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pangstrom posted:Really knife skills are the thing that I should have fixed by now and yeah I always chuckle at the "25 minutes" or whatever they put in the bottom right.
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Oct 20, 2016 18:25
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Arsenic Lupin posted:But unless there are longer versions of the recipe (or videos, because that would add genuine value), they aren't teaching you to cook. Teaching you to cook requires explaining what you're doing and why it works. The steak recipe says "cook 2 to 4 minutes per side for medium-rare, or until browned and cooked to your desired degree of doneness." 2-4 minutes is a big enough range to give you anything from raw to burnt depending on your stove and pans, and they give you no insight into how to look at a brown surface and intuit how pink the middle is. oh we agree it's stupid i just think their marketing is hosed up and dishonest
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Oct 20, 2016 18:25
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pangstrom's blue apron recipe template: *peel/cut up things for what feels like forever* *feeling of accomplishment and relief, sip wine* *add A* (often garlic, white parts of scallions, and/or ginger) *salt and pepper, sip wine* *add B* *salt and pepper, sip wine* *add C* *salt and pepper, sip wine* ... *add Z* *salt and pepper* *sit down to dinner with your wife at ~8pm, who asks why you're so drunk*
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Oct 20, 2016 18:32
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pangstrom posted:The recipes are generally straightforward, I haven't seen a roux or anything like that. I am a terrible/incurious cook and over the past 2 years of blue apron I haven't screwed up much of anything. A few of the pan-fried crusts haven't worked out too well but a number have. Your argument might be "well you should be a better cook now" and, well, yeah guilty on that because I'm only slightly better / more aware of things that seem to happen together a lot. Really knife skills are the thing that I should have fixed by now and yeah I always chuckle at the "25 minutes" or whatever they put in the bottom right. Knife skills are a thing only trained chefs have a real grasp off. It's a cool talent to have but not really necessary if you just home-cook. For me it's mostly that Blue Apron just provides a worse version of something that already exists if your ambition is to learn to cook. Like just go check like Sortedfood or Foodwishes on youtube, they'll show you the way to a lot of cool stuff.
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Oct 20, 2016 18:33
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The target market of BlueApron is techbros looking to impress dates with something other than a mediocre stir-fry or chicken parmesan. We got a free promo week of it here and after the week was over it shocked me that it cost as much as it did because I could walk to a restaurant and buy better food and leave a good tip for the same price.
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Oct 20, 2016 18:34
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Just my opinion regarding myself, here, not being prescriptive, but: from a time perspective, knife skills are what I'd love to have. The rest of learning to cook doesn't really interest me, I'm going to be a recipe guy for the duration.
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Oct 20, 2016 18:37
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My daughter is teaching herself to cook (with occasional assists from parents) and she has never made a bad meal from Smitten Kitchen. At first glance, it's your typical lavishly-photographed essay-studded food blog, but the actual recipes are very clear, beautifully explained, and unusual.
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Oct 20, 2016 18:41
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Budget Bytes is my food blog of choice, and actually has a fair number of very simple recipes for newbies to throw together. I wouldn't say using it has made me a great cook, but I have a better idea of steps to follow now, and can be reasonably confident about what flavors I'm throwing together. And she sometimes does specials on how to properly freeze meals without ruining them, or how to stock a kitchen, which are both basic skills someone might not have been taught.
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Oct 20, 2016 19:25
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blue apron isn't meant to be convenient compared to hot pockets and frozen pizzas, it's meant to be convenient compared to cooking everything from scratch. If people are finding cooking takes about an hour start to finish that is about the goal they were aiming for. It's meant to take multi hour preps and make them something you do in 30ish minutes plus cooking. It's for people that want cooking to be an activity but not that much.
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Oct 20, 2016 19:54
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Blue Apron is in a weird market segment of people who: * Kind of know how to cook already, but not amazingly well * Like to cook, but don't have a lot of time * Don't like shopping * Don't mind a significant markup on ingredients It's kind of a narrow target, and from what I understand not enough to sustain their economics without regular infusions of VC cash. So they're currently hemorrhaging money as they try to advertise their way into mass market adoption, which is not usually a winning strategy.
