what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all. Germany would have resumed the war if that was what the Versailles conference came up with, and the Allies had no stomach for more war.
> what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all
Of course we did [1]. The ACC was far more intrusive than the American occupation of Japan; we formally stripped Germany of its sovereignty.
EDIT: the lesson from Versailles was that we had to rebuild Germany. To rebuild required occupation. Occupying Germany after WWII was one of the lessons learned from Versailles.
I think the person you are replying to meant that the allies didn't occupy Germany after WWI (and therefore there could be few lessons from Versailles on nation building), your link posts to WWII.
They were all exhausted. US troops had been sent home. If Germany had said, "Nope, not signing that" results would have been unpredictable. But meekly submitting was unlikely.
your link and comments are about WW II. Versailles was the treaty that ended WW I.
> Germany was in no position to keep fighting.
No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted, but "defending the homeland" is a more powerful motivator than anything the Allies had. Germany asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" which did not include occupation.
> No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted […]
The US had just entered the war after the Zimmerman telegram, and so Allied powers had more man power and more industrial strength. The Central powers were the ones that were exhausted, especially after the Hundred Days Offensive.
You're right that Germany was whipped, but the persistence of the "stab in the back" theory in the 20's and 30's demonstrated that they hadn't quite internalized that. After all, they hadn't been invaded, and "news" back then was so heavily censored that the Germans didn't all know the real situation.
I believe the parsing intended might have been that the UK and France were "equally exhausted" .. not that the US suffered losses comparable to either.
Even so, the UK lost 3/4 million from 45 million whereas France lost 1.1 million from 39 million .. so that's kind of order of magnitude roughly ballpark from a distance, but France got hit harder.
Correct. The UK and France put together were as exhausted as Germany. And "exhaustion" can't be measured just in body counts. Recall that France had some very serious mutinies around the time of the battle of Verdun.
The "lessons of Versailles" is a dumb phrase. Germany only asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" although Wilson didn't manage to pull that off over England and France's objections.
So we have two counterfactuals, neither of which can be settled:
1) Wilson doesn't propound his 14 Points. Perhaps he loses the election of 1912.
2) He does and the Armistice happens as it actually did, but the Paris Peace Conference declares that the Allies are going to occupy Germany and reshape its government, or maybe Germany is to be dismembered.
It's #2 that this phrase seems to imply. I'd claim that if that happens, no peace treaty is signed at all, similar to the way that the Korean War is technically still going on. The Allies would not have invaded Germany. Russia was already out of the war.
It's of course up for debate, but one of the general assessments is that the resentment caused by the Treaty of Versailles gave fertile ground for the rise of the Nazi party. It's hard to see how unconditional surrender would have made the treaty more palatable to Germans rather than less.
I would rather say that the fact that there was a (conditional) surrender by Germany and it took place before the Allies had significantly entered German homeland territory enabled certain agitators to claim that Germany had been betrayed rather than defeated.
You are correct that the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles made for good grist for the mill when those same agitators to point at the "unfair" consequences of the betrayal.
After WWII there was no one who could possibly say that Germany had not been completely and utterly defeated (and the Allies, at least the western ones with respect to western Germany) did invest in rebuilding the country.
The WWI ended with an armistice, and then a peace treaty. It was intended to save Germany from the shame of total defeat. The problem with that was that peace terms were extremely harsh, as you would impose on an inconditional surrender, and France intention was to get revenge, applying the terms of the treaty as hard as they could. Said agitators tried to take advantage of that duality: "we didn't surrender, yet we are being humiliated".
The lesson for WWII was that as shameful it could be for Japan to surrender inconditionally, it was needed to shut those sectors of the society that would think they could had won the war if only...
This was more a problem with Japan than Germany in the WWII: Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace, and specially the soviets didn't want any of that. It's know that Hitler and friends wanted either victory or the complete annihilation of Germany. But Japan actively tried in the last couple of months of the war to achieve a conditional surrender.
> Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace
Hitler knew that he'd be hung when the war was over. He knew what happened to Mussolini. He was never going to allow a negotiated peace.
The idea behind the officers' plot to kill him was that then Germany could sue for peace. Failing to kill Hitler meant the war was going to continue to the bitter end.
I got my glasses a year ago and just did a checkup. Apparently my current vision (with glasses) sits at 21/20. They did two tests using the rotating lens machine.
I might have better vision (with glasses) than a lot of people who wouldn't get glasses because their vision would be good enough.
I'm in Germany and my glasses are mainly used to correct my astigmatism.
