/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>6674743
Literally what.

wtf r u talking about

>>6674751
>>6674753
>Blue Apron
It's some retarded service for people like OP who can't plan ahead longer than 24 hours.

I wonder if they activate the almonds

>>6674751
It's like a cross between grocery delivery and takeout.

They deliver all of the ingredients you need for a specific meal, in a refrigerator box. No tipping, and no fridge full of rotten half-used heads of cabbage, bunches of parsley, huge ass tubs of miso, and so on.

It really upsets some people who think that paying extra for convenience is some kind of Israeli conspiracy to make you worship the lizard people.

>>6674767
I'm not upset by this, but it sounds like a profoundly stupid concept. People are free to spend their money on whatever asinine bullshit they want to, though. It is their money, after all.

>>6674767
>It really upsets some people who think that paying extra for convenience is some kind of Israeli conspiracy to make you worship the lizard people.
Doesn't upset me. I just think you're retarded for blowing more money on someone almost literally spoonfeeding you ingredients rather than being able to plan ahead and use ingredients in multiple dishes in a short amount of time.

>>6674775
>in a short amount of time
Just now (well about an hour ago) I threw out the following undated containers of stuff accumulated over the last untold number of years:
>An enormous, half consumed tub of duck fat, probably from the time of the WTC attacks
>Three mostly empty jars of capers
>Some crystallized tamari from 2004
>A dessicated bottle of pearl river bridge from the Ming Dynasty
>A mummified cluster of de-fleshed frozen chicken carcasses that never got made into stock
>A mangled quivering blob of what was once romaine
>Five or six dried up lemons
>Several heads of garlic, still in their original shape but 1/5 the original weight
>A half eaten tub of tahini from when Hong Kong was part of the UK
I'm tired of typing but you get the general idea.

I'm done with the bullshit. Blue Apron forever.

>>6674793
So how is this my problem you can't plan ahead?

>>6674795
Why do you feel everything that bothers you is your problem? You must be exhausted all the time.

>>6674803
>Why do you feel everything that bothers you is your problem?
You seem to have felt the need to tell me everything you threw out, so you're acting like it's someone else's fault you can't plan.

>>6674813
Not my fault Blue Apron wasn't around in the year 2000.

You think I wanted to buy 500 grams of duck fat? I go through like 3 tablespoons a year, and I have no intention of ever using more.

>>6674824
Nobody forced you to buy all that duck fat. You could have done without it, or used it more in other dishes, or even found others who needed some and they would take some and help cover the cost. Instead, you felt the need to buy more than you knew you were going to use because of (probably) one dish. Again, you can blow your money on delivered DIY kits, but it just means you can't plan ahead.

>>6674840
If you wanted my duck fat so bad, you should have asked, anon.

I don't think the rats have gotten to it yet, should I fish it out of the trash room for you?

>>6674851
Now we're deflecting. Nice damage control.

tl;dr OP can't into organization.

>>6674860
I've gotten quite good at it in fact. You should see how many of the Blue Apron ice packs I can keep in my freezer now that I've thrown out all the crap I'm never going to use. A bunch of wild alaskan salmon, five pounds of freeze dried morels from two or three years ago, a big ass tub of demi glace I spent all day making a few winters back, and all those chicken carcasses.

>>6674869
Cool. So we've agreed that Blue Apron is for people who have money to burn but can't quite think ahead? Got it.

/thread

>>6674878
>/thread
You don't get to decide this, anon.

>>6674743
Some people like the actual process of mise en place.

>>6674881
Bawwwww harder, champ.

>>6674935
What are you trying to say?

OP, the problem is that you are apparently trying to cook one meal per cuisine for every cuisine that exists in the world. Why? That's a retarded way to cook at home. Dipping your toe into one cuisine long enough to get one meal out of it and then moving on is what restaurants are for. They have all the necessary ingredients, equipment, knowhow and so on to do that sort of thing for you.

