Also not a vegetarian and i agree 100% with your 3rd point. Cooking good vegetarian food requires more skill - to me, meat is like a cheat code for flavour. In my opinion, Indian cuisine offers some of the tastiest veg dishes because they are not adaptations of meat dishes, but their own thing entirely.
I don’t think it requires more skill, just more effort. Cut off a chunk of meat and add heat and you’re most of the way to a good flavour, while veg dishes usually require a variety of vegetables, each of which requires more prep than the meat did. There are exceptions, but as a general rule of thumb if they’re putting the time and effort into doing the vegetarian dishes properly it shows they’re doing everything else properly too.
What’s crazy to me is the otherwise very accomplished chefs who can’t/won’t do a vegetarian dish. Like their imagination ends at animal fats for flavour.
I recently watched a cooking competition show called America’s Culinary Cup. One of the challenges was to make dishes exclusively using vegetables. It was nice to see
Now I’m curious what a complete dish is in your opinion. Like there are only protein (meat, soy, bean) and carbs (potatoes, pasta, rice, corn, bread) and oil / fat that have calories. Like what else could you add to a steak? A spoonful of lard?
Complete dishes are not that difficult, take a good spaghetti bolognese, it has everything and the flavours are combined and compliment each other.
I do agree that the whole ‘steak for dinner’ is a bit hard to make a good ‘complete dish’ from. Personally I’d prefer something like noodles with steak/beef cuts or something like that. You can eat an entire steak with nothing else and call it dinner. But do that everyday and you’ll pretty soon get a deficit of a lot of nutrients.
I think their opinion is that fries/salad is a lazy choice of sides to complete a meal. A traditional meal is usually a combination of protein, starch, and veg. In that regard, steak+fries+salad is a “meal”, but it’s definitely low-effort and designed to make people not hungry as cheaply as possible.
Good restaurants will create thoughtful sides that truly add to the dish, so it doesn’t feel like you’re eating “steak and some other shit”.
Adding fries to a dish in a (good) restaurant means you didn’t make a complete dish and just added the fries to add carbs/fill people.
On that same note: just a piece of meat (steak, spareribs or smth like that) is not a full meal (and don’t you start about adding fries and a salad)
a restaurant is only as good as its vegetarian dishes (some exceptions apply, like restaurants that focus exclusively on meat)
Ironically, I am not a vegetarian ;)
Also not a vegetarian and i agree 100% with your 3rd point. Cooking good vegetarian food requires more skill - to me, meat is like a cheat code for flavour. In my opinion, Indian cuisine offers some of the tastiest veg dishes because they are not adaptations of meat dishes, but their own thing entirely.
I don’t think it requires more skill, just more effort. Cut off a chunk of meat and add heat and you’re most of the way to a good flavour, while veg dishes usually require a variety of vegetables, each of which requires more prep than the meat did. There are exceptions, but as a general rule of thumb if they’re putting the time and effort into doing the vegetarian dishes properly it shows they’re doing everything else properly too.
What’s crazy to me is the otherwise very accomplished chefs who can’t/won’t do a vegetarian dish. Like their imagination ends at animal fats for flavour.
I recently watched a cooking competition show called America’s Culinary Cup. One of the challenges was to make dishes exclusively using vegetables. It was nice to see
Now I’m curious what a complete dish is in your opinion. Like there are only protein (meat, soy, bean) and carbs (potatoes, pasta, rice, corn, bread) and oil / fat that have calories. Like what else could you add to a steak? A spoonful of lard?
Complete dishes are not that difficult, take a good spaghetti bolognese, it has everything and the flavours are combined and compliment each other.
I do agree that the whole ‘steak for dinner’ is a bit hard to make a good ‘complete dish’ from. Personally I’d prefer something like noodles with steak/beef cuts or something like that. You can eat an entire steak with nothing else and call it dinner. But do that everyday and you’ll pretty soon get a deficit of a lot of nutrients.
I think their opinion is that fries/salad is a lazy choice of sides to complete a meal. A traditional meal is usually a combination of protein, starch, and veg. In that regard, steak+fries+salad is a “meal”, but it’s definitely low-effort and designed to make people not hungry as cheaply as possible.
Good restaurants will create thoughtful sides that truly add to the dish, so it doesn’t feel like you’re eating “steak and some other shit”.
This is exactly my point, well put!
I feel like that is the perfect definition of what a steak is. It’s STEAK!!! And some other shit.
Yep. If I’m going out to get a really good steak, I give less than an ounce of a fuck what it comes with.