Do you let the shelters become drugs dens? Because many chronically-homeless people in SF are addicts, and they prefer to live on the street than give up drugs to sleep indoors.
Addicts should have a choice: shelter, treatment, or jail. If you bring drugs in the shelter, your choice becomes treatment or jail. Drug encampments on city sidewalks should simply not be an option.
Some chronically homeless people in SF also suffer from mental illness and cannot look after themselves. They may also not do well in shelters. But leaving them outside is not humane. Institutions had a reputation for poor living conditions, but leaving them to suffer in the street is no better. And institutions can be improved.
I’ve stayed at a shelter once in my life. It was horrible. I had to line up with scary people at like 6pm, wait hours, make it to my cot at 8ish, lights out at 9pm and then they wake you up at 5:30 in the morning and cast you away to figure out how to keep warm in below freezing weather. Couldn’t bring my stuff in with me; I had to leave my backpack in a shed that relied on the honor system (and getting to it ASAP when they unlocked the shed in the morning) to prevent theft. I couldn’t bring a snack in with me. It felt like jail. If I had more stuff than a little bag, they simply could not accommodate storage. If I had a sleeping bag I’d 100% have preferred to find some safer quiet spot to sleep, and sleep in until the sun came up.
To be fair, there’s a large delta between homeless shelters and the Fairmont. I’ve read a lot of women feel unsafe in them as it’s not exactly private and secure. Of course neither is the streets, but you can try and create more distance.
I have a lot of sympathy for those in this situation. It’s a tough place to be, and many won’t get out of it for a wide variety of reasons.
So here's a question for you: is there ANY definition of "housing" under which you'd be willing to compel homeless people to take it, under penalty of fines & jail? Please tell us.
I notice no one cares to answer this, but they do seem to be downvoting it. I wonder why? Because they think living on the streets is an unconditional right?
The point is that you don’t incentivize moving to SF with no money and no job and no prospects and living on the street until you get free housing.
Newsom tried this while he was mayor. His conclusion was that for every person they put in housing, two new people showed up on the street.
Another issue was that most people they put into “temporary” supportive housing never moved out. A significant portion of SF’s budget goes towards paying for the housing of formerly homeless people. The city won’t put them out on the street, so why would they ever leave?
Can't blame people for not using shelters if you make them feel like a prison.
Would you use a shelter where you can't control light switches, get woken up by a siren, get your stuff stolen, probably have to share showers and kitchen with junkies, if you are even allowed to cook your own food?
I am not homeless and I never have been, but I would MUCH rather sleep in a car or a tent (placed in a spot of my choosing, near people I trust and away from people I distrust) than in a typical homeless shelter surrounded by strangers who might assault me or steal from me in the night. It's not even close.
However, I'd MUCH rather sleep in a hotel room than in a car or a tent. Again, not even close.
If I put a gun to your head and told you where to live, would you feel that I was giving, or taking away, your personal liberty? Which of these two things should our government be responsible for? My Constitution says the former.
Without threat of violence, housing projects such as the Harlem River Houses have been immensely successful. Other than the US and Canada, do any other first world countries have homelessness problems of the magnitude we're seeing? Why does the US lead the world in homeless and prison populations; if stricter laws were the answer, shouldn't that have worked by now?
If the city says “You cannot live on the sidewalk, in public parks, or in Bart stations,” that’s a far cry from putting a gun to someone’s head.
The city can offer other options:
- shelters in the city
- shelters outside the city if shelter in the city are full (this is my controversial opinion, but if you can’t afford housing in a specific place, you may need to live in a different place until you can afford it. I’d love to live in Malibu, but I can’t afford it. I don’t think it’s my right to plop myself down on the sidewalk and shoot heroin until the city of Malibu builds me free housing. That’s not a realistic expectation.)
It might, if laws were enforced. Most everyone I know left Norcal precisely because enforcement is nonexistent. Try calling the police in SF/Oakland. Hell, just google what it is actually like if you try: https://abc7news.com/post/oakland-76-gas-station-burglary-ro...
People who claim that "laws do not work" are usually ignoring that laws need ENFORCEMENT.
Valid. This is a tragedy of the commons. The problem is they’re being used for the private benefit of those camping on them. That will eventually undermine support for funding them.
Yes, that's why you spend money on housing; for pennies on the police state dollar. Granting a person a room is a one-time cost, which can be diminished with larger builds, and a modest upkeep. The criminal justice system incurs significant ongoing costs per incarceree. Moreover, a criminal record is a barrier to employment, which tends to entrench people within the criminal justice system -- these costs can avoidably result in a lifetime of wasted taxpayer dollars.
