Different Environments

A lot of cooking lore comes out of modern commercial kitchens and actually doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re not running a restaurant.

Restaurants value turning out the same exact dish, every single time, like clockwork, as efficiently as possible.

Home chefs just want to make something delicious and actually prefer if their meal is a little different each time.

Restaurants like chicken stock - because it’s lightly flavored, versatile, and clockwork-reliable. You can trust that the stock is going to be basically identical every time you use it.

Home chefs like broth - when you’re pulling flavor out of that chicken, toss some spices and onion chunks and whatever vegetable scraps you want in there: it’s more efficient and much more delicious, and it doesn’t matter if it tastes a little different every time.

Restaurant knife skills focus on efficiency and homogeneity: if the onions are always the same size, they always take the exact same amount of time to cook and taste the exact same.

Home knife skills focus on safety and ease: your goals are simply to make food smaller and not hurt yourself: however you accomplish this is fine.

Many, many home recipes are just adapted restaurant recipes and it’s important to be able to learn which parts of the recipe are vital to the flavor of the dish and which parts are simply there for the sake of reliable, prep-friendly industrial-scale production.

Home chefs are adept with substitutions (you rarely need to DO a substitution in a restaurant and you OFTEN need to do it at home) and the measure of a good home cook is more “versatility” than “scale”.

Speed is important, of course, in both, but what “speed” means in a restaurant and at home are totally different: speed in a restaurant means executing a complicated, complicated dish as quickly as possible with a production line of people helping and prepping, whereas speed at home mostly comes from simplifying.

Adam Ragusea and Internet Shaquille, on YouTube, are a few personalities out there preaching the word of de-complicating home recipes, and it’s good stuff.

A restaurant might have a guy who’s job it is is to make 500 radish florets a night, which he gets extremely fast at by virtue of doing it 10,000 times a month.

A home chef might achieve a similar efficiency by simply not bothering to add an extraneous radish floret.

One huge example of this in particular is how many recipes call for unsalted butter, and then just add more salt back in by hand. That’s a total “commercial kitchen” move.

But: buying just salted butter is simpler, and it lasts longer in your fridge (thanks to the preservative qualities of: salt).

If you can remember that there’s about 1tsp/lb of salt in salted butter, you can only ever buy just the one butter, it’ll last longer in your fridge, and it’s good for all of your butter use-cases - even if you don’t remember to remove an eighth of a teaspoon of salt from your recipe if it called for 1/4cup of unsalted butter.

Some parallels might be drawn between this and “small vs. large software development organizations” but they’d be pretty tortured analogies.