Why hello there, and welcome to a special edition of Kitchen Catatrophe Quick Tips, where we dig into some facet of food culture, and beat out the interesting discussions with a stick. I’m your resident old man complaining on his porch, Jon O’Guin. Today’s topic is...Look, I honestly don’t know where I’m going with it, but it’s about, as the title says, Culinary inflexibility. And no, that’s not about eating overcooked steaks. It’s about a slight pet peeve of mine I’ve had for a while, that was recently prodded surprisingly fiercely. So let’s complain about Youtube Comments! NO DON”T LEAVE. Or maybe do. Like I said, I don’t know where we’re going. Leaving might be the best choice.

Filial Foibles

So, a couple months ago, I reviewed Season 1 of Bon Appetit’s Making Perfect. Team of cooks trying to make the perfect Pizza. I spent almost the whole post just comparing them to various members of the Avengers, because it’s hard for me to review things without spoiling them, so I distracted myself with comic book references.

Ah Yes, “The Tempter”. Definitely a famous villain that I know.
Let me, for unrelated reasons, take a look at my phone.

And Season 2 of the show launched while I was in Leavenworth. Well, technically, it DROPPED while I was in Leavenworth, as the whole show was put on various streaming services in its entirety for free. But, over the last few weeks, they’ve been releasing one episode a week to Youtube, allowing those of us unwilling to pay for Apple TV (/unwilling to work their way through the Apple TV account currently FLOODED with Asian romantic dramas (my mother’s obsession with the genre has only deepened since we last discussed it. She’s branched out from Taiwan to Korean and Hong Kong shows now))  to watch the episodes for free. And this season, Bon Appetit set themselves up for…SO MUCH CRITICISM, but for, like, the DUMBEST reason. So I wanna talk about it, and this will have some spoilers for season 2 of Making Perfect/the November issue of Bon Appetit magazine, which is…a really weird thing to have to say, but there you go.

Yes, you’ll learn some of the contents of this COOKING magazine before you read it.

So, season 2 of Making Perfect, as that cover shot implied, decided to tackle Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving, well, holidays in general, but Thanksgiving in particular, is a great source of what I’ve been referring to when I say “Culinary inflexibility”, a term I’m using for a particular phenomenon. One I’ve already talked about a couple times in the past: “A refusal to experiment with or accept approaches or ideas about food that differ from your expectations”. More broadly, I mean something I’m sure we’ve all encountered in our lives, but that I personally connect very strongly with my late father: when someone dismisses a food as “wrong” because it’s not how THEY do it. Or refuses to try a new food, because they simply ‘don’t want to’. (Though I want to make it clear I’m NOT referring to people who do this because of food allergies or issues. That’s a legitimate issue, and I understand those people’s reluctance.)

As I wrote about in the post memorializing him, and many times in posts prior to his passing, my father was a very culinarily inflexible man. He liked red meat, and key lime, and breaded meat in red sauce. He liked tacos, he liked pizza, and he liked whiskey. Anything not on that list was suspect. It is a trait somewhat shared by my mother and Nathan, much to my constant frustration. The raw inability for any suggestion to gain traction stymies me sometimes.

 On multiple occasions, they have directly tapped me to be the researcher on some food-adventure. (“Oh, while we’re down in area X, we’ll go to dinner. Jon, figure out somewhere good to go”) And one by one torn apart every suggestion I’ve made, sometimes with the most ridiculous arguments. At one point, the literal words used were “It seems like it would be dangerous to try something new”. This statement was made as a refutation of going to a restaurant that served gyros, hummus, and pizza, none of which are new foods to my family, since we’re not Indiana Mennonites, who shun horseless carriages and the tomato or “Devil’s Apple”. They then doubled back to say “You know, we mean a new restaurant”…which means they wanted me to find them somewhere good to eat in a new town…that they had somehow already eaten at, I GUESS? (Except they didn’t want THAT, because they had ALREADY RULED OUT the restaurants we had eaten at before!)

I ended up selling them on an Irish pub for dinner, and Russian Pelmeni dumplings for Lunch, so it wasn’t all that difficult.