Getting a person a room is, indeed, cheaper than running the whole criminal justice system if there had been such a person, giving a room to whom would stop all the homeless crime I'd be first to pay for their room my own personal money. What you meant, I believe, was running a free housing program for everyone, not a room for one person, right? And then the one-time cost is not one-time anymore, as people will be constantly demanding free housing, and modest upkeep is not so modest especially with larger build. And you still need to run the criminal justice system.
I am shooting in the dark here, but are you even aware of the various free housing programs that the US already had tried in the past[1]? Those did not solve the issues and the proponents blame them being too cheap on the failure.
I grew up a block away from housing projects in Seattle, where many of my friends lived growing up. They were recently demolished, the majority of their residents sent packing (hello, homeless population!) and the developers who were granted the land sold most of the houses at market rate. Yeah, I'm familiar with what's been tried.
When a halfassed attempt fails, do not conclude that a full and honest effort would also fail.
So if I got you right, you are saying that not enough money had been spent on the government housing (after insisting it will cost mere pittance to build and maintain)? These programs were not cheap already so whatever you propose should cost even more.
> Maybe look at WHY government-built housing is always so lousy.
Thank you, this is a crucial aspect of Harlem that make it such a shining example in my mind. It was undertaken in a period when human dignity was given more weight. And while the apartments themselves seem stark to modern tastes, they were built about a century ago and in their time, contributed to a cultural renaissance.
A big problem is penny-pinching. You can sacrifice a ton of quality and end up only saving a few points on a total build cost, and paying way more in lifetime maintenance and replacement cost. Modern conservativism is penny wise, pound foolish, and that mindset is ever-present.
> Saying "We need to change the whole system" is just a cop-out.
Right on. But I didn't say that and I don't see anybody else saying that here.
No, I am not okay with compulsion... you're asking me at which point has the government given enough gifts to justify authoritarianism. And I'm telling you, I don't accept your authoritarianism, and there may be a path forward that doesn't require it.
Holy shit, for the third time in a row, no, I am not okay with authoritarianism. I said that with sufficient housing, it should not be necessary. No. No compulsion.
there's that juvenile sentiment again. And there "shouldn't" be any burglaries, car thefts, armed robbery, or murder, either. Nevertheless, they've always existed and always will. And compulsion will always be a part of the civilized state.
and yet you won't name any of your ideal cities, nor comment on the Harlem House, that New Deal-era paradigm. Or note that people living in there are paying rents, albeit subsidized. But you want to give homeless people that, except for free.
"Inchoate yearnings" pretty well describes it for you.
Or, humility. Nothing is certain in civic planning. But I suspect you'd jump on me if I claimed it was a foolproof plan, wouldn't you? But it's observed all over the world: in places where housing is affordable and available, there isn't a homelessness crisis. Most homeless people don't wanna be. Remove them, and the community goes away, and with it, all but a very few diehards that exist in practically every city.
Really? Name some of your ideal cities. We'll check and see what their policies are for sleeping on the streets.
So if they do force people to move on, despite this "affordable and available" housing, that pretty well destroys your argument, doesn't it? Because all compulsion is bad, as you said.
This is also why I don't like eating out much anymore. Every restaurant just leans so hard on heavily salting fats to make their food taste good.
I'd rather cook myself now where I can actually taste flavors and feel good, rather than just having the primal "mmm good food" button bashed in my lizard brain and feeling like garbage afterwards.
When I was in college in Massachusetts in the mid 1990s, there was a buffet-style Greek restaurant named "Brothers". (Somewhere near Peabody I think.)
The Greek woman behind the counter made me (well, guilted me into) getting some vegetables with my order. They weren't too salty or fatty; they were just good for me (and tasty).
It was like being fed by one's own mom. It was awesome.
This comments and many of the others on this thread strike me as written by people who have either never worked at a real restaurant and/or tend to order bland and fatty food (eat like a toddler) by default when they patronize restaurants.
This is fine but really not reflective of good restaurants and the majority of the food they serve.
What do you mean? Even in the linked article, the food critics consistently pointed out that restaurants make food very rich so that it's more appealing. And how they suffered from eating so much rich food.
Risotto in Italian cooking definitely uses buttoer. But, I already know what your reply will be: "Oh, that's Northern Italian cooking -- it doesn't count." Most normie readers don't care about that distinction.