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Oct 20, 2016 20:17
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Baby Babbeh posted:Blue Apron is in a weird market segment of people who: I don't know if they will ultimately succeed but the market is slightly upper middle class people who's lifestyle would have included recreational cooking but doesn't currently because their parent's generation fell into the hole where abundance of premade food was still a novelty and never cooked ever.
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Oct 20, 2016 20:46
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Arsenic Lupin posted:My daughter is teaching herself to cook (with occasional assists from parents) and she has never made a bad meal from Smitten Kitchen. At first glance, it's your typical lavishly-photographed essay-studded food blog, but the actual recipes are very clear, beautifully explained, and unusual. Good Eats was amazing for me because of the focus on a single ingredient or theme really gave you a good idea on how to use (or substitute for) different things.
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Oct 20, 2016 20:54
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Yesterday I got a promotional flyer for Blue Apron in the mail. It's headed "Seasonal recipe guide: Simple Fall Recipes". The final recipe is "roasted sweet potato pizza with caramelized onion, béchamel sauce, & arugula salad." Caramelizing onions is literally as basic as you can get. Seriously. Onions on low heat until done. gently caress, do it in a crock pot for full give-no-fucks set and forget. Béchamel is only slightly more complicated than cutting up cheese to eat. It is the most absolutely basic of all the mother sauces, literally flour, butter, and milk. These are basic things anyone can do without killing themselves, but seem fancy enough to help justify Blue Apron as 'gourmet delivery'.
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Oct 20, 2016 20:57
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Liquid Communism posted:Caramelizing onions is literally as basic as you can get. Bollocks is it. I cook more than anyone else I know and I've never caramelized onions. Anything that needs to cook for an hour, attended, isn't simple. I could do it, but it'd be a fancy meal to impress people.
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Oct 20, 2016 21:30
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I don't know if they will ultimately succeed but the market is slightly upper middle class people who's lifestyle would have included recreational cooking but doesn't currently because their parent's generation fell into the hole where abundance of premade food was still a novelty and never cooked ever. its also useful if you're capable of cooking but want an impetus to try recipes outside what you'd normally make, or have a family unit consisting of exactly two people and work schedules that make meal planning a pain you're definitely paying for convenience (in terms of cost every week usually has two reasonably priced options and one where their margin has to be crazy), but I've used it in the past and liked it- my biggest complaint is that they structure it as a subscription you opt out of on a weekly basis rather than something you order when you want it BarbarianElephant posted:Bollocks is it. I cook more than anyone else I know and I've never caramelized onions. Anything that needs to cook for an hour, attended, isn't simple. I could do it, but it'd be a fancy meal to impress people. lol caramelizing onions is ridiculously easy, they're a major component of at least two of my "feeling too lazy to expend real effort" staple meals LGD fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Oct 20, 2016 |
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Oct 20, 2016 21:36
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BarbarianElephant posted:Bollocks is it. I cook more than anyone else I know and I've never caramelized onions. Anything that needs to cook for an hour, attended, isn't simple. I could do it, but it'd be a fancy meal to impress people. You 'cook more than anyone else you know' and are incapable of slicing up an onion thinly and throwing it in a pot on low with a little butter and oil and stirring occasionally?
