 days earlier.
And although good coffee is always welcome, you don't really need a great coffee with dessert, just a decent one. You want something to perk your senses up a bit after the meal and to provide heat and bitterness to balance out the sweet, probably cold dessert. Nobody's going to be focusing on the coffee, just the dessert. And people don't expect to pay more than a few bucks for a cup of coffee, even at a nice place.
So there's really not much profit in stocking great coffee, installing top-of-the-line coffee machines, and training your staff how to make it. Making espresso is relatively time-consuming, too, as is grinding the beans and cleaning everything (working as a barista is like 90% cleaning). So you buy something that sounds impressive enough to list on the menu for as cheap as you can get it, you grind up enough ahead of time to get you through the night, you put it in a big industrial-sized drip machine with an insulated carafe, and you forget about it.
I think that's actually a common misconception. Maybe it's relevant only in coffee-heavy cultures, but a coffee is (often) the very last thing one will taste before leaving the restaurant. You want your customers to leave on a high note, right? This is why so much effort is spent on the dessert, the final dish. But the coffee will follow the dessert! That's the final dish.
When an otherwise decent meal is followed by a terrible coffee, to me it's depressing; it forces me to re-evaluate the experience. Maybe those dishes weren't as good as I thought, maybe they got them right by accident... This is why many restaurants will actually offer you liquor at the very end; it's an easy way to make you leave happy. If you don't go down that route, then you should invest some time in making sure the coffee is good. Or at least get a Nespresso :)
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
The article discusses how society treats information differently depending on where it came from, and how it was produced -- even if that difference is not observable in the raw bits themselves.
When we are discussing whether artisan-made products are better, I think it is worthwhile to have in mind whether we're considering objective, measurable standards, or a different sort of perspective that takes into account "color". From the article:
> Of course, we need to think about yield, efficiency and environmental impact. But we also need to think about what kind of world we want to live in. And if we do, most of us would say that we would prefer food chains that preserve human links between consumer, farmer, land, and animals, in a landscape that combines functionality and beauty as much as is possible.
Is the concept of "preserving human links" something that can be measured objectively, or is it color?
Analog.
No, really, I'm serious. It really is about analog. For years and years, everyone who has had any experience with technology has been striving to create perfection and flawless beauty in every sense of the words. Digital is the best way to do this – it's calculated, cold, and mathematical. It's predictable and reassuring. But humans aren't digital. Our hands tremble; they don't stay steady like a robot's mechanical arm. Our brains aren't perfect: they often forget things we want to remember, and remember things we want to forget. Our walking isn't straight. Many of us have less-than-flawless health and vision. We're not completely symmetrical, and look pretty ugly without clothing.
In other words, humans are imperfect.
But, perfection, while it is the antithesis to imperfection, is paradoxically horrible for humans. Our brains are wired to expect change and differentiation from the routine. We like good surprises, and monotony gets dull. Unlike a computer, our neurons are always firing and active rather than passive, so we hate passivity.
So, isn't perfection just the antithesis of everything that makes the world beautiful? A lovely red leaf hanging on a tree long after the winter solstice. The knotted wood on a piano. The fingerprints on a record. Isn't perfection what takes the life out of life?
As we continue to automate, we really, seriously need to ask ourselves a question: will we accept convenience for mediocrity?
Sadly, consumer choices and corporate brainwashing have shown in the past that we will.
And that won't change in the future. Enjoy your handmade coffee now, because it will get rarer and rarer in the future. And with every imperfect barista replaced with a perfect machine, we'll lose a little bit of what makes humans...
...humans.
As for after grinding - you can't really expect it to produce a decent extraction even _ten minutes_ after grinding.
Per the article, in this blind taste test, the opposite appears to be true:
In distant last place came the ground coffee I had brought, a very good quality, single-estate bean, but not roasted for espresso and ground four days earlier, a little too coarsely for Bruno’s machine. The traditional house espresso scored 18 points, and was the favourite of one taster. But the clear winner with 22 points was the Nespresso, which both scored most consistently and was the favourite of two of the four tasters. Of course, these were just four people’s opinions. But their consensus fits the judgment of top chefs and Nespresso’s own extensive testing, which must have been conclusive enough for them to have the confidence to agree to my challenge in the first place.
If you have better data, cite it!
My own informal testing (which would seem to have at least equal scientific validity to the article) is based on friends and family A/B-ing my own decent home machine, some excellent local coffee shops, Starbucks, and a Nespresso machine I bought for a relative so that I could bear to drink their coffee when I visited.
Not trying to grandstand here but the article has misleading info (and may well be astroturf), that's all.
One of the major reasons for this is that these chefs get crazy good deals from Nespresso as part of it's marketing, ie, it's in the best restaurants, it's good for you.
Coffee from most specialist espresso cafes is really not that good. But some are. I got the barista at one to teach me how she made coffee (Note: although already experienced, she wasn't very good for the first year at that cafe, but became extraordinary within 3 years).
The two things I learned were that (1). the grind is affected by the changing humidity and temperature of the day, so must be adjusted (this is more important for an espresso cafe, where the machine is near the entrance - in a fancy hotel, it would be climate controlled); (2). the texture of the milk froth (for a latte) is very important to the experience - when correct, you can see the milk falling like snow through the coffee. There is no boundary between coffee and milk, but a very gradual gradient (which disappears within a few minutes). Although it looks nice, the big difference is in the incredible silky taste.
tl;dr grind and frothing automation
I live in Australia, which surprisingly has some of the best coffee culture in the world, but here you sort of just expect that all restaurants serve pretty crap coffee. I would never, ever use it as a benchmark for good coffee...
In my city (third largest in the country), we have hundreds of little cafes that either roast on-site or are supplied by local artesian roasters. The quality of the product that many of these places are producing is pretty incredible (to my taste at least), and I have never had a capsule coffee that comes close...
"In distant last place came the ground coffee I had brought, a very good quality, single-estate bean, but not roasted for espresso and ground four days earlier, a little too coarsely for Bruno’s machine."
Bringing not roasted for espresso coffee to espresso competition makes me wonder what was the purpose of the competition. Why not to bring something that had the characteristics of a winning coffee.
Frankly you are better off with French press or pourover at home.
Restaurants take great care of lot other food and beverage details by for some reason they cant use decent fresh coffee or tea.
I have a Nespresso and have made my own Sous Vide cooker, but I'll throw stakes on the BBQ at most dinner parties because of the social aspects.
Personally I don't use a capsule machine because I don't want my coffee choices limited by manufacturer. Also, instead of 25c per cup, capsules are 80-90c per cup.
It's important for anyone involved in creative industries to understand, in their specific field, what can be automated today, what has already been automated, and what should not be automated. These are huge factors that will affect your training, your output, your pricing, your marketing and your future strategy, regardless of which field of endeavour you're in.