Japanese izakayas frequently sell grilled items wrapped in foil that is swimming in butter. Again, I assume you will reply: "Oh, but that's not traditional Japanese cooking -- it doesn't count." Again, most normie readers don't care about that distinction.
Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/
I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never dream of using at home.
Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)?
Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004).
I find some restaurant meals strike me as far better than others. Taquerias, Thai and Vietnamese food, better vegetarian restaurants (say, Greens in SF), for example. Specific choices such as sides, beverages, alcohol, and whether or not the restaurant permits smoking (some parts of the US still allow this barbaric practice) would likely be huge confounding factors.
I'm not discounting home-cooked meals, and generally far prefer them myself. But overly-broad, undifferentiated analysis is ... not especially illuminating.
There may be associated negatives, but Super Size Me is a terrible piece of evidence of it. Spurlock not only intentionally ate far more than any normal person would, but also declined to mention in the movie his copious alcohol consumption. (Not that I expect someone to admit to their alcoholism in a movie, but when you're making a polemic about how what you consume is bad for you, not mentioning that you're drinking a lot of alcohol during the same period isn't great!)
TBH I was mentioning SSM more as an exemplar than as hard science, and there are plenty of other indicia (rigorous or anecdotal) which suggest a consistent fast-food diet is other than health-inducing. I'm not aware of Spurlock's alcohol consumption during the trial, and there is the fact that he reversed much of the damage at the time following his partner's dietary advice (she is a dietician AFAIR).
If you've any links or references to share I'd be interested.
I don't unless I'm traveling but eating a couple modestly portioned meals a week which, yes, you can do in the US, is healthy enough as part of a basket of options. And often better than whipping up a lot of things you can make with 15 minutes of effort from the grocery store.
I also suspect that a lot of the people who are eating out in restaurants all the time are on planes a lot and at late business dinners, many of which are determined by "safe" customer choices like steakhouses. (Though, without further info, I also suspect to it defaulting to fast food on an absolute basis.)
Also: truckers (largest single occupational category in many classifications), cabbies, trades workers, etc., etc. If you're in a captive market, whether that's airports, convention centres, motorway service areas, lunch wagon, lunchroom, etc., your choices are going to be limited.
On business travellers vs. truckers, I'm finding ~ 3.5 million truckers in the US, who all but certainly eat on the road at least one meal per day (local) and more likely 3+ (long-haul). <https://schneiderjobs.com/blog/truck-drivers-in-usa>.
For corporate travel: there are ~400 million long-distance business trips annually <https://www.trondent.com/business-travel-statistics/>. Trips-per-person is harder to find, though one source gives 6.8 trips/year, which gives 60 million travellers/year. So that's more than truckers ... but it's a lot fewer trips (and meals). I'd put money on there being more trucker meals-out than business travelers'.
Fleshing out further: we really want trips per year, for each classification. I'm going to assume truckers are on the road 250 days/year (roughly 5 days/week) ... we'll do variance after in case I'm wrong. That gives 3.5 million * 250 or 875 million trucker trips/year, more than double the business air travel number. We could cut trucker travel in half and still be somewhat above the business air travel trips figure.
Whatever the exact number, it's probably safe to say that directionally way more "meals out" are grabbing some variety of fast food than some variety of upscale/fine dining. Not all that fast-ish food is unhealthy/bad but a lot is as a steady diet. Which just reinforces the point that drawing a broad brush eating out will kill you doesn't have a lot of support. Eating at a nice restaurant once a month is almost certainly not a killer.
The truckers vs. business travellers comparison was mostly me just trying to suss out what the relative magnitudes of those were. Information's sketchy, but inferences can be drawn. That was independent of your points, which are valid and insightful.
And yeah, the idea that 1) most "restaurant" meals are fast-food franchises and 2) that's not especially healthy on a consistent basis, as well as that 3) specific choices about menu items can have a major impact are ... fairly self-evident. Pity the study doesn't seem to address those, at least based on the unembargoed bits at the shared link above.
There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home.
You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and that's just talking about average restaurants. You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.
Sure eating a fast food burger and fries everyday will be heavy, but even something that simple can be difficult to match compared to the restaurant. Grinding your own meat, double frying the fries, finding/making decent buns, etc.
Food is one of the few activities that can be very enjoyable daily. It's usually cost saving to cook yourself and there's a lot of good stuff you can make at home. But you're missing out on some enjoyable experiences by completely avoiding professionals using professional equipment with access to better ingredients.