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Oct 20, 2016 21:58
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BarbarianElephant posted:Bollocks is it. I cook more than anyone else I know and I've never caramelized onions. Anything that needs to cook for an hour, attended, isn't simple. I could do it, but it'd be a fancy meal to impress people. Wait, how are caramelized onions a fancy thing you do to impress people? You literally just throw onions into a pan with some oil and butter and stir them every few minutes.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:03
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pangstrom posted:Just my opinion regarding myself, here, not being prescriptive, but: from a time perspective, knife skills are what I'd love to have. The rest of learning to cook doesn't really interest me, I'm going to be a recipe guy for the duration. Time to make some caramelized onions then! Or mashed potatoes. You can teach yourself most of the basic prep work knife skills with a 50lb bag of potatoes and enough patience to build both your confidence and some callus.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:11
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LGD posted:its also useful if you're capable of cooking but want an impetus to try recipes outside what you'd normally make, or have a family unit consisting of exactly two people and work schedules that make meal planning a pain Yeah, I don't know that it's a perfect solution with any sort of long term viability but I'm definitely someone that grew up in a house where the most complex a meal ever got was a plain chicken breast with green beans and a bread roll on the side. In the short term though I have enjoyed it as a half step to try a lot of stuff. I don't even feel like at the end of this I'll have learned to cook or anything. It doesn't feel educational enough for that. But I've still found it valuable because a part of lack of experience in cooking is that a ton of times stuff goes wrong and there is so many factors that it feels impossible to even assign where things even failed. These services feel like I am really enjoying the narrow slice of the whole cooking experience specifically because it does limit what I'm personally doing in a way where if some rice doesn't come out right I don't end up wondering if I just bought the wrong rice or something. It feels like it's been a hand holdy safety net type of cooking that has got me cooking more outside of it's confines just because my inexperience of cooking has always made mistakes feel very mysterious instead of something I could learn off of just because I know I could be making mistakes at any of the steps and just wouldn't know.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:16
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Paradoxish posted:Wait, how are caramelized onions a fancy thing you do to impress people? You literally just throw onions into a pan with some oil and butter and stir them every few minutes. They aren't fancy but they do require a block of time, some maintenance, and eat up a burner and a pan (which has to be washed) for a single, usually minor ingredient in a dish. A poor cost to benefit ratio, basically.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:26
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Baby Babbeh posted:Blue Apron is in a weird market segment of people who: Blue Apron is kind of like the Casper of food-prep companies. I mean Casper makes decent beds, but they're competing for market share against other places millenials shop, which is basically ikea? If there's enough adoption in critical markets I could see the company being quite successful, however I feel that a strong success would just push supermarkets to come up with their own alternatives and then compete strongly.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:27
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Zachack posted:They aren't fancy but they do require a block of time, some maintenance, and eat up a burner and a pan (which has to be washed) for a single, usually minor ingredient in a dish. A poor cost to benefit ratio, basically. http://altonbrown.com/how-to-make-caramelized-onions-in-the-microwave/ No. Really, just no.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:30
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Liquid Communism posted:http://altonbrown.com/how-to-make-caramelized-onions-in-the-microwave/ What in the everliving gently caress is that? If you think making caramelized onions in a microwave is in any way acceptable you are subhuman. a 35 minute microwave recipe, gotta be a first.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:32
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Landsknecht posted:Blue Apron is kind of like the Casper of food-prep companies. I mean Casper makes decent beds, but they're competing for market share against other places millenials shop, which is basically ikea? they already sort of are taking minor steps in that direction, a lot of the ones around me have recently added cut rooms so they can prepare chopped fresh vegetables on site you're definitely paying a markup over buying and preparing the ingredients yourself, but when you're cooking on a weeknight its definitely super nice to be able to opt out of making the mirepoix yourself
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Oct 20, 2016 22:37
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Liquid Communism posted:http://altonbrown.com/how-to-make-caramelized-onions-in-the-microwave/ OK so instead of a single burner I lose the entire microwave, it still requires a block of time (40-50 min), and the final 3rd requires monitoring it every three minutes, again for a single minor ingredient. At least the bowl can probably go in the dishwasher but I still view this a poor cost to benefit.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:43
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LGD posted:they already sort of are taking minor steps in that direction, a lot of the ones around me have recently added cut rooms so they can prepare chopped fresh vegetables on site It's an evolving market - maybe about 15 years ago meal-prep started to become a bigger thing, geared mostly towards middle-class professional women who liked to cook, and probably felt obligated to cook for their families, but didn't have the time. With a stronger interest in the preparation of food - look at the popularity of Chef's Table on netflix - I think there's a lot of room to promote "cooking services" stuff to the consumer market, especially since home ec programs were really gutted in the last few decades in favour of arts and academic options. Supermarkets also see restaurants as significant competition; they care about $ spent on food total, not just $ spent on groceries. So it's fairly obvious they'll move to the prep market, which could shut Blue Apron out.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:47
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Landsknecht posted:Blue Apron is kind of like the Casper of food-prep companies. I mean Casper makes decent beds, but they're competing for market share against other places millenials shop, which is basically ikea? Yeah, that's the problem. It's a business where it only really makes sense if A) You get big enough market adoption to ensure enough scale and regularity that you can run a warehouse profitably and B)Competition remains low so your margins don't get compressed. Competition is currently low because A hasn't happened, but the instant it does B goes out the window because there's not enough moat to keep established businesses that already have the infrastructure in place from entering the market (Supermarkets, but also probably Amazon because they're already doing grocery delivery and don't care about making money).