When you are cooking at home, the sensible thing to do is to find some small number of cuisines you like, maybe three or so, and then also a handful of other dishes you like. This way, you can buy ingredients in bulk and not have to throw stuff out, because for each ingredient you can use it in more than one singular dish. The advantages of this over Blue Apron are that it's much cheaper, that you get to customize your dishes to your liking, that you can choose what produce to buy based on what looks good in the store rather than relying on someone else to make good choices for you, that you will have all the necessary equipment for the dishes you want to make (if you want to make good quality dishes then for each cuisine you'll often need specialist equipment). Maybe the most important part is that you can make much more of your meal from scratch, therefore have it be a higher quality, because you can safely make side dishes and components of dishes (breads, etc) safe in the knowledge that you will be able to use them with something else the next day or the day after that.

I honestly can't see an advantage to Blue Apron other than for people who are literally autistic and cannot cook anything that is not precisely defined in a recipe. Honestly, if I were autistic I think this would be a godsend. Everything perfectly measured out, all you have to do is follow the recipe and you will achieve the result in the picture. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, but with food. If you're not autistic I can't possibly see how it could be worth it though.

>>6674951
Not OP, but which core cuisines should I choose, based on both health and taste?

>>6674951
>When you are cooking at home, the sensible thing to do is to find some small number of cuisines you like, maybe three or so, and then also a handful of other dishes you like

Fuck that. Don't tell me what to do.

>>6674960
It's not what you SHOULD do, but it's what a person who wants to both save money and not waste food WOULD do.

>>6674957
I have no idea, anon. Depends what you want to cook.

The idea is that by doing that, you will be able to turn a small number of ingredients into a large number of dishes, and it will be relatively easy to mix and match side dishes and dish components and such.

>>6674960
If you want to be more adventurous then do so. This is just a piece of advice. Maybe three is too restrictive. Particularly if you enjoy cooking as a hobby then you will want to branch out more.

What I'm suggesting is just to avoid the situation I often see semi-novice cooks getting themselves into: deciding what to cook by picking dishes at random, things they like or things out of a cookbook. I think that's a bad idea because, as OP has pointed out, you will inevitably end up with ingredients that you don't know how to use in other things. I think the best way to cook is to do it bottom-up, learning ingredients and ways to combine them (roughly speaking, learning a cuisine), rather than top-down, which would be deciding what dish to cook and then assembling the ingredients for it afterwards.

>>6674851
...you have a room just for trash?
Gross.

As a lazy person with a minuscule appetite who will let fresh veggies and meat go bad in their fridge and opt for the easier meal of frozen pizza, something like blue apron sounds like a great fucking idea. In the end I'd be saving money cause all my shit wouldn't go to waste.

Some people just aren't all moto for cooking, fucking christ.

>>6674878
You actually have to plan a week in advance with blue apron.

>>6674993
>>6674996

I imagine you also might encounter the problem of:

>get home from work
>can't be bothered to cook whatever today's dish is
>or maybe just don't feel like eating that today
>can't cook something else instead because you've ordered it all in advance :^)

I can't imagine totally giving up all flexibility to decide what to eat on the day would be a good idea.

This really just seems like it's for the "can't cook, won't cook" crowd. Still preferable to Soylent but it's definitely cut from the same cloth.

>>6674993
The first time I heard of blue apron it was an ad for a podcast. This told me it's for rich people as most ads in podcasts are things you'd pay for the convenience of. That's why I believe Marc Maron and Joe Rogan when they said they were too busy to plan a meal and liked that blue apron did it for them. They probably are too busy bit also used to eating out but find going in public to often be a hassle. So blue apron seems perfect for a rich, busy person that wants quality restaurant food but doesn't want to go to some place in a big city. This way they get a night in.

I'm not gonna buy it cause I'd rather shop at winco.

>>6674976
What I'm really asking is, what are the 2 or 3 healthiest, but best tasting cuisines?