A Smooth Criminal

Now, as cathartic as it is to bitch about all that, it’s not the thing I started this post to bitch about, so we’re in a bitch tangent. (A bitchgent? That sounds like a long-abandoned term for a dog-breeder) THAT, as I stated, was Youtube comments, and the sheer vitriol and passive-aggression I saw in the comments of the Bon Appetit Thanksgiving videos.  Apparently, as inflexible as people can get about new foods, they go fucking HAM when it comes to holiday meals: Nobody eats Mashed potatoes for 3/4s of the year, but the instant you make yours too smooth, you’re a goddamn monster. (Hilariously a complaint I’m well-acquainted with, as Nate for some reason despises smooth mashed potatoes. Like “views removing the skins before mashing as the first dangerous step on the road to damnation”, which, now that I write it out, does make us sound a little Mennonite-y)

“Thou hast seen the sins of the spud!”

Specifically, the outrage has focused on two avenues so far: the first one I’ve already alluded to, and it’s that the BA crew made Mashed Potatoes that are “too smooth”. And I’m not going to come out here and claim the video doesn’t have problems: most of the first 10 minutes are the two chefs attempting to PROVE that they DON’T have to make mashed potatoes at all, and instead should make some kind of Crispy Potato product, against the wide consensus of everyone they talk to. (Where, I’m not going to lie, I pulled that earlier line from: several people openly agreed that, while they don’t eat Mashed potatoes for most of the year, they aren’t willing to budge on them being on the table. “Crispy every other day, but Mashed on Thanksgiving” (Though I’ll also note that this is basically just a riff on “364 days a year Americans eat Chinese food , and 1 day a year they eat Turkey”…ANOTHER long-standing adage about how culinarily inflexible people are about the holiday.)) And I’ll even  agree that at least one of the visuals the video produced certainly makes the argument that these potatoes are substantially softer than what I’m used to.

Pour some out for your homeboys.

And people lost their MINDS about this. “Great recipe, but this is potato soup, NOT mashed potatoes”. “Are Mashed potatoes supposed to look like that? Gross.” “What the hell did they do to there [sic] potatoes?!” And, again, Sure, I get the initial confusion. I’ve never been able to pour my mashed potatoes onto a plate before. But here’s another image from minutes later in the video.

EVIDENCE. OF an argument I haven’t MADE yet.

That’s one of the chefs (Carla, the Black Widow of the bunch) eating their mashed potatoes with a fork, meaning it CLEARLY sets up as it cools, and is thicker than a soup. (Also, that Carla is occasionally bad at planning, since…who the hell eats mashed potatoes with a fork? She has to swap tools like, 5 bites later… because it’s hard to mop up GRAVY with a FORK.) The stuff on top is their compromise with their intense desire to NOT make mashed potatoes: they made a crispy topping of paprika, breadcrumbs, and potato chips, so they can have crispy potatoes on their mashed potatoes. It’s an interesting idea, and they say it works with the gravy, so I’m willing to hear them out.

And that last bit is the part that’s been tweaking me about all the Youtube comments. It’s the unwillingness to hear someone out. Like, I don’t like seafood. But I am willing to try dishes with clams, or oysters, etc before I say “that’s not good.” And because of it, I’ve found that, since my childhood dislike of seafood that I’ve actually become okay with eating crab.

A little Spicy, A Little Corny

But the potato fight is the weaker of the two. The SECOND fight is the one where I’ve seen the most vitriol. And on the one hand, I get it. To some, I’m sure,  it represents a much great “violation” of norms. But on the other, some of the arguments I keep seeing about it are even WORSE than the “ew, smooth potatoes” . And that is for THIS DISH.

Gaze upon their works, ye mighty, and despair.

That is the Bon Appetit “Perfect” Thanksgiving Stuffing, made by Chris Morocco (the Iron Man) and Rick Martinez (who was not IN the earlier Avengers post, as I hadn’t seen him in many of the videos at that time, but he’s become a fun, active member of the team since he started showing up in more videos, so I’m going to call him…It would be cheap to call him The Black Panther because he brings more ethnic diversity to the team, so instead he’s the Ant-Man: funny, lovable, slightly bumbling) And it uses Cornbread as the bread. IN addition, horror of horrors, in 5 POUNDS of stuffing, it uses one chopped Jalapeño. Even more wildly, it uses ground up Corn Nuts as part of the recipe. And that is all kinda weird to me. But it’s also not THAT WEIRD. In a recipe with 15 ingredients, the weird points are “A bread I’m not used to”, “a little bit of spiciness”, and “Corn Nuts”. Which, sure, are weird, but they EXPLAIN WHY they use them. (Because regional options for Cornbread mix/Masa Harina varies in relative sweetness, while corn nuts are consistently corn-forward in flavor, being…you know, toasted corn.