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Oct 20, 2016 22:47
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What I don't get is that everywhere Blue Apron exists is also serviced by some kind of grocery delivery service, which are getting better and cheaper all the time. I understand the appeal of having a box of prepped ingredients show up at your door, but for about a quarter the price you can use any decent recipe site and Prime Now or Instacart. Is 10 minutes of food prep worth four times the cost? Why not just Seamless at that price point and skip the cooking entirely? It feels like the latest in a long line of "frat problem" startups that absolutely do not need to exist.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:48
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Zachack posted:OK so instead of a single burner I lose the entire microwave, it still requires a block of time (40-50 min), and the final 3rd requires monitoring it every three minutes, again for a single minor ingredient. That is because you're being obtuse and wrong- the steps you're characterizing as being oh-so onerous apply to almost anything you'd make while scratch cooking, and you're incorrectly characterizing caramelized onions as a minor ingredient when they actually impart a ton of flavor/texture to dishes that use them. Dr. Fishopolis posted:What I don't get is that everywhere Blue Apron exists is also serviced by some kind of grocery delivery service, which are getting better and cheaper all the time. LGD fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Oct 20, 2016 |
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Oct 20, 2016 22:54
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Blue Apron would make sense if they could deliver some quality, interesting products at a non-prohibitive price, although they haven't been able to do this yet. If I'm interested in making some Punjabi food, which I know nothing about, it would be neat to be able to order a cooled box which would have everything I need portioned out and ready to cook, along with instructions, all for less than the cost of taking my girlfriend and me out for similar food at a restaurant. However, they aren't there yet, and I don't know if they ever will be.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:57
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Zachack posted:OK so instead of a single burner I lose the entire microwave, it still requires a block of time (40-50 min), and the final 3rd requires monitoring it every three minutes, again for a single minor ingredient. honestly, just put them in a slow cooker while you're at work. Surely anyone who has an interest in cooking has a slow cooker. http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-caramelize-onions-in-the-slow-cooker-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-193413 Bonus because when you come home your house smells of tantalizing onions.
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Oct 20, 2016 23:00
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:blue apron isn't meant to be convenient compared to hot pockets and frozen pizzas, it's meant to be convenient compared to cooking everything from scratch. Here are the instructions for the caramelized onion, because Arsenic loves you very very much. Words are abbreviated but not omitted. (BTW, I forgot to tell you that the you cut the onions into "thin slices", which does require knife skills, at least if you want thin even slices.) quote:In a large pot, heat 2 tsp of olive oil on medium until hot. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, 8-10 min or until lightly browned. Add 1 T of water. Cook, stirring frequently, 2 to 4 minutes, or until browned and very tender. Add an additional T of water, stirring and scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan to deglaze; season with salt and pepper to taste. Transfer to a bowl. Wipe out the pot. quote:In a large pot, heat 2 tsp of olive oil on medium until * Examples that most Americans would agree on the color of gratefully accepted. I rejected "toast" because everybody likes their toast different colors. I went to this effort to illustrate a point: Blue Apron isn't spending enough on the recipes, or maybe isn't hiring the right people, but I'd bet on the first. They're spending a fortune on fancy photographs on the recipe card (a marketing cost!) while spending far too little on useful recipes (a quality cost).
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Oct 20, 2016 23:27
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LGD posted:That is because you're being obtuse and wrong- the steps you're characterizing as being oh-so onerous apply to almost anything you'd make while scratch cooking, and you're incorrectly characterizing caramelized onions as a minor ingredient when they actually impart a ton of flavor/texture to dishes that use them. Unless you think scratch cooking means plucking chickens or making mozzarella, then sure 45 min.