>>6675010
It would be expensive to eat blue apron meals every day. Especially two meals a day.

At best they give you enough for two people or a family of four. Then you might have leftovers but that's it. It's not like the stuff is gonna go bad immediately, either. If you don't feel like eating it, eat it the next day.

You guys are under the impression this isn't something casual when it is.

>the amount you throw out is nothing compared to blue apron's overcharging

So broadly what you're paying for is, what, green points for throwing out less? Be serious, there are better uses for that money if that were the case.

>>6675040
I just can't see why I'd want to pay more to vastly constrain my options and lower the quality of my food, for the benefit of... what? Not having to touch the same cuisine twice in a week? Look, I love restaurants, but restaurants are particularly well equipped to provide you a meal from a cuisine you don't know anything about, using ingredients and techniques that you wouldn't normally use. Home cooking is the opposite: well equipped to create food for cheaper, from a more consistent cuisine or cuisines, with the details customized to my liking.

My suspicion is that increased wealth meant that millennials were brought up on restaurants to a much greater extent than their parents were, did not learn to cook at home, and so moved out with expectations of being able to eat a totally different cuisine every night. Attempts at this produced the kind of mass wastage OP is talking about, which never existed when people cooked more sensibly; Blue Apron has come to the rescue, with a pricey solution that doesn't really address the core problem: what you eat when you eat out and what you eat at home do not need to work in the same way. In fact it's much more efficient if they don't, as I explained above.

>>6674761
Underrated post

>>6674824
I think the point is it's cheaper just to buy the tub of duck fat and throw away what you don't use than pay Blue Apron for just a little bit.

>>6675107
Not really. It comes out pretty close, and Blue Apron is more convenient.

>>6674869
>five pounds of morels
>often in excess of $40-$70/lb
>freeze dried upwards of $200/lb
I'm only used to eating them fresh picked (by me) and usually deep fried (by my sister).

>>6675143
Can I put my mushroom in your sister's greasy basket too?

>>6675093
>what you eat when you eat out and what you eat at home do not need to work in the same way.
But if I want a restaurant type meal but can't leave the house, then blue apron seems like a good way to go honestly.

I don't try to eat efficiently. I just eat what I want when I want and if I can't then I'll find a way to do so.

>>6674869
The problem is that much of the point you're trying to make is lost, because Blue Apron does not provide the opportunity to buy premade demi-glace for the first time ever - nor for any similar premade component of a dish. You can get that stuff from the supermarket. By mentioning how long you spent making it, you seem to be trying to show how much more convenient Blue Apron is, but the time saving is not created by Blue Apron, but by buying it premade. Which of course comes with the same disadvantages, whether supermarket or Blue Apron - lower quality, and not customized to your preferences.

>>6675177
>I don't try to eat efficiently. I just eat what I want when I want and if I can't then I'll find a way to do so.

Which is all anyone has been saying. I don't think anyone has been denying that, if you are prepared to pay more, and are prepared to sacrifice quality and customizability for not having to do much thinking, Blue Apron is probably a good idea. All anyone has been claiming seems to be that OP's descriptions of how much you waste cooking normally are hugely exaggerated, and to the extent that they are true, are down to attempting to cook food in a way that doesn't work very well at home.

If I want a restaurant type meal but can't leave the house, then I will order a takeaway. I wasn't joking about Blue Apron probably being decent if you want convenience in exchange for quality and customizability, though. If you can get one-off orders then I might even consider using it occasionally, if I want to cook a particular dish that is well outside the kind of thing I normally cook, and I'm not interested in learning it for making in future. I like other kinds of convenience food, like fast food, too. I'm just doubtful that building your eating habits around expensive convenience food - whether McDonalds, fancy restaurants, Indian takeaways, or Blue Apron - is a particularly good idea.

>>6674991
Where do you keep it? The dining room?

>>6675207
...it.... it goes outside anon

The packaging seems horribly wasteful

And also, miso paste lasts forever, it's fermented!