And sure, I don’t have a real history of eating Cornbread stuffing, but you know how I know it’s not that weird? I live in Washington state, and I, RIGHT NOW, can walk into a local chain store, and buy several varieties of pre-made cornbread stuffing. Stove-top, that weird bag one, etc. I live roughly as FAR from where people tend to eat Cornbread as you can in the contiguous United States, and I can still go get both pre-made cornbread mix, pre-made cornbread STUFFING mix, and the ingredients for making cornbread with TRIVIAL ease, even barring the existence of internet vendors like Amazon, where you can order BLUE cornmeal with trivial ease.

A fact evidenced by the multiple pounds of Blue Cornmeal I own now.

I bring this up because the single most repeated attack on the dish is that it’s “not accessible” to “the average home cook”. And I think they’re using that in both its forms: it’s harder to make, since people might not be able to buy cornmeal and Jalapeñoes in their area, and it’s harder to SELL, since people might not be used to these flavors. And…like, I just pointed out both of those statements feel WRONG to me. Sure, you might not be completely used to cornbread as a stuffing, but you KNOW what cornbread is! You KNOW what stuffing is! (And yes, technically, this recipe isn’t stuffing, because they don’t put it in the bird, making it a “dressing”, but that distinction is being phased out linguistically, so only half pedant-points)

And sure, the team takes this stuffing even FURTHER in some bold directions, making the base stuffing, and then making a “chile crisp” of fried shallots and garlic, spiced oil, and pureed chiles to potentially top it with. I can see THAT being a little harder for some cooks to make (though, again, if I walk into the Hispanic section of my local grocery store, I’m pretty sure I can find all the chiles needed) and sell their family on, since it’s a pretty direct “oh, THIS is something very different” topping. Then they take it FURTHER, by presenting the idea that you can then take the stuffing and chile crisp, and use them to make a Stuffing-Based Fried Rice.

BEHOLD THE MADNESS THAT LURKS IN MEN’S SOULS.

Is that pushing boundaries? Yes. Is it undermining the spirit of the holiday? Honey, if your holiday could be undermined by switching your side starches, it wasn’t much of a holiday. And with that bit of sass, I think I’ve worked it out of my system.

I didn’t make this post to attack these people, though that was fun. I did it to discuss and highlight an attitude that I think holds too many people back in the kitchen. Too often, we’re unwilling to take that slight step out of our comfort zone, distracted by surface level assessments.  That cornbread stuffing uses Sage, Onion, Celery, and Thyme, just like the stuffings my family makes. It uses chicken stock, and too much butter, just like anyone else’s. It’s flavors are clearly rooted in the same ideas as any other stuffing, just also with a heaping helping of corn flavor, and some spiciness to cut the richness. I think it sounds delicious, and I’m…fuck. I think I just wrote myself into having to make this to prove a point, didn’t I?

Goddamnit. I can’t even WHINE without giving myself extra work. Alright, pack it in. I’m already late to summarizing imperial Russian culture for another gig anyway. Ugh. Why can’t I be a stubborn ass like the rest of my family? THEN I could avoid this shit by just saying “Who cares, do the only 10 good recipes in existence” grumble grumble.

MONDAY: WE’RE NOT MAKING THE STUFFING YET, AS I’LL NEED TO GO GROCERY SHOPPING. INSTEAD, WE’RE MAKING A MEATY TREAT FROM ACROSS THE SEA. WHICH SEA? I HAVEN’T DECIDED YET. IT’S EITHER SHAKING BEEF FROM VIETNAM, OR BITTERBALLEN FROM HOLLAND.

THURSDAY: I’LL PROBABLY USE THE MONDAY POST TO WRITE ABOUT THAT COUNTRY’S FOOD IN ANOTHER LOOKING IN ABROAD’S PANTRIES. I HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT BOTH DUTCH AND VIETNAMESE FOODS.