Paradoxically, it's the fast food staples that are most difficult to do at home – because you need a fryer. Haute cuisine is no problem making at home, because fine dining is not based on using fryers. It can't be made with restaurant speed nor quantity, but you can get the same quality at home.
My air fryer makes decent fries, using only olive oil as a fat. It did take some practice to get it right.
Are they as good as deep-fat fried? No, but they're crisp on the outside and tender on the inside.
OK, you all want to hear this, you know you do:
===============
Start preheating the air fryer to 400F.
Slice the potatoes. Drop them in a bowl of water, swish them around and drain off the water, and fill the bowl again. By now, the water should be clear. If not, do it again.
Take the fries out and dry on paper towels, as dry as you can get them.
*These steps are important; you need to wash off the surface starch, and get them dry so you're not steaming them*
Dry the bowl, and put in some olive oil, with seasonings (salt, pepper, garlic salt, etc.)
Put the fries back in the bowl and get them all oily. Put them in the fryer. The basket should be hot enough that they make a sizzling sound.
Every 5 minutes, toss the fries. You can either get compulsive and turn each one individually, or just pour them in a bowl and shake it, or shake the fryer basket (if that doesn't cause it to separate, as it does mine). Put them back in the fryer.
Check periodically that they're as brown as you want them.
And it's probably not reasonable that the average person who gets McDonalds fries (which are indeed good and better than most, if not all, of the "fast casual" joints) will do those things. Not that frozen supermarket fries in a deep fryer are an especially heavy lift and they're mostly good enough (with reasonably fresh oil) for hamburger and fries.
McDonalds fries can be somewhat achieved by adding beef flavor (authentic or vegetarian sub) to the fries. It’s like the easiest hack to better homemade fries, IMO.
This is simple untrue. There is many, many YouTube videos explaining how to achieve wok hei (鑊氣) at home with a non-commercial gas-fired stove and a cheap wok.
I know very little about Asian cooking of any kind, but I seem to remember being told that wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building - to the point that even when people do want to use wok hei at home they would choose to have a setup in the garden rather than the kitchen.
If my memory/understanding is not wrong, then that adds to the idea that people won't achieve wok hei on their stove even if the reason is not wanting its side effects rather than being technically impossible.
> wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building
Not true. Find some videos on YouTube about wok hei. Yes, you need to choose an oil with a high smoke point (not olive oil). With a bit of practice, you can do it in your sleep and enjoy delicious stir fry.
Re: oven temps, I seem to recall seeing a link here maybe a decade ago about a guy who figured out how to get his oven hot enough for certain pizza routines by basically breaking the handle on the cleaning cycle or something.
> your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods
Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.
> restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store
This might be true, but from what I have seen most of the restaurants are barely even reaching SysCo/USFoods level of quality ingredients. Your local grocery store is probably just fine until you are a very good cook. At that point, you might have to start looking at more niche grocery stores.
And, if you get better than that, well, you're likely sufficiently obsessive that you will find a way.
> You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.
It's more sheer technique and attention to fussy detail than teams of people. A patissier is simply WAY better than you are at making desserts, for example. They know all the tricks; they will also have all the necessary equipment.
However, yeah, Michelin restaurants are definitely next level.
For most people, it's also not just the technique (and, to a lesser degree, gear), it's also the sheer number of fresh ingredients often required. Desserts may actually lean more towards technique/time and less towards ingredients. I took a croissant class and produced at least serviceable croissants (with a chef correcting things here and there). But much as I like a hard to source fresh croissant I'm not going to routinely spend half a day making a batch.
> Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.
I have a steel plate. An hour at 500F only gets it to around 400F.
Which is fine for pizza, actually, so you're right about that.
If you ask big US pizzerias (I don't know about the famous Naples ones) what temp they use, it's usually 650-750. At 900F you have zero margin for error.
You can get a standalone pizza over for a couple hundred. I've got an Ooni and it gets up to 900 in about 15 minutes. Its obviously not for indoor use but its great nonetheless. It still takes a good bit of technique to get the dough and timing right but its great to be able to cook a pizza in little more than a minute.
Have you actually pointed an IR thermometer at it? On mine (which I sold), it was 900 at the back and 600 at the front.
It was just too much trouble. A pizza steel in a kitchen oven, preheated, works very well; maybe not as good as a 700F oven but WAY easier. And 5 minutes instead of 1 minute is not a big sacrifice.
Hey, this is a great post. I have read similar complaints about Ooni pizza ovens, where it is very difficult to achieve the 900F temp and impossible in the front. Great point about 5 mins vs 1 min.
Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)
You cannot get the same leoparding on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with a 5 minute pizza. If you are talking about normies than probably no, they cannot tell the difference but if you are detail oriented you can tell the difference.
My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Even with all that thermal mass I find the later pizzas take longer to cook due to the steel cooling off. You just cant put enough energy into a home oven to match the energy it looses during cooking.
Another tip is when the steel is maximally heated I find the rate of cooking on the bottom of the pizza is faster than on the top so I also turn the broiler onto max after I put in the pizza so the toppings get cooked at the same rate as the bottom of the crust. A delicate balance which requires continuous feedback.
Real question: I see a lot of YouTube videos bragging about "leoparding" (spots on the bottom). Does it really matter? My point: Can you cook a pizza that tastes just as good _without_ "leoparding"?
> My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour.
Sheesh. This is my second complaint about endless YouTube videos about the "perfect pizza at home": What is the carbon footprint per pizza? (Exception: I can forgive anyone who has a magical setup that is 100% electric and has solar panels / wind turbines to supply it! Also: Hat tip to any of the crazies that are producing their own green hydrogen at home via electrolysis for their hydrogen-gas-fired pizza oven!)
All of the electricity produced in my area is hydroelectric so the carbon footprint is minimal on a per unit basis.
There are much bigger fish to fry when it comes to carbon footprint such as how often you fly and what motor vehicles you drive which use orders of magnitude more energy than a pizza.
At some level baking becomes an art form — a way to channel your efforts into a form of mastery. Does the leoparding make a difference? Probably not. It is the aesthetic and demonstration of mastery which makes leoparding desirable, much like how people desire perfectly manicured lawns and gardens.
Thanks, you know, I think the brick oven pizza IS better. Yes, you probably could taste the difference. Whether the 5 min is dryer: maybe, could be.
My decision to sell my Ooni, after about 6 tries, was because my actual results were nowhere close to a pizzeria's, and way more trouble than my kitchen oven's.
Since you can't just open the door as you can with the kitchen oven, you have much less tolerance for error. In the kitchen, you just open after 5 minutes and decide, "OK, it's done" or "One more minute."
I guess I decided the brick oven pizzeria results are just not attainable at home. The kitchen results are damn good; way better than a frozen pizza.
Great follow-up. Thanks! I never saw anyone comment like this: "you have much less tolerance for error". That is the key to understanding Ooni vs kitchen oven. Brilliant.
Have you tried Adam Ragusea's NYC pizza recipe? He gives a lot of sensible advice about how to get a great pie from a shitty kitchen oven!
Which model did you own? I haven't bought one but had been considering buying an almost unitasker because the reviews from trusted sources seemed very good. Serious Eats in particular seems to love the brand.
Yeah the taste difference is there, but you can get quite close even with a regular 500°F (~250°C) household oven and a longer time (4 with fan/grill + 4 minutes without in my case, YMMV). The basic tricks are to use a pizza stone, prepare your pizza dough a few days before (let it rest in a fridge) and do not go crazy with the toppings (less is more, too much stuff on top of pizza usually means soggy pizza - the top grill element can sometimes fix this, but not always).
It's not perfect but those Naan flatbreads available in many US markets plus a pizza stone at 500 degrees F work fine for the occasional homemade pizza if I don't want to get takeout from one of a couple of local pizzarias. One of which is more convenient and the other is brick-over/better.
I lost a ton of weight during the initial Covid lockdowns of 2020 without even trying. The only difference?
I ate home cooked meals while WFH. They weren’t even made to be specifically healthy or with the objective of losing weight.
Then I jumped ship for a company that was 100% in office. I started eating the supposedly healthy meals catered by the company for lunch. Dinner also came later because commute time.
I gained back all the weight I lost WFH and then some. The significant amount of walking and/or biking from the commute did nothing to help.
Where are you people eating that you feel gross? And what are you ordering? I promise you, eating out does not and should not need to be anything like you are describing.
5-10 years ago I would have agreed with your comment, but once I hit my 30s I started to feel gross if I ate a bunch of donuts, super duper greasy food, etc.
As the years progress more and more food makes me feel a little yucky afterwards, not just the blatantly obvious incredibly unhealthy ones.
...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :)
I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food.
In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish.
But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are paid to make things tasty - with salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. And then with more of those.
(also, I wonder how restaurant review eating compares to supersize me)
Your side comment about saunas got me searching. It's quite amazing (though based on small populations) - I'll be giving this a try, thanks for pointing it out!