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Oct 20, 2016 23:48
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Liquid Communism posted:You 'cook more than anyone else you know' and are incapable of slicing up an onion thinly and throwing it in a pot on low with a little butter and oil and stirring occasionally? I guess you didn't read to the end of my post. I *could* do it, I'm not an idiot, but at 30 minutes+ for a single element of a meal, not worth it unless I was doing a special recipe. I've got a kid to feed and 22 minutes to cook.
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Oct 20, 2016 23:51
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I don't count time while I cook, so it didn't occur to me how long it takes to pan-caramelize 1 onion; I have no idea if the time the recipe requests is adequate. If it's really more like 20 minutes, oog. e: I missed that they're cheating on time. You do the 9-to-11-minute (as written) roasting of sweet potatoes while the onion is caramelizing. If you're caramelizing onion for the first time, I wouldn't recommend simultaneously keeping tabs on baking sweet potato slices. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Oct 20, 2016 |
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Oct 20, 2016 23:51
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I don't count time while I cook, so it didn't occur to me how long it takes to pan-caramelize 1 onion; I have no idea if the time the recipe requests is adequate. If it's really more like 20 minutes, oog. See I think that's OK (because I do expect baking to be a simultaneous process, even for a new chef) but I'd expect a new chef to have to do all prep in advance so there's going to be a lot of dead time in that process and it's going to take a lot longer on the whole. Edit: isn't there a similar service to blue apron that includes prep? That imo makes more sense for a new chef.
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Oct 21, 2016 00:07
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Also, while I realize the market is probably tiny, I've always wanted a service like blue apron but that focuses on weird or unusual dishes where I don't know if I'll like it and don't want to go to the trouble of ingredient hunting for something I may never make again. Like, I enjoy a lot of Vietnamese dishes but some of them are really inconvenient to make for varying reasons and I'd like to have a "cheat mode" version to decide if I want to buy certain things in any bulk and store them, or make the bonus trip to the Asian market, or deal with the mess or whatever.
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Oct 21, 2016 00:15
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Zachack posted:Edit: isn't there a similar service to blue apron that includes prep? That imo makes more sense for a new chef. I think a sweet potato pizza topped with béchamel and caramelized onions is a restaurant dish, not a home dish. In a restaurant, you caramelize the onions in a big batch the same morning, and you either have a vat of bechamel sitting around or you have sauce cooks who could make one up while drunk, high, and riding a unicycle on a beach ball. Slapping together one more pizza takes minimal effort but looks impressive. In a home kitchen, you're eating up all that cooking time for one single dish, and one that won't keep well. I would expect recipes in a home-delivery service to be optimized for minimal prep for meals for two, not for maximal prep that can be amortized over multiple customers. e: For the record, I hate this pizza and its cow. Béchamel on pizza offends the Holy Ghost, and I don't care who hears me.
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Oct 21, 2016 00:18
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Zachack posted:I think you're overstating the importance of caramelized onions and overstating the complexity of most cooking if you think most scratch cooking involves single ingredient actions taking 45+ minutes with moderate-frequency interruptions, not including prep. Nah, they actually taste really good and it's a thing that can be done while drunk and watching TV- they don't require particularly close monitoring and it's not a huge ask to poke something with a wooden spoon every 5 minutes or so. They do take a bit of time, but there's nothing remotely difficult about them at all. Obviously you shouldn't bother if you need to make a complete meal for 4 people with no prep in 20 minutes, but it's very far from project cooking.
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Oct 21, 2016 00:21
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Blue Apron doesn't do any of the prep. "Here are a pound of sweet potatoes, an onion, 5 cloves of garlic, pizza dough, ... cheese, flour, and milk. Knock yourself out." They have a very transparent philosophy on how much prep work they do for you. They do almost all the hard stuff like measuring and weighing ingredients and they send you anything that is complicated predone but they make sure you always have something you need to chop up and some sauce you have to mix yourself. They are very very calculating in making the user feel they have done more than they really had.
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Oct 21, 2016 00:38
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