I hear this "cheap oil" thing a lot in food pseudo-science Internet writing. What exactly is "cheap oil"? And, is there any peer reviewed evidence for your claims about how you feel after eating "cheap oil"? If this effect is so drastic, then, surely, it must affect others, and would be an interesting and worthy research topic.
I guess it's generic vegetable oil as opposed to Canola oil or Peanut oil? I'd actually suspect that a mindset of buy whatever oil is cheapest from Sysco would pursue cheapness in other areas as well including kitchen supervision/skills.
I doubt it makes any appreciable difference anyway most of the time although Canola oil and Peanut oil do have a slightly higher smoke point than vegetable oil.
Since my mom moved to town, we've been eating at her place frequently. She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy. Lots of butter, cheese, coconut milk, etc. We've asked my mom to cut those things in half.
She's a very good cook, and the things she improvises or makes from memory are much lighter fare. I learned to cook from her, so my meals tend to be fairly light too.
Sure, the fat and salt (and don't forget sugar) are yummy, but they'll kill you. There needs to be a compromise.
An amusing aside, Julia Child said that it's perfectly honorable to be a home cook and not a chef. Making stuff that's good but healthy is an art unto itself, especially if you're feeding vegetarians.
> She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy.
There’s a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT that I’ve used several times. Not only is it heavy, I’ve had to halve the ingredients and even then it still produces enough to satiate the Cookie Monster for probably at least a month.
As a Brit, I also had to convert all of the measurements (patent absurdities like ‘cups of butter’, ‘tablespoons of chocolate’, etc.) to grams — taking account of the variation in density, of course.
Some of the measurements are aided by how the ingredients are packaged. For instance, butter is sold by the pound, in boxes of 4 "sticks" that are marked as being 1/4 cup each, which ignores the density variation but is familiar to every home cook. Chocolate comes in "squares" that are some predictable amount. In fact some recipes call for squares.
"A pint's a pound the world around" is a workable rule of thumb for a lot of things, but of course you need to know when greater precision is needed. Since I don't bake sweets very often, I measure most things by eyeball. For instance my bread recipe is based on filling a glass measuring cup nearly to the top, above where the volume markings end.
Maybe it's a reaction to spending my day designing precision measuring equipment.
But yeah, it's a hodgepodge of archaic units, and quite unnerving if you hail from the metric world.
If it was at least all in cups, it’d be somewhat more forgivable. I’ve even seen recipes using amounts of flour measured in a combination of cups and tablespoons! Actually, maybe that doesn’t sound as mad to everyone as it does to me…
Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.
Sticks of butter are also labeled in tablespoons here. One stick is 1/2c, and the paper it is wrapped in also has markings for 1-8 tbsp. So it's pretty common to see that in US recipes as well.
As far as flour goes, it's incredibly common to have both cups and measuring spoons in a US kitchen. So if a recipe says "1 cup and 2 tablespoons" or something, it's really easy to measure that.
By contrast, I hate recipes which use weight measurements. It takes a ton of faffing about to get exactly 300g (or whatever weight) of flour weighed out. Add a bit... watch scale... add a bit more... watch scale ad nauseam. And then I often wind up overshooting anyways, so then I have to try to scoop some back out! Whereas with volume measurements I just dip a cup/spoon in, level it off, and I'm done in a couple of seconds.
For similar accuracy to what you have with cups and spoons, you don't need to bother making the measurement exactly 300g.
A relative was a professional cook. Butter wrappers are also marked with measurements here, at 25g intervals. That would be accepted for some recipes, but the butter would be measured more carefully when making certain pastries or cakes.
Yeah, especially since the density of flour varies. All the home bakers I know either weigh their flour, or eyeball it like I do and live with the imprecision.
I'd just let the flour mound over the top of the cup by a bit to make up for the tablespoons. ;-)
Agreed - eyeballing it (or volume measurement for that matter) is good enough for the vast majority of baking recipes. I have made some finicky recipes in my day, but generally you will not need the precision of measuring by weight. For some reason people online hype up how exact you "need" to be when baking, but it's just not true. Hilariously, people also act like you can just completely wing it with no precision at all when cooking on the stove, and that also isn't true. Both forms of cooking benefit from some measurements and consistency, but you don't have to go too crazy with it.
A scale's cheap and if it's in a situation where accuracy matters, I use it if the measurements are given or consult a standard conversion. And as someone in the US I tend to use grams for the purpose to avoid faffing with a combination of units. And I don't even mind at all using US Imperial for many things on a day-to-day basis,
To a first approximation, fat won't kill you. There's no reliable evidence that a diet relatively higher in fat causes worse health outcomes, as long as you maintain energy balance. Salt won't kill you either, unless you're genetically susceptible to hypertension and don't drink enough water. The sugar is more problematic.
Halving is a neat trick. In my experience you can usually safely halve the amount of sugar in most cake recipes and still get a great cake that is sweet enough.
It can't do it with everything but sugar is probably the thing I'm most inclined to go "Nah, that's too much" in recipes. (Often, online, I'll see what people say in the comments too.)
I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US. Oddly enough, the higher end restaurants start to move in the other direction and shrink portion sizes.
>I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US.
i think you are right.
i have always seen big portion sizes in restaurants when i have gone to the US.
also, very recently, i saw a youtube video in which a french person says the same thing. they said that even though the French eat a lot of fat, their overall portion sizes are smaller than those of the US. so overall, they end up eating less calories than US people.
also the French tend to walk a lot, while the US people tend to drive a lot.
My own impression from a week in Paris is that you're right: if you get the "menu" at most restaurants (appetizer, entree, dessert), you walk out full but not stuffed.
The weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, supposedly make you feel like that. I haven't taken them myself. It's like you don't really want any more.
Americans seem to feel entitled to two meals for the price of one, and they may or may not eat them both in the restaurant. (If they don't finish, they take the rest home with them)
>Americans seem to feel entitled to two meals for the price of one, and they may or may not eat them both in the restaurant. (If they don't finish, they take the rest home with them)
yes, when my parents used to go to the US, a few decades ago, they told us kids about this practice called using doggie bags. apparently people used to ask for the uneaten part of their restaurant orders to be packed in what was called a doggy bag, under the euphemism that they were taking the extra food home for their dog.
I don't know whether the practice is still followed.
I don't know that anyone has ever used "doggy bag" to mean/imply an actual bag for dogs in my lifetime (I'm 39), but yes it's still common to get the rest of your food in a container to take home. These days your waiter/waitress will usually ask "do you want a box" instead of referring to a doggy bag, but everyone knows what you mean if you ask for a doggy bag.
I don't think the term is all that common today in the US. But, counter my pervious comment (though I hadn't been active that day and it was quite hot), a few of us were having dinner and most of us took something home (for us, not a dog)--and I just had a starter! Considered quite normal. Good food but there was just a lot of it and I didn't have much of an appetite.
I do know a few places that are sort of known for having portion sizes that are oriented towards people taking leftovers home.
It is a generalization but maybe I know it's because there's often a lot of relative filler in entrees and I often gravitate towards one or two starters/apps. That said I mostly don't find portions in Europe (including France) to be especially small.
Appetizers. In my experience the term is fairly common in the US.
I think some of it is that many restaurants have a lot of fairly inexpensive filler (potatoes, rice, etc.) with entrees that I probably sort of tune out and don't really try to finish a lot of the time. This is probably less true of some countries/cuisines than others.
I feel like restaurants really have an unfair advantage there as far as flavor goes. Whenever I try to make something following a recipe, I balk at the amount of butter/sugar/oils/salt and cut way down or leave them out entirely, with predictable results. With a restaurant this is completely abstracted away so it's easier to get past.
> typical gun safety rules like he was at a shooting range
You mean, "treat all guns like they're loaded"? That typical gun safety rule?
If you hand me a gun and say, "it's not loaded" I'm not going to point it at my head and pull the trigger. There's a crime called "negligent homicide" for just that case.
Latest trends on stupid corporate jargon are legitimate news. I have a subscription, so some of what you miss:
> The phrase is “innovative,” says Beth DelGiacco, a vice president of corporate communications at biotech company Argenx, who praises its efficiency.
> “It’s only a few syllables. Everyone knows what you mean when you say it,” says DelGiacco, who regularly trots it out with peers.
The same is true of "drill down." It's not explored why "double-click" (3 syllables) is better than "drill down" (2).
> Tech-inflected buzzwords are especially apt to gain traction—think “network,” “bandwidth” or “take offline”—because they can sound smart or cutting-edge, says Doug Guilbeault, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who has studied corporate jargon.
> The inventor of the literal double-click, former Apple designer Bill Atkinson, isn’t convinced. Reached while boating on a recent weekday, Atkinson, now retired, says he’s never heard anyone use double-click as a metaphor and would steer clear of such usage himself, preferring more straightforward language.
what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all. Germany would have resumed the war if that was what the Versailles conference came up with, and the Allies had no stomach for more war.